Summer Greetings!
Here in Yolo County’s Capay Valley, peaches, zucchini and basil announce the arrival of summer. The sun is out longer each day; workdays for farmers and their crews are longer too. Hopes are high for a good harvest… and for affordable farmworker housing!
If you’re new to this mailing list, welcome! Casa Agraria is an emerging community land trust (CLT) that is developing a new model for affordable, secure housing and land access for the people who work in agriculture.
The next time you bite into a California peach, think about how it got to market. It was handled by a professional – someone highly skilled, yet earning close to minimum wage; someone relied on by their employer to get the produce to market, yet more often than not living under a shadow of fear as deportation raids pick up again in our state; and quite possibly someone struggling to serve their kids a square meal and keep a roof over their head.
Get involved!
Seeking $750,000 in grants/donations and $900,000 in loans to build our first housing project: Casas Capay Valley
Rural housing is hard to come by, and farmworkers struggle to find rentals close to work. When they do, those rentals are rarely affordable. Rent (or mortgage payments) should not require more than ⅓ of a family’s household income; yet in Yolo County, 41 percent of farmworkers spend over half their incomes on rent!
New and beginning farmers struggle too, to find adequate affordable housing on or near land they can farm. Casa Agraria aims to help close this gap by acquiring, preserving, and/or building homes which are leased or sold to working families at permanently affordable rates. And Casa Agraria will also improve affordable access to land for regenerative farming!
Farmers Paul Muller and Dru Rivers are preparing to transfer a four-acre parcel in the hamlet of Brooks to our CLT incubator Northern CA Land Trust in a ‘bargain sale’ – generously donating a portion of its value. NCLT will, in turn, transfer it to Casa Agraria under the agreement by all parties that the homes built shall be reserved for farmworkers.
County zoning allows for a large duplex as well as an Ancillary Dwelling Unit (ADU), so three families can be housed in this initial project, dubbed “Casas Capay Valley.”
In an exciting nonprofit partnership, Casa Agraria has agreed to receive two highly-discounted, prefabricated homes under a grant from the California Energy Commission. The homes have state-of-the-art insulation and solar packages, and the future residents have agreed to allow monitoring under the grant project for a year, thus reducing the cost of homes to Casa Agraria by about two-thirds! The plan is to connect these homes with a shared breezeway roof so they can qualify as a duplex.
The third home will be site-built using local contractors and sweat-equity contributions from residents. Our design and construction team is looking into cost-effective ways to use locally-abundant straw bales for insulation, in hopes of creating a replicable building system for additional farmworker housing in the future.
“This project can be a step for other low-income families and people like me,”
says Chyca, member of the Farmworker Advisory Council and Casa Agraria’s local coordinator.
“It gives a belief that homeownership is reachable and offers hope for the future.”
With the generous participation of Paul, Dru and the CEC grant, over $865,000 has been committed in-kind to Casas Capay Valley so far. Now we turn to you, our community, as we ask you to invest in turning these dreams, plans and commitments into reality!
We are applying for a construction loan to execute this project, but to close the affordability gap the rest of the way we will need to raise about $720,000 in grants and donations. This community investment will a) provide permanent, affordable housing for three farmworker families; b) ensure affordability and access to those homes for underserved farmers and farmworkers in perpetuity; and c) establish precedent and leverage to then provide more green, affordable agricultural housing in the Capay Valley and beyond.
“Good land is a gift, and it is best cared for by those who are intimate to the generosity of that gift.” - Paul
Can you help?
Visit www.casagraria.org/donate
Or mail a check made out to our fiscal sponsor:
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (Memo - FSP Casa Agraria)
15290 Coleman Valley Rd.
Occidental CA 95465
Donations are tax deductible.
Questions? Please call Casa Agraria Board Member Paul Muller: (530) 796-2214 (office)
Or Program Director Kendra Johnson: (707) 869-3558 (cell)
