Half Moon Bay City Council to mull fate of senior farmworker housing Tuesday

A battle of the bureaucracy will converge at Tuesday's Half Moon Bay City Council meeting, where the fate of an affordable housing project for older farmworkers could be decided.

The city of Half Moon Bay gave initial approval to a five-story, 40-unit affordable housing complex at 555 Kelly Ave. in 2024, following a mass shooting that killed seven farmworkers and brought substandard farmworker living conditions to the attention of policymakers.

The city-owned property at 555 and 535 Kelly Ave. was identified as a potential affordable housing site as far back as 2022, but the population it would serve had not yet been settled upon. The effort to build the complex and dedicate its housing to aging, local farmworkers with low income gained momentum after the shooting.

After a lengthy process that involved an appeal of approvals by the city's Planning Commission, the City Council voted 3-2 in May to finalize a 99-year lease for $1 annually to two organizations to develop and provide services at the complex: Mercy Housing, a national nonprofit affordable housing developer, and Ayudando Latinos A Sonar, known as ALAS, a local nonprofit organization that supports Latino farmworkers.

State housing officials urged the city to move forward with the project before eventually filing a lawsuit last week alleging Half Moon Bay was dragging its feet on submitting plans to comply with new requirements to build more affordable housing.

The state's Department of Housing and Community Development wrote to the city in April urging it to approve the project as a component of its Housing Element. Attorney General Rob Bonta followed up with a lawsuit against the city last week accusing it of violating the state's Housing Element Law by missing several deadlines to submit plans to build more housing and by delaying projects such as the Kelly Avenue development.

Voter initiative forces council action

But a citizen-led voter initiative is forcing the city to retreat from its final approval of the project and start over, or put the ordinance authorizing the complex's construction and lease to a popular vote.

A group of opponents that organized under the name "Let Half Moon Bay Voters Decide" began the petition to put the matter to a vote after previous attempts to stop the project failed.

The group criticized the size and location of the building, which they said would be the first building to exceed the city's three-story limit downtown and would invite other developments to follow suit.

"We simply wish for voters to have the opportunity to fully understand the pros and cons of the project," said Hal Bogner, one of the organizers of the petition, at the City Council meeting on June 16.

Belinda Hernandez Arriaga, CEO of ALAS, said she had the opposite hope.

"We wish it wouldn't have gotten to this process," she said in a phone interview Monday.

Hernandez Arriaga said ALAS was hoping the City Council could find a third option that would allow the ordinance to be enacted as voted upon. Short of that, she said voters in the city would show up to support the project if it had to go that route.

"The community is prepared to push for 555 Kelly. There are a lot of voters that care about farmworker housing," she said.

Hernandez Arriaga said there was no reason to complicate the idea of giving dignity to people who had served the community with their labor for decades.

"There are so many people who believe in this," she said. "I believe 555 Kelly is going to go strong. We're ready."

The City Council is scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Ted Adcock Community Center, 535 Kelly Ave.

It can either rescind the ordinance it passed in May authorizing the lease, which would put the yearslong planning process back to square one, or put the exact same ordinance to a vote in November. The ordinance would need a simple majority to pass.

Remote access to the meeting will be available through the city's online meeting platform. Residents can also participate by phone at (669) 900-9128 using Webinar ID 876-7480-4231.

The post Half Moon Bay City Council to mull fate of senior farmworker housing Tuesday appeared first on Local News Matters.