Farmworkers: ‘If we don’t work, they’ll kick us out’
Chronic shortage of safe, affordable housing is acute in farm communities
WATSONVILLE » Farmworkers Carmella and Antoline live deep in Santa Cruz County, past miles of berry and produce fields, in a single-story ranch house. Duct tape crosses the floorboards, and a stark lightbulb illuminates the kitchen and its worn appliances.
The landlord moved a second family in a few months ago. The house rents for $3,000 a month — nearly double the price Carmella and Antoline paid when they moved in a decade ago. It’s roughly the cost of a small two-bedroom in Silicon Valley. Out here, it rents a twobedroom, two-bathroom farmhouse for four adults and five children.
Carmella, 40, and Antoline, 45, like many farmworkers, are undocumented and identified by this news organization by first name only. The couple say they endured threats and constant rancor with their new roommates and work seven days a week to support their family.
They feel they have few options. “If we don’t work,” Carmella said, “they’ll kick us out.”
The chronic shortage of safe, affordable farmworker housing has grown even more acute, workers and advocates say, as tentacles of the Bay Area housing crisis have reached into the region. Long-term, low-wage laborers are being pushed even further to the edge.
Santa Cruz and Monterey counties need to add 33,159 housing units — a 13% increase — just to alleviate overcrowding in farmworker homes, according to a regional task force. Most of those crowded homes include tenants from different families living under the same roof, according to the task force. And about 1 in 7 residents sleep outside bedrooms, in living and dining rooms, garages, hallways and closets.
“We read about gentrification in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” said Assemblyman Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, author of a new law encouraging more rural housing, “but it’s happening right before our eyes.”
During the growing season, as many as 90,000 farmworkers harvest fruits and vegetables, tend to crops and maintain the land in the Salinas and Pajaro valleys. About 90% were born and raised in Mexico.
“Farmworker housing availability is a persistent
issue,” said Dave Puglia of the Western Growers Association. “And it has gotten worse.”
Rents in outlying Santa Cruz and Monterey counties have risen nearly 50% since 2011 as Silicon Valley refugees have traded longer commutes for cheaper housing.
Watsonville, a 6-squaremile farm town with a city center still recovering from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, has become one destination for Bay Area workers. Its population grew nearly 4% between 2010 and 2017, adding 2,250 new residents, according to census figures. Yet in the last five years, just 440 new homes and apartments have been built in the city.
“The challenges that the Bay Area as a whole are having are spilling over to all communities big and small,” Watsonville City Manager Matt Huffaker said. The City Council has been pro-development, he said, but open space is limited and the downtown is still marked with empty storefronts and aging apartment buildings.
The hunt for affordable housing has brought in more families, higher housing prices and more social pressures than the region has seen in two decades. “That places burdens on our existing community members,” he said.
The average salary for a farm laborer in California is $12.60 an hour, roughly $26,200 a year. A family of two workers making $50,000 a year would spend more than half of their wages on the typical apartment in Santa Cruz or Monterey counties. Advocates say Central Coast farmworkers now need three or four incomes to afford rent in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.
Buying a home is even further out of reach. The median home price in Watsonville is about $600,000, while the median household income is $51,500. The ratio of home prices to income is about 11-to-1, much higher than even San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.
As housing costs have risen and more families have packed into tighter spaces, the city has had to spend more on support services, including parks, recreation and social programs. “With the high cost of living and the low median income, it has a cascading effect,” Huffaker said.
A comprehensive survey of workers published last year by a government and business consortium found a mounting housing crisis:
• Two-thirds of workers in the Salinas and Pajaro valleys lived in severely crowded units by federal standards.
• In a typical home, at least five people shared a single bathroom. Migrant workers and families sharing homes with unrelated families shared one bathroom among seven people.
• Nearly 9 in 10 workers rent, with few farm employees owning a home or mobile home.
Ann Lopez, executive director of the Center for Farmworker Families, said her organization has seen the growing pressures throw families and children into unsafe conditions.
Lopez said her organization had learned of 16 people sharing a two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. Families have turned to the center for help escaping violent domestic relationships, or with replacing stoves, refrigerators and buckling floors.
Workers have little choice but to share cramped spaces. “The bottom line is, there is no housing,” Lopez said. “It’s just disgraceful.”
Wages of farmworkers — tending to thousands of acres of grapes, berries and produce in the valleys — haven’t kept pace with housing costs.
Ernestina Solorio arrived in the U.S. about 20 years ago and has a worker visa. She picks strawberries on a Salinas Valley farm, and earns about $460, after taxes, during a typical week in the harvest season.
There’s simply no room in Solorio’s budget to pay the $2,000 a month in rent — up from $1,300 when she moved in 12 years ago — for a three-bedroom house in downtown Watsonville. Solorio rents a bedroom to another farmworker family.
On any given night, about 10 people from two families sleep under the same roof and share one bathroom. If rents continue to rise, she said through a translator, “I don’t understand how I’m going to survive.”
The Trump administration’s threats and insistence that it will crack down on immigration have added a layer of stress and fear to the community. Few are willing to complain about their apartments, worried that a landlord might evict them and leave them homeless. The stakes are high. The housing shortage compounds other industry and community challenges and threatens the long-term health of the region’s $5 billion farm industry, experts say.
But even as farmers and worker advocates agree on the problem, they have fought bitterly over a new law, effective Jan. 1, that makes it easier to build worker housing on surplus land. It requires farm owners to turn over management of the units to a nonprofit, preventing the conflict of having employers also serve as landlords.
But farmers — including a coalition of farm bureaus, family winemakers, fruit growers and others — say it will make the crisis worse. They are particularly upset over a provision that bars some state funds from being used to build dormitories for seasonal immigrant workers on H-2A visas. The visas require growers and harvesters to provide free housing for immigrant workers during their temporary stays.
Puglia of the Western Growers Association said farmers are leery of the provisions and won’t buy into the program. “They’re not going to do it.”
Rivas, a first-term assembly member from Hollister, called the measure an initial step.
“When the average price of a home is near $600,000 in this valley, it’s a problem. It’s a big, big problem,” Rivas said during an interview at his Salinas office.
“When you look at the pressures of the Silicon Valley and the San Jose region — the average price of a home is $1.2 million. That is putting a significant amount of pressure on this region.”
New housing plans and construction continue too slowly for many in the community. “The families need decent, safe, affordable housing,” said Julie Conway, housing manager for Santa Cruz County. “You can’t farm without labor.”
As threats of immigration raids and violence persist, some workers have lined the outside of their homes with security cameras.
Others keep dogs on their front porch.
Dominga, 35, lives with her husband and four daughters. The couple arrived 13 years ago from Oaxaca, on a perilous, five-night journey through the desert carrying 1- and 2-year-old daughters.
The parents work in the strawberry fields, and on a visit, Dominga’s jeans were stained with soil and crushed strawberries. Her skin was darkened from hours in the sun.
“Sometimes I don’t want to get up in the morning,” she said. “I’m so tired.”
The competition for reasonably priced apartments in Watsonville is fierce. Her rent has risen from $1,600 to $2,000 since 2014. The income she and her husband make from farm work has not grown as quickly. “We battled a lot to find this place,” she said through an interpreter.
The family rents the living room — walled off with sheets hung on clotheslines — of their two-bedroom apartment to another migrant family. Dominga’s teenage daughters share one bedroom, and the younger children share the master bedroom with their parents.
Dominga said she worries about her girls and their future. “I’m trying,” she said, as her two youngest played nearby, “to keep these kids out of the fields.”