San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Wine Country city has a big segregation problem, columnist Justin Phillips writes .
Marcus Kirkwood was riding his bike through St. Helena last month when he noticed a man take a photo of him from the sidewalk.
Kirkwood at first wrote it off as poor timing. Maybe the man was taking a picture of a house across the street. Kirkwood turned his bike around and asked. The man told him he often took photos in St. Helena of things that he found “suspicious.” He meant Kirkwood.
Kirkwood is a 36yearold business owner who identifies as Black and biracial. He was only a stone’s throw from the home he owns on the affluent, mostly white west side of town.
St. Helena is a tiny city of 6,100 residents and more than 400 vineyards tucked in the Napa Valley. It’s 65% white and 31% Latino, with only 4% of the population Black, Asian or multiracial, according to U.S. census data.
By many accounts, it’s also quite segregated.
St. Helena has been slow to build new affordable housing. Karina O’Briain of Napa Valley Community Housing told the Napa Valley Register in November that the city had built only “25 incomequalified rental units” in the past two decades. And when St. Helena does build this housing, it happens in one area.
In 2016, a group of residents wrote the city saying that “98 percent of St. Helena’s lowincome, affordable and multifamily rental units” were on the east side of town, the Napa Valley Register reported. This keeps workingclass Latino residents out of the city’s posh west side, with its multimilliondollar homes few can afford.
This invisible border exists because people of color have rarely held positions of leadership in St. Helena.
St. Helena’s mayor, vice mayor and three City Council members are all white. Residents have elected just two people of Mexican descent to its City Council in the last 50 years — Anthony Perez in 1988 and Catarina Sanchez in 2008.
Rosaura Segura ran for a council seat in 2020. She was more than qualified. Her resume included time as a board trustee for Napa Valley College. She also led the Mexican American Vintners Association, where she worked to address farmworker housing problems.
Voters ended up electing two white men in Lester Hardy and Eric Hall. Segura currently sits on the St. Helena Planning Commission, where she says a city official recently expressed surprise to her about how clean the ground was at an affordable housing community with a large number of Latino residents.
She said she was disappointed by the comment, but not surprised.
“There needs to be a better understanding of our (Latino) community,” Segura told me. “And I know I’m the Mexican in the chair and it looks good for me to be a representative. But the frustration I feel sometimes is good for me because ... I become more vocal.”
Segura and St. Helena school board member Julio Olguin — who was appointed to his seat in 2018, not elected — are currently the city’s only highranking officials of Mexican descent.
St. Helena has been at least 28% Hispanic or Latino since 2000, according to census data. St. Helena’s connection with its Latino community should be better established.
“There’s gigantic blind spots when you have a certain type of thinking or experiences you’re drawing from and it doesn’t include those Latinx voices, or Black and brown voices,” Kirkwood told me. “Yet that community is so deeply engaged in our economy and makeup, not having those voices heard on the policy level, it’s deeply detrimental as a whole.”
St. Helena has a history of prioritizing its white, affluent majority. It’s part of the city’s pervasive “antigrowth” sentiment, which is the desire by many to keep new housing and new residents to a minimum.
When the St. Helena Planning Commission voted in 2019 to embrace density — or the creation of more housing — in its General Plan, Hardy said the “antigrowth sentiment has as much influence today as it did” 30 years ago, according to the California Planning & Development Report, a news publication that covers planning and development issues throughout California.
Last week, the St. Helena City Council published a 12point mission statement on the Napa Valley Register website stating its top goal was “(p)romoting a culture of equity, diversity and inclusion.” No. 8 on the list was “(p)reserving our historic, smalltown, rural character.”
History has shown St. Helena can’t do both.
St. Helena’s white voters must make it their priority to elect officials of color. It can start in November 2022 when two St. Helena council members reach the end of their terms.
This won’t erase the city’s past, but it can make St. Helena feel more like home to the minorities living there now.