Congratulations, You Delayed It.

Part One: Do You Know Who Needs the Housing?

The new Veterans Home nursing facility needs caregivers. A small but powerful cadre of Yountville residents who delayed the proposed Commons project has the same old answer for workers who cannot afford to live here and it’s always the same: try somewhere farther down the road.

For most of the last two years, the people planning the Yountville Commons have been on the witness stand. Why 126 homes? Why studios? Why three stories? Why should the Town remain the landowner? Why not hire a private developer? Where would everyone park? What would the whole thing eventually cost? Why couldn't the Veterans Home simply house its own employees on those 615 acres up the hill? Town staff, consultants and elected officials spent more than twenty public meetings answering those questions, changing the plan along the way, completing environmental review, approving the zoning and tentative map, and preparing to find out through competitive procurement what the first phase would actually cost to build. Then 235 people signed a petition, the zoning ordinance was suspended, and the Council repealed it rather than spend more public money fighting through a referendum. So congratulations. You delayed it. Now it is your turn to answer some questions.

Let's begin with the Veterans Home, because it offers a particularly useful test of whether the people who delayed workforce housing understood the community in which they were doing it. California has spent more than $325 million building a new 285,000-square-foot, 240-bed skilled-nursing facility at the Yountville Veterans Home. The State found the money to build it. It even budgeted for more than a hundred additional employees to operate it. The problem now is finding and keeping enough people to staff those beds. The State knows how to finance buildings, and after years of planning and construction it is about to have some very good ones. What it does not have are enough people to operate them. CalVet's own planning documents describe serious vacancies among the registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, certified nursing assistants and other direct-care employees on whom the Home depends, and they identify the extraordinary cost of living around Yountville and the long commutes forced upon employees as obstacles to recruitment and retention. More than two hundred veterans have reportedly been waiting for skilled-nursing admission while staffing, rather than the physical number of beds, constrains how many people the Home can actually serve.

Nobody who signed the Commons petition created that staffing problem. It predates the petition, it has multiple causes, and California, not the Town of Yountville, is responsible for operating the Veterans Home. Wages matter, management matters, state hiring practices matter, working conditions matter and CalVet's own employee-housing policies matter. But housing matters too, and this is where the petitioners now have something to explain. If you deliberately interrupt the most advanced effort to build deed-restricted workforce housing in a town where one of the largest employers is already telling you that the local cost of living makes it difficult to recruit workers, you have not caused the underlying problem, but you have certainly made one part of it much harder to solve. The question is whether the people who circulated and signed that petition understood this consequence before they decided Yountville needed to wait.

Consider the worker at the center of this story. An entry-level certified nursing assistant at the Veterans Home may earn somewhere in the low-to-mid $20s per hour, depending on classification, experience and differentials. That is an ordinary working wage in much of California and an impossible housing wage in Yountville. The person helping an elderly veteran out of bed in the morning may therefore have started her day in Fairfield, Vallejo, American Canyon, Vacaville, Santa Rosa or farther away, driven into Napa Valley, worked an exhausting shift and then driven home again. When the Home asks her to cover another shift because somebody else is missing, the calculation includes not only eight more hours of work but the commute waiting at the other end. When another young nursing assistant considers whether to take the job in the first place, the inability to live anywhere nearby is not an ideological question about California housing policy. It is a practical reason to work somewhere else.

The absurdity is that Yountville is unusually well equipped to do something modest about this. The Town owns seven acres at the former elementary school, roughly a fifteen-minute walk from the Veterans Home. Yountville voters approved Measure S in 2018 with 72 percent support, creating a dedicated source of revenue for affordable and workforce housing that is paid substantially by hotel visitors rather than Yountville homeowners. The Town then spent years planning the Commons on land it already controlled, with the intention of keeping the property in public ownership and the housing permanently deed restricted. The plan was phased, which meant Yountville did not have to build 126 homes at once or commit itself irrevocably to every building shown on a conceptual plan. It could begin with roughly 30 to 40 homes, see what they actually cost, learn from what it built and decide what should follow.

Those first homes would not have belonged to the Veterans Home, and that is important. The Commons was never a CalVet employee-housing project. It was intended for the larger workforce that makes Yountville function: restaurant workers, hotel employees, Town staff, teachers, caregivers, young professionals and other people whose incomes increasingly exclude them from the community where they work. A nurse or nursing assistant at the Veterans Home would simply have been among the people for whom such housing might make sense. Thirty or forty homes would not solve the Veterans Home staffing shortage, just as they would not solve the labor problems of every hotel and restaurant in town. They would do something much less grandiose and much more useful: allow several dozen working households to live in Yountville who otherwise probably could not.

This is where the politics surrounding the Commons have become remarkably slippery. Almost nobody in Yountville says they oppose workforce housing. Instead, we hear that people support workforce housing but not this much, not this design, not at this cost, not under this management structure, perhaps not on this site, and certainly not until some additional alternative has been explored. Any one of those objections can be reasonable. Collect enough of them, however, without ever specifying what would be acceptable, and “I support workforce housing” becomes a position requiring no housing at all. That is why the petition changed more than the timetable for one zoning ordinance. It shifted responsibility to the people who demanded the delay to tell the rest of Yountville what they thought the delay was supposed to accomplish.

The Veterans Home gives us an excellent place to begin asking. If 126 homes were too many, would the petitioners support the first 30 or 40? If the architecture was wrong, what should change about it? If the eventual cost projections for the entire Commons were too high, why not competitively price the first phase and find out what it actually costs? If public ownership was the problem, should Yountville sell land purchased with public money to a private developer instead? And if the answer is that caregivers at the Veterans Home should not be part of Yountville's housing concern because CalVet has 615 acres of its own, then that proposition deserves to be stated clearly and examined on its merits rather than offered as a convenient way to stop talking about the seven acres Yountville already owns.

We will examine those 615 acres in the next essay, because they have become one of the strangest abstractions in the Commons debate. From Washington Street they can sound like an enormous reservoir of vacant state land upon which California could simply build hundreds of apartments if Sacramento would get around to it. The reality described in CalVet's own master planning is considerably more complicated: a 142-year-old medical and residential campus containing more than one hundred buildings, historic resources, aging utilities, steep terrain, major health-care operations and enormous deferred infrastructure and capital needs. CalVet does contemplate additional employee housing, and it should build it. The State should renovate usable cottages, create new workforce housing where appropriate and recognize that an institution employing hundreds of people in one of California's most expensive communities has a responsibility to participate in solving its own housing problem. None of that explains why Yountville should postpone doing the same thing on its own land.

In fact, the insistence that the Veterans Home solve this by itself represents a curious reversal in the relationship between two communities that have occupied the same small piece of Napa Valley for nearly a century and a half. The Veterans Home predates modern Yountville and for generations has been part of its civic and economic life, providing employment, public investment and a population that is not incidental to the town but physically and politically part of it. Civilian Yountville, meanwhile, has become one of America's great luxury destinations, a place where hotel rooms can cost more for a night than many caregivers earn in several days and where the economic success generated by visitors has made ordinary residency increasingly difficult for ordinary workers. It is an odd moment to discover that the two communities have nothing to do with one another, and that the people who care for veterans on one side of town should simply solve their housing problems somewhere else.

Perhaps that really is the position. Perhaps CalVet should house every employee it can, hotels should solve housing for hotel workers, restaurants should solve it for restaurant workers, and Yountville should accept that most of the people required to operate the community will live in Fairfield, Vallejo, Napa, American Canyon, Vacaville and beyond. There is a coherent, if bleak, version of that argument: Yountville is simply too valuable for much workforce housing, scarcity is an inevitable consequence of what the town has become, and commuting is the price workers pay for serving it. What is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain is that position simultaneously with the assertion that one strongly supports workforce housing. At some point support has to produce an address, a number of homes and a date when somebody gets a key.

That is why no further study is required to establish the basic facts before Yountville. We already know the Veterans Home has staffing vacancies. We know CalVet considers local housing costs and commuting relevant to recruitment. We know a worker earning roughly $20-something an hour cannot compete in Yountville's private rental market. We know the Town owns seven acres. We know Yountville voters created a dedicated housing revenue stream, largely paid by visitors. We know the Commons went through more than two years of public planning and more than twenty public meetings. We know it was designed to be phased rather than constructed all at once, and we know the petition did not produce a competing housing plan. Another consultant can produce another report, another committee can hold another workshop and another election can generate another round of promises about how deeply everyone cares about workforce housing, but none of those exercises will alter those facts.

Nor does acknowledging them require Yountville to resurrect every element of the Commons exactly as it stood on the day the petition was filed. The buildings can change. The unit mix can change. Financing can change. Costs can be tested. The first phase can remain modest while the Town learns what works. There is nothing sacred about a particular drawing produced during a two-year planning process, but there should be something valuable about the two years of knowledge contained in it. Delay becomes particularly hard to defend when it is used not to make identifiable changes but to restart questions that have already been asked and answered until the political conditions for building anything disappear.

The Veterans Home is therefore not being dragged into this argument because Yountville owes California a solution to its staffing shortage. It is here because the Home makes visible what the phrase “workforce housing” can otherwise conceal. Somewhere behind every unit Yountville delays is a person who still needs to live somewhere: a nursing assistant beginning a dawn shift, a cook closing a restaurant at midnight, a hotel employee changing rooms for visitors who can afford Yountville for a weekend but whose housekeeper cannot afford it for a month. Housing policy decides how far away those people live, how much of their lives they spend commuting and, eventually, whether they continue working here at all. Yountville cannot house everyone, but on seven acres it already owns, using money visitors are already providing, it can certainly house some of them.

For two years, the people behind the Commons had to explain what they wanted to build. After 235 signatures delayed that work, the people who stopped its progress inherit some of that burden. The first question is not whether they caused the Veterans Home's staffing problems; they did not. It is whether, knowing those problems exist, knowing housing is part of them, knowing Yountville possesses both land and dedicated housing revenue, and knowing a first phase of deed-restricted homes was moving toward implementation, they believe delaying those homes made anything better. If they do, the rest of Yountville deserves to hear how. If they don't, then perhaps the next conversation should finally move beyond what they oppose and toward the much harder question that will follow this series all the way to November: what, exactly, are they prepared to build instead?