Congratulations. You Delayed It.
A Yountville Moon series about what happens after you stop progress
For more than two years, Yountville worked in public on a plan for the seven-acre former elementary school site in the center of town. There were more than twenty public meetings, environmental review, financial analysis, architectural studies, workshops, hearings and repeated revisions to the plan. The Town bought the property, voters had already approved a dedicated tax for workforce housing, and the Council ultimately approved the zoning and tentative map that would allow the Yountville Commons to move toward implementation. The plan was not a sketch on the back of an envelope, nor was it a $91 million check waiting to be signed. It was a phased public project, capable of beginning with roughly 30 to 40 deed-restricted homes and proceeding only as financing, construction pricing and experience justified what came next. Then 235 petition signatures interrupted the process, and the Council repealed the zoning ordinance rather than send it through a costly referendum. The petitioners did not replace the Commons with a smaller project, identify a better site, offer a different financing structure or tell Yountville which parts of two years of planning they actually wanted changed. They delayed it.
So congratulations. But the housing problem did not agree to wait.
The seven acres are still there. Measure S is still collecting money, substantially from the hotel visitors who come to Yountville precisely because the town has become such a successful luxury destination. The people who work in Yountville have not suddenly begun earning enough to live here, and the restaurants, hotels, public agencies and other institutions that depend upon them have not discovered a new workforce somewhere closer. Nor did repeal erase the planning, engineering, environmental work and public discussion that produced the Commons. What Yountville lost was time, and in a housing market defined by scarcity, time is not neutral. Every year of delay is another year in which the people who make this town function are overwhelmingly expected to find housing somewhere else and commute into a community that increasingly reserves residency for those wealthy enough to buy their way in.
For most of the Commons debate, however, the burden of explanation ran almost entirely in one direction. Town staff and supporters were asked why there were so many homes, why the Town should remain the landlord, why studios made sense, why buildings should be three stories, why a private developer was not taking the risk, where everyone would park, what the entire project might someday cost and why the Veterans Home could not simply solve part of the problem on its own 615 acres. Those were fair questions, and Yountville spent two years answering them in public. The project changed repeatedly because of those questions. But the people asking them enjoyed an enormous political advantage: they never had to produce a plan of their own. It was enough to find something objectionable in somebody else's proposal and then insist, as opponents of housing almost invariably do, that they supported the goal but simply could not support this particular way of achieving it.
That period is over. The Commons has been delayed, but the people who delayed it do not get to send Yountville back through another two years of studies and workshops without explaining what they believe all that additional time is supposed to produce. If 126 homes were too many, how many are appropriate? If the first phase was too large, what is the right first phase? If seven publicly owned acres in the middle of town are the wrong place for deed-restricted housing, where is the right place? If Measure S, overwhelmingly approved by Yountville voters and funded substantially by visitors, should not help build permanently affordable homes on land the Town already owns, what exactly should it accomplish? Those are no longer questions for the people who designed the Commons alone. They belong principally to the people who stopped its progress, particularly those who now want a role in governing what happens next.
The series begins at the Veterans Home because it makes the consequences of Yountville's housing scarcity unusually difficult to hide behind abstractions. California is completing an enormous investment in new skilled-nursing and memory-care facilities on the campus, yet buildings cannot care for veterans without nurses, nursing assistants, therapists, dietary workers, housekeepers and the many other people required to operate them. CalVet has acknowledged serious staffing vacancies and identified the local cost of living and long employee commutes as impediments to recruitment and retention. Nobody who signed the Commons petition created that staffing crisis. But it takes a peculiar kind of reasoning to acknowledge that caregivers cannot afford to live anywhere near their jobs and then deliberately delay deed-restricted housing within walking distance because someday, somehow, somebody else might build something somewhere else. The first essay asks whether the people stopping these homes understood who might have lived in them, and if they did, what they expected those people to do instead.
#2: The People Behind the Beds
The second essay starts with a photograph: a summer evening at a Yountville hotel, veterans from the Home as honored guests, a Sinatra tribute band, and a host who led the petition that stopped the Commons. It then reads the documents sitting just outside the frame. CalVet's 2025 Master Plan reports vacancy rates approaching 29 percent for registered nurses and nearly 47 percent for certified nursing assistants, and names distance and housing as material obstacles to filling them. Yountville's own Housing Element treats employee housing at the Home and middle-class housing in town as two parts of one response, not rivals. It closes with a question for the host and for the 235 people who signed: having seen how directly housing affects the people who care for the veterans, what are they prepared to do now?
#3: But Sure, Let's Do Another Study
The third essay leaves Yountville for the county and comes back with numbers. Tim Carl of Napa Valley Features reported this month that Napa County schools identified 832 students as homeless last year, most of them doubled up with relatives, in the district that closed Yountville Elementary. In May he read the state's population release: every town in the county shrank except Calistoga, which grew because it opened one 78-unit workforce building. Against that record, the essay measures the 75 apartments the Commons would have provided, finds them a small and necessary dent, and then names the recurring call for "another study" for what it is: a cynical play to delay housing indefinitely without anyone having to say no. It ends by asking readers to subscribe to Carl's paper, since he is the reason any of this is known.
#4: The 615-Acre Excuse (forthcoming)
The fourth essay takes seriously the most persistent answer to every question above: the Veterans Home has 615 acres, so why doesn't California simply house its own employees there? CalVet should build more employee housing, and its own master planning recognizes housing as a recruitment and retention tool. But 615 acres on a map are not 615 acres of vacant residential property. The campus is a 142-year-old medical and residential institution containing more than one hundred buildings, aging infrastructure, historic resources, steep terrain, health-care operations and enormous capital obligations. Its plans for meaningful new employee housing move on the long timelines of state planning and appropriations, not in apartments that appear next year because Yountville decided not to build its own.
The argument also raises a larger question about the relationship between the Veterans Home and the town that grew beside it. For generations the two have existed symbiotically, sharing workers, infrastructure, civic life and a geography that makes the boundary between the Home and civilian Yountville less meaningful than a map suggests. Now that Yountville has become an extraordinarily valuable luxury destination, it is convenient to discover a new doctrine of strict responsibility: CalVet's employees are CalVet's problem, hotel employees belong to the hotels, restaurant workers belong to the restaurants, and everyone who cannot afford Yountville can commute from somewhere else. The fourth essay examines where that philosophy leads, because if every employer is expected to solve housing independently while the Town preserves scarcity inside its own borders, then "support for workforce housing" has become a polite way of supporting it somewhere else.
#5: What Did You Want Changed? (forthcoming)
The final essay will dispense with the abstractions altogether and ask what should be the simplest question in Yountville politics: after two years of public planning and more than twenty public meetings, what specifically did the people who delayed the Commons want changed? Not what they disliked; the public record contains plenty of that. The useful question now is what they would actually build. Perhaps the answer is 30 homes rather than 126, or 40 homes followed by a long pause. Perhaps the architecture, the unit mix, the financing or portions of the site should change. None of those positions requires abandoning the work already completed, and none requires pretending the only choices are the Commons exactly as approved or nothing at all.
This question matters more as the election approaches, because criticizing government and governing are very different exercises. A petitioner can object to density, parking, architecture, financing and process without ever reconciling those objections or producing an alternative. A council member cannot. Anyone asking Yountville voters for responsibility over the former school property should be able to say how many deed-restricted homes belong there, who should qualify, how Measure S should be used, what should be kept from the work already done and when the first residents should reasonably move in. "I support workforce housing, just not this project" is a comfortable position while somebody else is doing the planning. Once you have helped delay the only actual plan on the table, it becomes an invitation to explain yours.
That is what Congratulations. You Delayed It is doing. It is not another defense of every decision in the Commons plan, and it is not an argument that disagreement with the Town was illegitimate. The Commons can be improved, reduced, rephased, redesigned and competitively priced, and a public project of this scale should keep evolving as real costs replace assumptions on paper. What Yountville should no longer accept is the proposition that demanding another round of reconsideration is itself a housing policy, particularly when the people demanding the delay cannot say what outcome would finally satisfy them.
The people who developed the Commons spent two years putting their ideas into drawings, budgets, environmental documents, staff reports and public hearings where anybody in Yountville could challenge them. The people who delayed that work deserve the same scrutiny, not as punishment for participating in democracy, but because they have now materially affected what happens next. Yountville already knows what they did not want. Before another election, another study or another year passes, the town deserves to know what they do. ☾