Woodmark's tenants face eviction as its developer renews search for farmworkers

The developer is bound by a federal agreement to fulfill its commitment to provide housing for farmworkers and their families at Woodmark

Yesterday, tenants at Woodmark, a low-income housing complex on Bodega Avenue, began getting calls from the development’s property management company, Aperto, announcing that they were being evicted.

Not because they’d done anything wrong, not because they hadn’t paid their rent—but because they weren’t farmworkers.

Former Sebastopol Times reporter Ezra Wallach wrote several articles last fall about the mystery of Woodmark—a $25 million property built to house farmworkers and their families that stood empty for months. I wrote an article in January of this year when the property’s management company instead rented out every unit to people who weren’t farmworkers at all: they were seniors, single parents and other families who didn’t make enough money to pay the region’s exorbitant rents.

Woodmark’s developers, The Pacific Companies and its nonprofit partner, the Central Valley Coalition for Affordable Housing, received a $1 million loan from the USDA’s Farmworker Housing Program to kick-off their $25 million development. This loan stipulated that the property could only be used for farmworker housing.

A $1 million USDA loan may not seem like much in the context of a $25,000,000 project like Woodmark, but as our former reporter Ezra Wallach pointed out in his article last December, that $1 million USDA loan for farmworker housing was the key that opened the door for Woodmark to receive more than $15,000,000 in California tax credits for builders of affordable housing.

After the property stood empty for several months, the developers applied for a USDA waiver, claiming it couldn’t find enough farmworkers in Sonoma County to fill the units. A Sebastopol Times investigation proved that the company’s attempts to do so were lackluster at best.

Zeke Guzman of Latinos Unidos del Condado de Sonoma, one of the main sources in our story, filed an official complaint with the USDA—and then for months, nothing happened.

Then, yesterday, the other shoe dropped. Every tenant at Woodmark, except for one or two farmworker families, were told they’d have to leave.

Guzman has been in communication with Woodmark’s developer and the USDA. He said that the developer and the USDA had agreed on what’s known as a Corrective Action Plan—and that plan involves moving the current tenants out and farmworkers in. (We reached out to the USDA and The Pacific Company for confirmation, but have not yet heard back from them.)

“They’ve got a plan to help move the people that are living there now over to another affordable housing location, where they have available units,” Guzman said. “Then they’re going to correct what they did and get farmworkers in there.”

Caught in the middle

This is not OK with the current tenants. There are 48 units at Woodmark. Minus the few farmworker families who live there, that means there are roughly 46 individuals and families who will be looking for affordable housing somewhere else in Sonoma County.

“We had people crying in the [manager’s] office, people crying in the parking lot last night,” said Cassandra Miller, who lives at the property with her husband and infant daughter.

According to Miller and several other Woodmark tenants who contacted the Sebastopol Times, tenants were given the following offer: $10,000 if they move out by Oct. 31; $5,000 if they move out by the end of November. They are being given referrals to two other affordable apartment complexes, Cedar Grove apartments in Santa Rosa and The Redwoods at University in Rohnert Park, which are also run by Aperto, the property management firm that manages Woodmark.

Tenant Galena Leslie said that Ana Mendoza, the community manager at Woodmark, told her at 4:30 pm on Tuesday, Sept. 2, that eviction proceedings had started that morning at 10 am.

Leslie, who was the first tenant to move into the complex last December, has a two-bedroom apartment for which she pays $608, roughly 30% of her monthly income.

“I’m really stressed,” Leslie said. “I’m a senior citizen. I need a roof over my head.”

Leslie said she asked the property manager how she could stay at Woodmark. She said Mendoza told her she could marry a farmworker or get a farmworker as a housemate. (Mendoza declined to comment for this story. She referred me to her supervisor, Danyel Higgins, at Aperto, but we have yet to hear back from her.)

Leslie feels the county should give all the tenants who are being displaced Section 8 vouchers so they can look for housing in the open market.

She also said the property owner had turned off tenants’ access to the website that allowed them to pay their rent online. It now has to be paid by check (something many people no longer have) or cashier’s check.

Another Woodmark tenant, who asked to remain anonymous, posted about the eviction on Nextdoor. She told the Sebastopol Times, “They called each of us individually. They said a formal written notice will be sent out but did not say when.” After this tenant read the Sebastopol Times articles on Woodmark’s history, she wrote, “I didn’t realize how much of a mess this whole thing was from the beginning! And now so many of us are going to be un-homed!”

So that’s the bad news.

A return to its original mission

The good news, according to farmworker advocates, is that the property will finally house the people it was meant to house in the first place—farmworkers and their families.

Farmworker advocate Maria Membrila, who was featured in our January article on Woodmark, worked as a principal field researcher and data analyst for the 2024 Napa County Farmworker Housing Report. Now she is under contract with Woodmark’s developer to find farmworkers to fill the soon-to-be-empty apartments.

“My role as a farmworker housing consultant is to find eligible farmworkers and to fill the units with eligible farmworker households,” she said. “I also provide bilingual, bicultural housing navigation services to the farmworkers to help them with their questions or with filling out the application. I support them through the entire application process.”

Membrila is visiting farms, wineries and other agricultural facilities in west county and elsewhere to let eligible farmworkers know about this opportunity.

Who is eligible to apply for a unit at Woodmark? According to USDA regulations:

• Any person (and the family of such person) who receives a substantial portion of his or her income from primary production of agricultural or aquacultural commodities or the handling of such commodities in the unprocessed stage.

• They must be a citizen of the United States or a person legally admitted for permanent residence. Some other immigrant statuses will also be considered.

• These units are also available to agricultural workers who are retired or disabled, but who did domestic farm labor at the time of retirement or becoming disabled.

The USDA’s definition of farm labor is quite broad, including “Services in connection with cultivating the soil, raising or harvesting any agriculture or aquaculture commodity; or in catching, netting, handling, planting, drying, packing, grading, storing, or preserving in the unprocessed stage…any agriculture or aquaculture commodity; or delivering to storage, market, or a carrier for transportation to market or to processing any agricultural or aquacultural commodity in its unprocessed stage.” (See the full list of industries and job types in the sidebar below.)

Membrila noted that “My number one goal is to find people who really need the housing who work in our fields. My job is to get farm workers into housing.”

Zeke Guzman said that while he feels for the people who are being displaced (he was surprised that it was happening so quickly), he thinks the developer is finally doing the right thing.

“They recognized their mistake, and they’re trying to correct it,” he said. “I think that’s good.”

Not so fast…

Meanwhile, many of the current tenants are lawyering up and asking how the developer is allowed to summarily evict them without cause. Most of the tenants at Woodmark moved in in December or January and are smack in the middle of their year-long leases.

Some have reached out to Sonoma County Legal Aid. Patrick McDonell, the Supervising Attorney for Legal Aid’s Housing Program, said he has been eyeing the Woodmark development with concern since we first reported on it.

“The regulations say that when you have people in USDA farmworker housing that are not eligible or are non-farmworkers, it gives them the option of 30 days or to the end of their lease term, whichever is longer,” McDonell said. “So the fact that they have an active lease term as a legal matter should guarantee these families the right to stay through their lease term. The Legal Aid party line here, or our position, is that Woodmark—the developers and the managers—they created this problem by not complying with the terms of their USDA loan. The solution to the problem shouldn't be to play vulnerable families off against each other.”

On the other hand, McDonell said, there’s no getting around the fact that Woodmark was meant to be farmworker housing.

“On some time horizon, this is going to be farm worker housing, and it has to be farm worker housing, which means the families that are in there are, over time, going to be replaced with eligible farm worker families…That much is true. But Woodmark took on the action of filling the property with non-farmworker families—and with vulnerable non-farmworker families,” he said. “Over the long term, Woodmark is going to have to revert back to its [original] purpose, but the tenants who are in there, these vulnerable families, they have rights too, and those rights include being able to stay through the end of their lease term.”

He wasn’t surprised by the cash payments the property owners were offering to tenants who move out early.

“They're basically trying to incentivize these tenants on the property to solve their problem for them, right? And from our perspective, we negotiate what are called “Cash for Keys” deals on a regular basis,” McDonell said. “It's the tenant families’ prerogative. So for some of them, maybe they have a place to go, and that $10,000 sounds really attractive, and they're willing to be bought out of the remainder of their lease term at that amount. For some, especially for a poor family, the option of being housed for another three, four, in some cases, maybe even five months through the end of their lease term is worth more than $10,000 to them, especially given the challenges—which are hard no matter how much money you have and are much more significant when you're poor—of being able to move in 30 days or less.”

“The point is that the law gives the residents that prerogative: They can agree to be bought out by the offer, they can negotiate for more, or they have the right to stay through the end of their lease term,” McDonell said, “and folks who feel that moving out prior to the termination of their lease is not an option for them should not feel pressured to do so just to fix Woodmark’s developers’ problem.”

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If you work in one of these fields and qualify as low-income, you could apply to Woodmark

As you can see below, a surprisingly broad range of jobs qualify as agricultural labor. If you think you qualify as an agricultural worker, fit the income requirements, and would like to live at Woodmark, contact Maria Membrila at maria@casaplanningandconsulting.com or 707-571-9533.

• Aquaculture—Seeding, care, management, or harvest of fish, shellfish, and other aquatic organisms; seafood wholesalers, packing.

• Bees—Hive care and management, honey extraction, confection manufacturing

• Berries—Field work and harvest, including field pack, produce wholesalers, packing, sorting, juicing.

• Cattle—Herd management, slaughterhouse.

• Cotton—Field work and harvest. Ginning, pre-gin storage.

• Dairy—Milking barn, herd care and management creamery, cheese production.

• Eggs—Layer flock management, egg sorting, grading, and packing Egg yolk separation.

• Fruit trees — avocados, dates. Grove operations and harvest. Sorting, packing, storage, guacamole production.

• Fruit trees — citrus. grove operations and harvest. Sorting, packing, storage, juicing, canning.

• Fruit trees — figs. Orchard operations and harvest. Sorting, packing, drying, storage, fig confections.

• Fruit trees — olives. Orchard operations and harvest. Sorting, packing, storage, brine & cannery operations.

• Fruit trees — apples, kiwis, peaches, pears, plums. Orchard operations and harvest. Sorting, packing, storage, cannery, freezer, drying operations.

• Fruit trees — prunes (dried plums). Orchard operations and harvest. Re-hydrating, processing, cannery operations.

• Garlic—Field work and harvest. Wholesale produce packing, drying, dehydrating.

• Grain — barley, corn, oats, rice, wheat. Field work and harvest. Milling, drying, bulk storage.

• Grapes — raisins. Vineyard work, including field dry & pack. Sorting, rehydrating, processing, cannery operations.

• Grapes — table. Vineyard work and harvest. Wholesale produce packing.

• Grapes — wine. Vineyard work and harvest. Grape crushing, fermenting.

• Hay Production—harvest, baling, stacking, and storage. Silage production, compressor/pelletizer operation, feed mix preparation, broker, feed store.

• Melons—Field work and harvest, field pack. Wholesale produce packing, sorting.

• Nurseries—Field and greenhouse work. Sorting and packing for shipment.

• Nut trees — almonds, walnuts. Orchard operations and harvest. Shelling, hulling, oil expression, roasting, nut products.

• Oilseeds—Field work and harvest Oil expression, bulk storage.

• Potatoes—Field work and harvest. Chipping, storage, packing, bagging.

• Poultry—Poultry production. Hatcheries, slaughterhouse, processing plant.

• Seed production—Field work and harvest. Seed certification, sorting, packing, storage.

• Sheep—Flock management, shearing, wool storage. Auction yard, slaughterhouse, yarn production.

• Sugar beets—Field work and harvest. Sugar refineries.

• Vegetables—for fresh market. Field work and harvest, field pack. Sorting, packing, salad mix operations.

• Vegetables for processing (artichokes, asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, greens, mushrooms, onions, peppers, tomatoes) Field work and harvest, including field pack Cannery operations, freezer operations, drying operations

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For background on the Woodmark issue, see our previous articles: The Word on Woodmark and Woodmark: A case study on how affordable housing gets built by Ezra Wallach and Woodmark's promised farmworker housing quietly given to others by Laura Hagar Rush.

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