CCRH PUBLICATIONS
June 2023
In April 2023, City of Needles was one of the first small rural communities to earn the State of California Pro-Housing Designation.
In 2022, as part of the BOOST Program Technical Assistance team, CCRH connected City of Needles with federal and state housing programs and supported them to build their capacity to achieve their housing goals.
The purpose of this case study is to inform other small and rural communities like Needles about this city's journey towards achieving its housing goals and to discuss the possibilities of this case to be replicated.
May 2021
For those of us who live in rural areas that sit outside California’s major cities, natural
disasters are woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Even populated areas close to large cities are not immune, despite their more urban features. And while these are not new or isolated occurrences, climate change has caused the increasing frequency of such events to force the natural beauty of our rural homes to go hand-in-hand with natural devastation.
Drawing from the mounting body of rural natural disaster knowledge and experience, the California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH), a statewide coalition of over 40 significant rural organizations and American Indian tribal communities, has created this guidebook focused on rural disaster planning and recovery
September 2019
In California, at least one million people live in more than 5,000 registered manufactured housing communities—or mobile home parks. Even more Californians live in unregistered manufactured housing communities, in individual manufactured homes on private land, or in American Indian Tribal communities. These homes make up over 4% of all housing across the state and are more concentrated in rural areas. Manufactured home communities are located everywhere from remote areas of the Sierra Nevadas to the coasts of Santa Monica and in the heart of Silicon Valley. While the price of homes, lots, and land vary widely across communities, manufactured homes make up a significant portion of California’s limited affordable housing stock. This study looks at four manufactured housing communities and explores how they were created and financed as well as what they can teach us about making future projects successful.
August 2019
This study was conducted by the California Coalition for Rural Housing and Rural Community Assistance Corporation to reveal the current housing and living conditions of California’s tribal communities and provide a blueprint for how the state can help to improve these conditions in the coming years. Components of the research and data collection helped inform the Final Statewide Housing Assessment 2025 published in 2018 by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Much has been written regarding the history of California’s American Indian population and state and federal policy impacts on the general welfare of tribal members. To our knowledge, however, there has never been a comprehensive statewide study of tribal housing. The goal of this study, then, is to understand the unique housing environment on tribal trust and fee land and, based on the findings, propose reforms to improve access by tribes to state housing programs. We focus principally on the housing conditions and needs of California tribes that have received federal recognition by the United States government.
July 2019
This map was created by the UC Davis Center for Regional Change (CRC) in collaboration with the California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH) for their Healthy Homes in the San Joaquin Valley project, and published in July 2019.
You can watch the webinar with San Joaquin Valley Healthy Homes Project here.
You can also read more, with the San Joaquin Valley Health Fund 2919 IHHEEL Policy Platform.
July 2018
Systemic challenges and concrete policies prevent investment in quality, healthy, resource-rich affordable housing. In order to overcome these challenges, there is a great need for data-driven and informed advocacy on local, regional, state, and federal levels that results in strategic and sustainable development of communities. This data can support the work of planners, developers, and other decision-makers in creating holistic and catalytic projects that are competitive for these limited resources.
You can watch the webinar with San Joaquin Valley Healthy Homes Project.
July 2017
The California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH) is pleased to announce the release of a comprehensive farmworker housing study commissioned by a consortium of local agencies in Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties. The publication, Farmworker Housing Study and Action Plan for Salinas Valley and Pajaro Valley, was performed in partnership with the California Institute for Rural Studies. The findings and policy and program recommendations were featured at a Farmworker Housing Summit in the City of Salinas on April 19, 2018.
The study surveyed 420 farmworkers working in the Salinas and Pajaro Valley laborsheds from June to August 2017 about their household composition, housing conditions, permanent residences, commutes to work, and other pertinent information. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents were renters: 40% rented single-family homes; 30% rented apartments; 19% rented rooms without kitchens; and 12% lived in motels, boarding houses, and barracks. 16% reported sleeping in living rooms and garages. 44% had complaints about the physical quality of their housing. Many lived in situations of extreme overcrowding with 2 people per room and more than 5 people per bathroom. In total, the study estimated more than 91,000 farmworkers in the region and a need for 47,937 additional housing units.
In addition to identifying needs, the study also identifies potential sites for new farmworker housing, federal and state government funding sources to finance housing construction, acquisition, and rehabilitation, local government strategies to generate additional financing sources, local land use, density, and zoning reforms that could expedite and facilitate farmworker housing production, and best-practice farmworker housing developments in other parts of California.
Fall 2014
For many years tribes in California have struggled with drastically underfunded housing programs that have left them unable to meet even basic housing needs. Additionally, tribes have faced significant obstacles in trying to compete with mainstream affordable housing developers for funding awards in California’s low income housing tax credit allocation system. Considerable cross-community work to bring tribes and housing program administrators together, however, led to the creation of California’s first tribal set-aside within the LIHTC program, and the first award to an Indian tribe in California in the thirty-year history of the state’s LIHTC program. The story behind the establishment of this new set-aside offers important lessons about how alliances can be formed to begin to breakdown longstanding barriers of isolation and inaccessibility.
Building Healthy Communities: Improving Housing Conditions In The Eastern Coachella Valley.
April 2014
April 2014
The Fair Housing and Equity Assessment (FHEA), a requirement as part of the HUD Sustainable Communities Grant, analyzes patterns in racial and economic segregation, discusses how segregation impacts individuals and families’ ability to access opportunity, and proposes strategies and recommendations to create more equitable and integrated communities. Based on analysis conducted for this assessment, the San Joaquin Valley continues to struggle with economic and racial disparities, geographic segregation, and inequitable access to opportunity.
February 26, 2010
Principal Investigator: Dewey Bandy, Ph.D., Deputy Director
That manufactured housing isn't more widely used by the affordable housing community is especially surprising given the advantages offered by this housing type and the types of development challenges affordable housing faces in rural areas. Manufactured housing promises quality units at lower costs than comparable site-built housing through mass production economies of scale. Further, by constructing the unit at a factory and then transporting a completed unit that is exempt from local building standards to a prepared site for installation offers developers the potential for significant project time savings.
September 1, 2004
California farmworker housing cooperatives represent a small, but important, sector of California’s affordable farmworker housing stock. Farmworker housing cooperatives first took root in the state as the result of farmworker-led grassroots initiatives to fight displacement and establish roots in the communities where they worked. The first four out of the eleven farmworker housing cooperatives that have been established in the state were driven by farmworkers seeking ownership and control of their housing in the 1970s and early 1980s (Bandy 1992). These farmworkers were motivated by years of living in substandard conditions as renters at the mercy of labor contractors, large growers and slumlords. They sought out the cooperative as an intermediate form of ownership that could deliver ownership, control, dignity and security in situations where single-family housing was infeasible. Many years later farmworker housing cooperatives still fill this important niche in the farmworker housing inventory by providing affordable ownership in settings where single family or condominium ownership is not feasible.
March 30, 2003
The scale of growth in the Central Valley and the complexity of the problems resulting from this growth have left communities scrambling to find new and effective growth management strategies. There is growing recognition by local governments, civic leaders, environmental advocates, affordable housing developers and other stakeholders of the high social, economic and environmental costs of existing land use practices. New strategies must be found and implemented. The intent of this publication is to present a solution that is increasingly being employed in the Valley itself and communities throughout California and the nation-building affordable housing as a cornerstone of Smart Growth. This publication will present twelve case studies of affordable housing projects undertaken in different communities in the Central Valley to demonstrate how affordable housing is central to any Smart Growth strategy.
February 1, 2003
With this publication, the 30-year experience of inclusionary housing in California is brought to the attention of a national audience through the sponsorship of the National Housing Conference. It attempts to provide a concise, comprehensive, up-to-date, state of the art account of inclusionary housing in California. It is organized as follows: First, the origins and evolution of inclusionary housing are presented, together with a discussion of the controversy surrounding inclusionary housing, especially the issue of who pays for its costs. Second, the findings of the 2003 survey are presented, followed by a brief analysis of the constitutionality of inclusionary housing. The report concludes with an analysis of the market implications of inclusionary housing.
October 8, 2002
This study was undertaken by the California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH) to evaluate the effectiveness of the cooperative model in providing affordable home ownership to California’s farmworkers. The cooperative housing model has been employed in California for almost three decades and there are now 11 farmworker housing cooperatives operating in the state. Although they vary in terms of funding sources, equity structures and occupational restrictions, all of these cooperatives share a common structure in which low-income farmworkers have an opportunity to collectively own and democratically operate their own housing.