Editor,
I write from Half Moon Bay, a community that prides itself on being progressive and inclusive. California’s Senate Bill 35 was designed to accelerate affordable housing, a goal I wholeheartedly support. But speed without direction can widen the very divides we claim to be closing.
Look no further than the street separating Palo Alto and East Palo Alto. One city has a median household income of $231,000, is majority white and Asian and has resisted affordable housing for decades. Across the road, East Palo Alto, majority Latino with significant Black and Pacific Islander communities, earns half as much. The divide is both economic and racial.
I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. As a student, I read The Immigrants by Morag Loh and Wendy Lowenstein, a vivid account of immigrant life in Victoria. Its lessons stayed with me: high-rise estates built with good intentions quickly bred social and cultural isolation, weakening communities from within and driving higher crime. The concentration of disadvantage compounded it.
On a work trip to Berlin, I walked from Mitte toward Alexanderplatz and was told something striking: you cannot tell, from the outside, which buildings house low-income residents. That is deliberate policy, mixed-income, mixed-tenure, distributed by design. The result is genuine integration.
SB 35 asks how many units. The better question is where, and for whom. California deserves communities where people of all incomes and backgrounds live alongside one another, not sorted into separate worlds.
Evelyn de Souza
Half Moon Bay
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