Vallejo council seeks solutions to expand affordable housing access

VALLEJO - The Vallejo City Council tackled a litany of housing issues during its meeting Tuesday night as the city grapples with understaffing in its Housing Authority, a lack of affordable housing options and widespread homelessness.

The City Council is considering adding new renter protections and inclusionary housing policies as it seeks to preserve and expand access to affordable housing. The council also on Tuesday mulled options to mitigate homelessness, including how to handle a massive encampment on private land in the White Slough area. 

However, service interruptions in the city’s Housing Authority have disrupted access to federal housing funds. The Housing Authority has struggled with understaffing over the last year, which led to the office temporarily closing last year.

City Housing Director Alicia Jones said during a meeting last week that the city received 2,358 vouchers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and 81 special purpose vouchers for homeless veterans under the Veterans Affairs Supporting Housing Program to administer this year. 

The council approved a $210,000 budget increase, including $150,000 to use “to ensure operational continuity and maintain service delivery standards during a period of staffing shortages.” Jones said the department is actively recruiting a housing specialist and two administrative clerks, and for now the city is expanding use of services from a consultant, Allecca Inc. 

“This temporary investment will stabilize operations, protect program performance, and provide staff with the necessary time to build internal capacity without compromising customer service,” Jones said. She said the agency has struggled to keep the administrative clerk positions, which limits its capacity to operate fully and respond to resident needs. 

Cristal Gallegos, director of the Vallejo Housing Justice Coalition, spoke in public comment criticizing the city for not providing more clarity on the understaffing and last year’s office closure. She said people relying on vouchers and in tenuous housing situations are feeling the impacts of the department’s troubles with delays and unfilled positions.

“Just last fall our Housing Authority shut down without warning, leaving thousands of people without access to service,” Gallegos said. “I still don’t know why that happened.”

Renter protections and inclusionary housing

Meanwhile, the city is also exploring renter protection measures, potentially including rent stabilization, just cause eviction, anti-harassment and tenants’ right to counsel.

City staff told the council on Tuesday that they are reviewing applications from seven consultants, and will select one to craft potential ordinances to bring back to the council.

The city also completed an inclusionary housing feasibility study in 2025, and expects to consider draft ordinances later this year that could require affordable housing to be included in new developments or a commercial linkage fee, an impact fee levied on commercial developments to help fund affordable housing. These efforts are intended to advance key policies to improve the city’s housing outlook and make progress toward its state-mandated goals, as the city is badly behind on affordable housing construction, staff said.

Councilmember Helen-Marie “Cookie” Gordon said she was excited to see movement on these initiatives, and praised the idea of requiring developers to create mixed-income housing.

“I came here gentrified out, homeless and had nowhere to go,” Gordon said. “Because there was no rental protection for me.”

Vice Mayor Diosdado Matulac said he’s concerned with housing developers’ apparent lack of interest in building in Vallejo.

“It is frustrating when we see American Canyon, and they’re building out of the seams right now, and here we are - we can’t even get developers here,” Matulac said. “I want to help us understand … what’s holding us back, and is it a misperception issue that developers are running into?”

Councilmember Peter Bregenzer asked if the city could consider more deals with developers, such as waiving certain required facilities improvements in exchange for more affordable homes. 

“I don’t see developers beating down our door trying to build anything in Vallejo to any kind of mass scale to make up for the numbers we’re already behind [on],” Bregenzer said. “How do we become a development city? We have all these projects pending and they look great, and they just don’t pencil out and then they stall for years and years.”

Council considers homelessness strategy

The council also reviewed an outline for the in-progress Unhoused Strategic Plan and approved staff to pursue support to remove debris and encampments in the White Slough area.

The council asked city staff to explore outside funding and resources to conduct a cleanup at White Slough, the wetlands located between Redwood Street and Highway 37 and Sonoma Boulevard and Sacramento Street. Some parcels at the site are owned by Vallejo Flood and Wastewater District and Caltrans, while others are owned by private entities and individuals, including one of the largest parcels, which is owned by a homeless resident of the encampment. 

Assistant to the city manager Natalie Peterson said it will cost an estimated $146,000 to clean up debris and encampment from the private parcels over three weeks. She said there are also approximately 110 vehicles and 30 RVs that will likely need to be towed, costing an additional $28,000. 

Peterson said the city is seeking outside funding, such as from Caltrans, for the cleanup, as well as housing resources to help work with people living in the area. The city is litigating with the private property owners to abate them, and Peterson said it could take two months to receive the court orders to abate the properties. Even then, the encampments could return.

“The city will not have the right to inhibit access to the properties, so it may be challenging to prevent the reoccupation of the properties,” Peterson said.

Councilmember Alex Matias said since his term started, he thinks that despite some efforts to abate homelessness, the work to improve the city’s approach often feels slow.

“A lot of this is because we don’t have the infrastructure as a city to support this work,” Matias said. 

Matias said he wants regular updates about homelessness strategies, and asked staff to craft a detailed strategy to address where people living in RVs can go. “Right now, we’re not doing anything,” he said. “People are on the street, and there’s also the heightened risk of fires popping off.”

Peterson reported that the in-process Unhoused Strategic Plan, which could address many of these concerns, is still not ready for public review. The council rejected a suggested consultant agreement brought in December to craft the strategy, and since then staff have been revising it. 

The draft plan contains several sections, Peterson said, including an overview of current projects, three strategies for addressing homelessness and the statistics of homelessness in Vallejo. The plan will wrap together current emergency shelters, permanent supportive programs, extreme weather centers and encampment removals, and will assess how the community can leverage assistance in providing housing, sheltering, and services while measuring outcomes of different strategies. It is unclear when this plan will come before the council.

The council also voted 3-2 – with Matulac and Bregenzer opposed – to explore county-level funding for up to $1,000 to pay unhoused people for a lived experience stipend program. The stipend would pay people with the experience of being unhoused to participate in focus groups, city meetings or other official activities to assist with developing policies around homelessness. People could fill out a compensation form for approval to be compensated $25 per hour for their input, Peterson said.

However, with the vote the council majority indicated the city will not pay out of its coffers for the program and will seek county support.

Bregenzer said he continues to oppose the stipend program.

“I don’t think we should have to pay for it,” he said. “If they really want their voices to be heard, they need to be part of the solution. We don’t pay our other boards and commissioners … they give it of their own free will.”