By Sheila Sund, CC-BY-2.0
With this post I want to highlight narrative data from our participants from the North State of California who have graciously shared their time and stories with us by participating in two different research projects, one funded by the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP) and the other by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). Both studies were designed to investigate the social and structural conditions of substance use, one within the context of drinking (NIAAA), and the other within the context of smoking (TRDRP).
We recently wrapped up data collection on both studies, and are now busy cleaning, coding, and analyzing the qualitative and quantitative data. While waiting for the results of our more formal analyses, I want to share some of the narrative data from our participants that highlights the social and structural conditions that arguably contribute to not only substance use inequities, but also to housing insecurity in rural communities in the North State.
Issues related to housing insecurity have emerged again and again in the research studies we have conducted in California over the past decade, and these studies are no exception. As a society, we spend little time acknowledging and addressing housing insecurity in rural areas. But, as our rural participants describe, housing insecurity is one of the most salient issues in their everyday lives.
The Rural North State
For many people unfamiliar with the North State, “Northern California” conjures images of the San Francisco Bay Area or nearby wine country. However, about one third of California’s land mass exists further north, and many people who live in this large geographic region will tell you that the San Francisco Bay Area isn’t ‘really’ Northern California. The North State in California refers to California’s North Central and Northeastern counties—Butte, Colusa, Glenn, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Tehama, Trinity, and Yuba. This is where 210 interviews for our two studies took place between June 2020-March 2023.
Affordability
Affordability was among the most important housing issues facing participants from the North State. In the early and mid-twentieth century, the North State was a resource-based economy dependent largely on logging and mining industries. However, rapid deindustrialization in the latter part of the twentieth century resulted in an economy reliant on “nature-based amenities” (Sherman 2021). Simply google Mt. Shasta, Lake Almanor, Burney Falls, Little Backbone Creek, McCloud Falls, Bumpass Hell, or one of the North State’s many other gems to see for yourself the immense natural beauty of the area.
While many rural communities can and do thrive after transitioning to an amenity-based economy, others experience negative consequences that threaten access to housing for the hard working people who keep these communities flourishing. While in-migration both in terms of tourists seeking vacation rentals as well as city dwellers relocating to rural areas can have economic benefits for rural communities, it also has unintended consequences that include straining the housing supply and increasing the value of properties, making homes unaffordable for the working class.
Ava from Siskiyou County perceived housing to be the biggest challenge facing her community and felt that not only residents but also business owners were suffering as a result:
Housing is… really expensive… which is kind of weird, because it is a small town, but we have…a bunch of out-of-towners…that will come up here and buy — you know, they’ve got a ton of money, so they can just basically offer homeowners … more money than their house is worth. And then they turn it into an Airbnb. Right where I live… there’s probably five or six surrounding homes that have all been turned into Airbnbs. So … most people my age … don’t have enough money for a down payment, so they have to rent, but then they can’t afford the rent because people know that they’ll be able to make more money by turning it into an Airbnb, rather than just a regular home rental…
But I think people haven’t really thought about that, because now they’re running into the problem where they don’t have enough people to work, and like, do all of the touristy things, like at the ski park. … or enough people to serve in the restaurants or the shops, or whatever. So now things are really understaffed and have to close, so they can’t cater to the tourists, which is what all the Airbnbs are for… For the most part, it is a really great place. It’s just a matter of like, people being able to stay here and make a living. Because there’s not a lack of jobs, it’s just a lack of housing and then sometimes, you know, the jobs don’t always pay that well, or like, well enough for people to afford the housing that is here.
Ava summarizes a few features of affordability that affect North State communities and which emerged across participants’ interviews in this study. First, the lack of sufficient livable wage jobs affects one’s ability to cover increasingly high rents. As McKee and colleagues (2017) have noted, housing insecurity is not just about shifts in the rural housing market but also about variability in employment due to seasonal, part-time, and low wage work.
For instance, Maggie, who has been “bouncing around” various unstable housing situations since being displaced by a wildfire, explained that the wages she earned as an educator were not enough to live on:
I would like to be a teacher again. … [T]he fulfillment that comes with the job is super worth it, but the pay grade and having to raise a kid on my own is not worth it at all.
(To read more about Maggie’s story, see this blog post.)
Although not unique to rural areas, the inability to retain teachers due to housing affordability has substantial downstream impacts on the health of communities.
In another example, Shelly takes a historical approach to explain how employment precarity can threaten entire livelihoods, ultimately determining whether or not housing may be afforded and secured.
…a lot of rural communities that I have been a part of have been established on logging. Especially in the Northern California, western areas. And now, because there’s a lot more regulation on logging…a lot of those communities are dying or dead…because they don’t have those jobs anymore. So there is kind of this disconnect between the past and the future of rural towns … There’s that disconnect between okay, what do these rural towns do now? Because right now…these youths are…getting out or they are getting caught in that cycle of getting these not very sustaining jobs and not living fulfilling lives for themselves.
The reality of declining industries, such as logging, is not just a historical feature of rural communities in Northern California but also a contemporary issue. In subsequent posts, we will say more about this and other issues, demonstrating how many dimensions of housing insecurity, like housing stability, housing conditions, and community context, all contribute to insecure housing in rural areas. We will also further examine how housing insecurity impacts health and well-being among rural young adults, with a particular focus on connections to substance use.
* Thanks to Rural Initiatives Strengthening Equity (RISE) for their assistance with these projects.
* Thanks to all of our study participants for their time.
* All participant names are pseudonyms.
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