Santa Cruz, CA – September 8, 2020. We all know about California’s housing crisis.  The state is millions of homes short of a reasonable amount for its population.  Limited public subsidy can’t help most of those struggling terribly.  More local residents here become homeless each year, even when they are employed.  It’s also abundantly clear that COVID-19 and the fires in our county have increased the suffering due to the cost of housing and placed even more of that burden on lower-income households.

What’s often less clear is what to do about it that will make a big difference.

New Way Homes (NWH) is a non-profit started in Santa Cruz that aims to truly prove how to solve the state’s housing crisis.  Sibley Simon, a former tech entrepreneur, started this effort in 2015 to create a scalable model for building the amount of below-market-rate rental housing that is actually needed.

5 years later the effort is beginning to succeed.  NWH has its first units under construction and over 300 more in design and permitting.  To raise the investment capital to get those next six projects through the design and permitting phase, NWH has just launched a crowdfunding investment campaign on Wefunder.com.  

“I started New Way Homes both to help reduce homelessness and to see that our community doesn’t turn into a wealth-only enclave with everyone working middle and lower income jobs commuting in from far away.  It’s been a goal from the beginning to allow everyone who agrees with those motivations to invest in our fund.  I know many people are looking for ways to have their investments be in the local community, not just wall street.  And many people here care about affordable housing.  Now that we’re building homes successfully, we’ve set up an approved way to allow anyone to invest,” explained Sibley, President of NWH.

The NWH model combines impact investment capital, partnerships with landowners (often non-profits from churches to Housing Matters), environmental sustainability that lowers operating costs, new state laws allowing more density in certain locations and less parking around transit, and many other techniques.  All of this put together is allowing a range of housing types, from permanent supportive housing to mixed-income apartment buildings to rehabilitating historic buildings into apartments.  NWH’s work has been supported by the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County, Dignity Health, Facebook, Santa Cruz County Bank, and numerous individual and institutional investors. 

In the years ahead, NWH aims to build thousands of units in our region.  Even more importantly, its big goal is to help seed a new part of the housing industry that is not limited by the amount of public subsidy, and yet focuses on increased affordability.  

Sibley describes this goal as organization’s central thesis: “The improved state land-use laws are helpful, from allowing backyard units to transit-oriented development.  But the only way we’ll start creating enough housing in CA is to have a new part of the development industry that lowers risk, fixes modest investor returns, and maximizes affordability.  That’s what we’re doing, and there’s no reason we can’t spread the system until it solves our housing shortage in a much more equitable way.”

Construction will begin this fall on seven units of permanent supportive housing at 801 River Street, Santa Cruz that will be owned by the nonprofit Housing Matters. This long-vacant historic Victorian home will serve chronically homeless individuals exiting the recuperative care center who have an ongoing need for support services.  This is a pre-curser for a new 120 unit permanent supportive housing building that New Way Homes and Housing Matters are collaborating on.  This larger project is within the Housing Matters existing campus and aims to significantly change the degree of chronic homelessness in Santa Cruz. 

For more on New Way Homes’ work, see the investment profile at:
wefunder.com/new.way.homes