Worker housing funded by Napa vineyards can’t meet demand

Wake-up time is 4:30 a.m. for Jesus Angel Sanchez Victoria and Cesar Alegria Ruiz. It’s early — but then again, everyone wakes up early at the River Ranch Farmworker Housing Center in St. Helena, where breakfast is served between 3 and 6 a.m.

Before they leave for their vineyard jobs, Ruiz and Victoria grab a sandwich or a burrito from the River Ranch kitchen. When their workday with Corona Vineyard Management ends — often around 4 p.m., depending on how hot it gets — it’s back to River Ranch. They spend their evenings doing laundry, listening to music, playing basketball and, every night, calling their families.

“Compared with how others are living, this is much more comfortable,” says Victoria, 33, who is from the state of Michoacan in Mexico.

“You return every day, and there’s food already prepared,” adds Ruiz, 25, who came here from Mexico’s Queretaro state.

Ruiz and Victoria are two of 60 men living at River Ranch, one of Napa Valley’s three farmworker housing centers. To live here, you must prove with a pay stub that you’re employed as a farmworker in Napa Valley. The rooms are filled on a first-come, first-served basis, and residents can stay as long as they want.

At a time when vineyard labor is harder than ever to secure, and affordable housing all but impossible for Napa Valley’s vineyard workers to find, the farmworker housing centers are a resource that the county’s wine industry simply cannot do without, its advocates insist, despite the relatively small fraction of Napa farmworkers they accommodate.

“In terms of being a self-maintained facility, we’re the only one in the state,” says Steve Moulds, president of the Napa Valley Farmworker Foundation.

Rent, as of July 1, is $14 a day. (It was previously $13.) The rest of the centers’ costs are subsidized by the Napa Valley wine industry: County vineyard owners each contribute $10 annually for every acre they own.

Now is a critical moment for the housing centers. The county’s vineyard owners recently voted on whether to renew their self-imposed subsidy for another five years; the results of that vote will be announced at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

The measure looks likely to pass, and encouraging signs have come lately from Sacramento: The state budget, signed last week by Gov. Jerry Brown, includes a $250,000 grant to the housing centers — the first state money they’ve received. Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, D-Winters (Yolo County), has introduced a bill that would require the state to sustain that funding annually.

Meanwhile, Aguiar-Curry and state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, are sponsoring a bill that would authorize Napa’s grape growers to raise their self-assessed subsidy to $15 per acre.

For comparison, the state’s Office of Migrant Services operates 24 centers for seasonal farmworkers, from Newell on the Oregon border to Arvin in Southern California. Though the Office of Migrant Services centers generate some of their revenue from residents’ rent ($11 to $12.50 per night), the bulk of their budget comes from the state’s general fund, which contributes $5.6 million. The centers are open for 180 days during peak harvest season and house about 2,520 people statewide, mostly families.

Napa’s three housing centers have 180 beds, combined, and are open 11 months out of the year. All three are on properties donated to the county by well-heeled wine companies: River Ranch, by Joseph Phelps Winery; the Mondavi Center, by Robert Mondavi Winery; and the Calistoga Center, by the Heublein Corp. (Heublein, which once owned Inglenook, Beaulieau and Christian Bros., sold its labor camp to the Napa Valley Housing Authority in 1993 for $1.)

Napa’s farmworkers, like Napa agriculture generally, have a unique set of needs. “It’s clearly changed from a migrant workforce to a full-time workforce,” says Jennifer Putnam, executive director of the Napa Valley Grapegrowers. “Napa Valley grapes command the highest prices of any ag product in California.”

The demand for skilled labor has driven wages up. Last year, the average pay in Napa for vineyard work was $14.50 an hour; with the labor shortage worsening, it’s almost certainly higher this year. Yet even those helping to produce $100 bottles of wine can scarcely afford to live in the county, where the average median home price rose last year to $796,551 and the median rent is $2,750 per month. Daily commutes from Fairfield, Vallejo, or even Stockton and Fresno are commonplace.

The housing centers do not solve that problem entirely. All three of Napa’s housing centers accommodate only unaccompanied men, but as the number of female vineyard workers has grown, there’s a greater need for family housing. And all the centers are in the northern part of the valley, still inconvenient for those who work in Carneros and the southern part of the valley. That forces most workers to commute long distances; a handful of wineries provide lodging, but not many.

Most important, Napa’s vineyard force numbers more than 6,000 workers, and 180 beds simply aren’t enough.

“The centers are running at 100 percent occupancy,” says Alfredo Pedroza, county supervisor for Napa’s fourth district. “It’s a reflection of the housing challenge. For the folks staying at our centers, there is no other place to stay. It’s either they stay here, or they’re sleeping in cars.”

River Ranch is clean and spare — functional, no-frills. The recreation hall has a commercial kitchen with a cafeteria-style, stainless-steel-lined buffet line. Lodgers eat their meals at long tables in folding chairs.

They sleep two to a room, in small twin beds. Most keep mini-fridges in their bedrooms, to store fruit and snacks. The spaces are cozy, with overflowing dressers, but brim with their residents’ personalities: Lining the walls are family photos, religious icons, posters of bikini-clad women next to cars.

Every night, says Angel Calderon, who runs the three centers’ operations, “you see lots of people walking around with their cell phones to their ears — calling home.”

Calderon, who has lived on-site since River Ranch opened in 2003, runs a lean operation. He has just two other staff and does all maintenance himself.

“In 1980, when I came to the U.S., my first concern was where was I going to live,” Calderon says. He worked as a cook at Silverado Country Club and Meadowood for many years, but even then, housing wasn’t easy to find. “This is much, much better.”

It’s hard turning people away, Calderon says. In January, he gets inundated with Facebook messages from the previous year’s residents. The day before the center reopens in February, workers will already be waiting outside, hoping to secure their bed for the season.

Calderon stops outside the laundry room to talk to Reynaldo Sanchez Mendoza, who works at Harlan Estate. Mendoza has lived at River Ranch for nearly four years. He moved in after the St. Helena apartment where he’d lived for 20 years was torn down. Unlike other residents, he doesn’t have family left in Mexico to return to in the winter, so Mendoza depends on the farmworker housing for shelter year-round. When River Ranch closes for January, he goes to stay at one of the other two centers, in Calistoga and Oakville.

Victoria and Ruiz, meanwhile, will be returning home to their families in October after harvest winds down. They can’t wait to see their kids. Victoria has three; Ruiz, two.

“The hardest part is being away from my children,” Victoria says. “A lot of people back home say they wouldn’t come here — they wouldn’t leave their family.”

But when asked if they’ll come back to Napa next year to work, the two men don’t hesitate. “You can make in a day here what you’d make in a week in Mexico,” Ruiz says.

With state funding expected to be on the way, and vineyard owners’ self-assessment potentially rising, Calderon hopes to be able to repave one of the sidewalks on the River Ranch property and to update the roofing at the Calistoga center. But in the meantime, he’s proud that the centers are clean, safe and comfortable — a reality he scarcely could have imagined for himself when he came to Napa Valley nearly 40 years ago.

“By the end of the season, everyone stops by the office to say thank you,” Calderon says. “It makes my work a pleasure.”