Eastern Placer County Affordable Housing Tour

Affordable Housing Tour Showcases Local Workforce Housing Solutions

On May 14, 2025, local and regional stakeholders came together for the Affordable Housing Tour: East County, a guided site visit organized by Placer County to spotlight workforce housing efforts across the North Tahoe region.

🏘️ Tour Highlights

Participants toured a series of key developments, each reflecting unique approaches to addressing the local housing crisis:

• Meadow View Place (Martis Valley)
  Affordable rental units for local workers, with strong support from Placer County and community partners.

• Hopkins Village (Martis Valley)
  Homeownership opportunities supported by land trusts and local investment.

• Kings Beach Housing (Downtown Core)
  Mixed-use infill development revitalizing the town center and providing long-term affordability.

• Dollar Creek Crossing (North Lake Tahoe)
  A major upcoming development planned to bring over 100 workforce housing units to the region.

Catch a glimpse of the event and hear from project partners, agency leaders, and community members:

🎥 Watch the Recap Video

TTUSD weighs workforce housing plan to retain educators

Credit: Sierra Sun | March 24, 205

TRUCKEE, Calif. — The Tahoe Truckee Unified School District (TTUSD) Board of Trustees is considering a workforce housing project aimed at easing the housing burden for district employees and other local workers.

At its March 19 meeting, the board reviewed a feasibility study conducted by Education Housing Partners in partnership with the Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency. The study explored the potential for developing workforce housing on the Alder Creek Middle School property, a site identified for its viability in addressing the region’s affordable housing crisis.

Bruce Dorfman and Joanna Julian of Education Housing Partners presented the study’s findings, which included site analysis, conceptual layouts, construction cost estimates, and financing strategies. The proposal outlined a mix of one-, two-, and three-bedroom townhomes and apartments, with Site A accommodating up to 72 units and Site B housing between 20 and 26 units. Planned amenities include private garages, storage, a clubhouse, playground, and possibly a childcare facility—designed to cater to the needs of local educators and staff

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Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency introduces plan to grow housing solutions

Credit: Sierra Sun | February 14, 2023

The agency includes members from Nevada County, Placer County, Tahoe Forest Hospital District, Tahoe Truckee Unified School District, Truckee Donner Public Utility District, Truckee Tahoe Airport District, and the Town of Truckee.
Provided

TRUCKEE, Calif. — The Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency Board of Directors approved a five-year strategic plan on Jan. 18 which sets forth a roadmap to expand services, programs, and funding for housing the local workforce. 

Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency is a new joint powers authority formed in 2020 by four public agencies to address the housing needs of their employees. The Agency has grown to include seven public agencies including Nevada County, Placer County, Tahoe Forest Hospital District, Tahoe Truckee Unified School District, Truckee Donner Public Utility District, Truckee Tahoe Airport District and the Town of Truckee. 

In 2022, recognizing the regions’ growing housing needs, the agency determined that the founding mission, to serve the employees of its member agencies, needed to expand in order to better serve the entire community.

“We care deeply about the region’s rapidly growing housing challenges. Our 2023 Strategic Plan outlines a framework that includes six targets, goals, and objectives to help us pursue housing solutions for our Truckee-Tahoe community. We hope to make a material improvement in workforce housing in the years to come,” stated Harry Weis, CEO of Tahoe Forest Hospital District and TTWHA board chair. 

TTWHA provides housing services to member agency employees including general housing education, programs to access rental homes, home purchase navigation and assistance, and other activities to increase the inventory of available units. The new strategic direction will include expanded programs to serve a greater workforce, an acquisition program to preserve existing workforce housing, as well as development pursuits focused on creating middle-income housing. 

“Our seven public member agencies all have different missions and legal frameworks for how they can allocate funding, but at the end of the day we are all committed to housing. The agency offers us a pathway to come together and work on these solutions creatively as partners,” said Brian Wright, general manager for the Truckee Donner Public Utility District and TTWHA board member. 

As part of the agency expansion outlined in the strategic plan, a new nonprofit workforce housing fund is being created to combine public and private dollars to create financial tools for local housing programs and projects. The goal is to raise $10 million in public contributions in its first five years and unlock matching private funds to increase housing opportunities and capacity in the region. 

To view the new agency strategic plan, visit http://www.ttjpa.org/about-us.

To learn more about Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency, including ways to partner through the new Housing Fund, contact Emily Vitas, Executive Director, at emily@ttjpa.org.

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Second Act of Housing Mission Possible

Credit: Craig C. Rowe for Moonshine Ink | March 9, 2023

New bilateral effort to address regional housing concerns signals potential sunset of Mountain Housing Council’s six-year existence

The Mountain Housing Council of Truckee Tahoe (MHC) was born in 2017 from the still dire need for a holistic, community-wide approach to solving our area’s lack of obtainable housing.

At its first meeting of 2023, the mood was one of near accomplishment, like reaching mile 24 of a marathon. Not quite there, but you can hear the crowd.

Most notable of MHC’s many tangible and philosophical successes might be the 2020 emergence of an offspring, the Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency (TTWHA). The seven-member union of local agencies now has a renewed focus on making the region livable for people and families earning 80% and above of the area median income, regardless of where they work.

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With momentum gained from the December approval of its five-year strategic plan, the TTWHA announced at the Jan. 27 Mountain Housing Council meeting the crystallization of its 501c3 nonprofit, the pending Workforce Housing Fund, designed to back “financing tools to accelerate workforce housing solutions.”

Another new kid on the block, the Housing Hub, was also announced at the meeting. The hub is a work in progress, still formulating itself. But when congealed, its role will be helping anyone — developers, private citizens, local employers with land — navigate the menagerie of policies and programs.

EMILY VITAS, executive director of the Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency.

ERIN CASEY, consultant for the Housing Hub.

MEGAN EVANS, Compass real estate agent.

The workforce housing agency and the hub comprise a now two-pronged approach to support the economic demographic better known as “the missing middle.” Creation of the two organizations commanded a nimble dance to figure out differing yet complementary missions. As the Mountain Housing Council considers leaving the stage, some question the need for two institutions.

Bullet points on a slide deck described the hub’s charges, in part, as workforce housing-friendly policy advocacy, land use and pre-entitlement support to project proponents, and management of development-focused programs. They want to buoy the builders stifled to the point of surrender by a longstanding, near-impenetrable historical headwall of town, county, and state regulations.

Erin Casey, founder of ERCasey & Associates, is a consultant for the North Tahoe Community Alliance, which drove the formation of the hub.

“Development in our region is hard, the opportunities are limited, so we need to be creative,” Casey said. “We need to come up with multiple solutions, we have not found just one that fixes it.”

Casey, who worked with Placer County until June 2021, said one of the more challenging income levels to serve is that of the 80% and above. “There are many people in our community that make that or more, but very little to no funding for housing in those ranges,” she said.

To illustrate how complex finding solutions can be, Casey explained when local employers increased wages to help employees meet inflation, it bumped many of them out of the income qualification range for housing programs. Their raises worked against them.

As the hub’s partner, the TTWHA will remain centered on finding and providing sources of financial support for aspiring homeowners and renters, ready to spring into action when the hub’s gears catch.

AN EASY WAY TO LOOK AT IT IS THE HUB IS FOCUSED ON DEVELOPERS WHILE THE FUND IS FOCUSED ON THE PEOPLE.”

~ EMILY VITAS, TTWHA

The TTWHA’s initial mission was to house only the workers of its member agencies: Nevada and Placer counties, Truckee Tahoe Airport, Truckee Donner Public Utility District, Town of Truckee, Tahoe Truckee Unified School District, and Tahoe Forest Health System.

Emily Vitas oversees the workforce housing agency and will curate the fund. “Along with the recent housing crush, the pandemic forced us to look in a much bigger way in how we serve the community in which our employees and employers are a part of,” she said. “Public agency members recognized that the impetus of this model of serving your own employees doesn’t sit well with a community in crisis.”

The workforce housing agency members knew they had to go beyond the needs of its 2,300 employees, an awareness that led to the recently adopted strategic plan.

“The solutions we’ve been working on in the last two years can easily be expanded to serve a greater public,” Vitas said. The new 501c3 fund will live under the TTWHA, leveraging private and philanthropic dollars to “unlock more significant public dollars.”

“We have $10 million in soft commitments from our current public member agencies to fund the activities that will be tied to the new Workforce Housing Fund … we know real solutions won’t come easily or cheaply,” she said. “We will also continue to serve our public member agencies in the ways they need us to, so the fund is really a capacity builder and agency expansion.”

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES: This Venn diagram, from the Jan. 27 Mountain Housing Council meeting slides, illustrates how the three housing nonprofits are related. Courtesy image

The Housing Hub’s roots came from the opposite direction, with an intent to cast a net wide enough for the full Monty.

“It was originally conceptualized as part of MHC 2.0, its second phase, a component of the RHIP (Regional Housing Implementation Plan),” Casey said. “The concept was to develop a nonprofit devoted exclusively to workforce housing, to provide a number of services, from acquiring land to developing projects, bringing in funding.”

Casey says options for funding the hub are being explored, with initial monies coming from the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation, Martis Fund, and the North Tahoe Community Alliance, pending board approval.

The hub was percolating as the TTWHA’s members were formulating their new mission. The groups were aware they couldn’t duplicate efforts.

“The hub said, ‘well okay, we were going to be all of those things, so what does the community still need that the expanded agency can’t provide?’” Vitas shared.

Where these two parts mesh will be key to the success of the whole, but in a region already replete with agencies and organizations, and when charged with the crucial mandate of housing the “missing middle” — which doesn’t hide well in Truckee — is creating even more layers the most efficient way forward?

Vitas said the bifurcation makes sense and is indeed what’s best for the community.

“The housing hub and the housing fund are focused on two different pathways. The hub is focused on developer, technical assistance, and project and policy advocacy, whereas the fund is more focused on leveraging dollars to facilitate and administer projects and programs that serve the people,” Vitas said. “Additionally, because the hub is focused on advocacy efforts, they are committed to not utilizing public dollars to execute their mission, so we are trying to avoid the comingling of my public agency members’ money with advocacy efforts.”

Casey concurred. “TTWHA’s board and governance structure makes sense for its work. The nature of the hub’s work demands different funding and governance,” she said. “The hub will need flexible funding sources and leadership on the board.”

“An easy way to look at it is the hub is focused on developers while the fund is focused on the people,” Vitas said.

With so many initiatives being introduced under various acronyms and entities, leaders have unwittingly created an assistance shell game, minus the busker’s profiteering mindset. It can be hard for the aspiring homeowner to uncover the right solution.

“Part of the work we’re doing right now is more thoroughly engaging the realtor and lender network,” Vitas said. “It’s our role to be educators in our community as to what the opportunities are, whether its Truckee Home Access Program, Workforce Housing Preservation Program, or Martis Fund Down Payment Assistance. There are a group of agents and lenders who are leaning in on this in a very big way.”

One of those is real estate agent Megan Evans, a Truckee resident and daughter of two retired local agents.

“I educate myself as much as possible and then turn to the experts, the people in the community who have the ability to make change,” Evans said. “I have clients at all levels, Bay Area transplants and first-time buyers, and I ask them about their roadblocks, their challenges.”

Evans looks to be the source of the source, referring clients to Vitas or local lenders familiar with such initiatives.

Vitas said some citizens remain apprehensive about approaching an agent if their credit score isn’t great or news of interest rate hikes permeates their news feeds.

“I understand people may be afraid of deed restrictions or AMI (area median income) caps. But this is what government has to do to utilize their dollars to help,” Vitas said. “It’s the agency’s duty as the people-focused entity to [educate] in a bigger way.”

With the onset of the Housing Hub and the renewed mission of the TTWHA, what’s left for the Mountain Housing Council, so close to the finish line?

Vitas said that’s up in the air.

“They’re trying to figure that out, to identify what else they can help with in the community,” Vitas said. “They’re going to survey their members to see if there’s a there there,” she said.

And if the sun does set on the Mountain Housing Council, it should do so upon an optimistic horizon.

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No Housing, No Employees

Credit: Melissa Siig for Moonshine Ink | June 11, 2021

With local workforce losing their homes, businesses struggle to find staff; the consequences will be felt by everyone this summer

Christy Hill Executive Chef Andrew Shimer is terrified about what is going to happen this summer. As he prepares for what many are expecting to be an extremely busy summer, Schimer does not have enough employees to properly staff the restaurant, especially in the kitchen. He needs at least seven more back-of-the-house employees, but he has been getting zero responses to his help wanted ads on Facebook and Craigslist. After picking up the slack and working 14-hour days, seven days a week, Shimer made a decision last June to close the restaurant on Mondays and Tuesdays to keep himself from burning out. He also simplified the menu so a smaller kitchen staff can handle preparing the food when the restaurant gets slammed.

“This is by far the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said Shimer, who has been in Tahoe 15 years, working at Christy Hill for the past 10. “It’s going to be the busiest summer in a long time, and to keep up with demand is going to be exhausting. We are losing thousands of dollars just by being closed a couple days a week, especially in the summer. We are paying rent and not making money.”

Shimer is not alone in his concerns. Almost every restaurant in the region is suffering from a lack of employees. While some blame the stimulus checks or former workers moving on to other jobs during the pandemic, everyone Moonshine Ink interviewed for this story cited the dearth of affordable housing as the number one culprit of the employee shortage. Although workforce housing has long been an issue locally, the situation has been compounded by the pandemic. Demand for houses in the area soared, driving up prices, depleting inventory and impacting the rental market, with landlords moving into their own properties, raising rents, or selling them to cash in on skyrocketing home prices.

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And it’s not just restaurant employees who are losing their housing. Many business owners who rent find their homes are being sold, leaving many to wonder — what becomes of a community when the workforce and business owners can no longer afford to live there?

Home Sweet Home, but for Whom?

The inability to find employees is not unique to Tahoe/Truckee, but rather a nationwide problem. A March survey conducted by the National Federation of Independent Business found that 42% of owners had job openings that could not be filled, a record high. And 91% of those hiring or trying to hire reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill.

While nationally the lack of employees can be attributed to pandemic-related issues like extra unemployment benefits, lack of childcare, or unvaccinated people’s fear of returning to work, locally the overriding cause is housing. The Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency, founded in 2020 by four special districts (the Truckee Donner Public Utility District, Truckee Tahoe Airport District, Tahoe Truckee Unified School District and the Tahoe Forest Hospital, with a combined 1,900 employees), reports that 43% of its member employees found it “very difficult” to find housing the last time they moved.

“I can say that the people who make this community run are very close to having to leave,” said Emily Vitas, TTWHA executive director. “How do our special districts continue to run if they don’t have the employees? … It feels like we have seen 12 years of change and growth in six months.”

Over the past year, Tahoe/Truckee has set a record for the number of houses sold, according to Charlene Gamet, a realtor with Sierra Sotheby’s and the president of the Tahoe Sierra Board of Realtors.

“The problem is, we don’t have available inventory. If a house hits the market it’s sold within a week. We can’t say, ‘come up next week to look at six houses’ because they are going to be gone,” she said. “It’s record-breaking because homes are selling so fast, and record-breaking prices because there is so much demand.”

According to Sierra Sotheby’s market reports, the median home price in Truckee for the first quarter of 2021 was up 70%, and the average price of homes sold was $1.2 million, up from $745,000 in 2020. At Tahoe, the median home price in Tahoma and Rubicon Bay was up 98% during the same period, and the average sales price for the West and North shores was $999,000, up from $670,000 in 2020. According to the Truckee Tahoe Workforce Housing Agency, an affordable purchase price for a 3-bedroom home in Eastern Placer County is $382,000, a price that now is practically non-existent.

“We have not seen a market like this before, at least not in my lifetime,” Gamet said. “It’s great while we are in it, but it has to make adjustments because it’s pushing out all of our local people … All of our rentals, people are cashing out now, so we are losing rentals and that is a problem.”

Disappearing rentals

This is a major concern for restaurants. Moody’s Bistro Bar & Beats in Truckee has half the kitchen staff they need for the summer. Like many restaurants, they have raised wages for the back of the house, and pool tips to attract kitchen employees. Moody’s general manager, Sam LeRoque, says the going rate for line cooks has jumped almost 30% in the last four years, but to no avail.

“We have crunched the numbers and are paying the absolute most that we can,” LeRoque said.  “We have made adjustments to spread the wealth more than we ever have before to try to capture and retain good employees. But is it working? Not yet.”

LeRoque, who has been Moody’s GM for five years, says the labor market is the absolute worst he has ever experienced. Even when potential candidates from out of the area apply, they usually don’t have housing, so it doesn’t work out.

“You will find people and they don’t have a house yet, then they get up here and either have to leave or are unreliable because they are couch surfing,” he said. “For an employee to be a valuable and reliable employee, having a steady home life and place to live is imperative.”

To compensate for lack of employees, Moody’s shuts down food service between 4 and 5 p.m. to prepare for dinner. The burden of insufficient kitchen staff falls on the shoulders of the chef and sous-chefs, who now also have to do the work of prep cooks — chopping veggies and making sauces — as well as on management, which has to tightly control the number of customers per night to match what the kitchen can manage.

“We have ads up for employment, and no one is reaching out,” LeRoque said. “We are gearing up to get our ass kicked all summer. I don’t know if there is any way around it.”

BAR ONLY: Brian Nelson, owner of Pioneer Cocktail Club in Tahoe City, is changing his entire business to work without sufficient staff, focusing more on the bar scene and less on food service. Photo by Wade Snider/Moonshine Ink

Tahoe City’s Pioneer Cocktail Club is in the same boat. Owner Brian Nelson needs to hire eight to 10 more people in the kitchen, and has raised wages for dishwashers to $18 per hour and as high as $25 per hour for other positions. But he says these are not sustainable wages with the already thin profit margins of restaurants. Nelson has made adjustments to cope with the lack of employees. He is closed Tuesdays and says he might have to close on Wednesdays as well in the summer. He is buying kitchen appliances that can keep food warm in order to expedite cooking, and he might go to paper plate service.

“I want to be open every day in the summer, but if I can’t, it’s a $200,000 loss in sales if I only do dinner or no late night happy hours,” Nelson said. “Due to a lack of ability to handle people, we are shifting to more of a bar environment to relieve the kitchen so we can drop the expectation of service.”

Jake’s on the Lake’s general manager, Noah Wasserman, says that rising wages will be detrimental for both restaurants and consumers. He says the more restaurants have to pay workers, the more they will have to sacrifice the quality of food or raise prices.

“In the long run, the people who are going to suffer are the businesses and guests when burgers are $25 and cooked by a guy with next-to-no experience and is going to leave in a week when someone pays him more,” said Wasserman, who notes that three of his employees lost their rentals when they sold, and others have had their rent doubled. “We have a huge influx of new residents who don’t understand why no one has staff because they bought up all the rentals, through no fault of their own.”

HELP WANTED: Blue Mountain Painting owner Scott Smelser can’t find enough people to hire, despite raising wages by $7 per hour. He blames the lack of affordable housing.

Restaurants are not the only businesses being impacted by the housing crisis and labor shortage. Scott Smelser, who owns Blue Mountain Painting, says he currently has six employees and needs to hire at least 12 and possibly up to 20 more to meet demand for his services. When he started his company in 2014, he offered $15 an hour for kids right out of high school. Now he is offering $22 an hour and receiving minimal interest.

One of his employees moved to Carson City after he lost the Incline Village apartment he had been living in for 10 years. That concerns Smelser.

“I am 100% worried that I could lose employees who move to Carson City or Reno. That still adds expenses like gas and mileage,” he said. “You have to have a place for employees to live. You almost have to have a hostel.”

In fact, Old Town Tap owner Marlena John said she has an employee staying in the Redlight Historic Bunk Hotel, a hostel on West River Road, because the person has nowhere else to live. John said her restaurant needs five to six more employees, but has had no one apply for kitchen jobs yet. She blames the labor shortage on housing and extended unemployment benefits.

EVERYWHERE THERE’S SIGNS: Nearly every business in town seems to be looking for employees, including (from top) Coffeebar, Tahoe Forest Hospice Gift & Thrift in Truckee, and Tahoe Fuller’s, a food truck that recently opened a brick-and-mortar restaurant in Tahoe City. Photos by Wade Snider/Moonshine Ink

“Housing has been the biggest factor, long-term, for sure, but I think stimulus money has been a huge problem in the last six months,” John said. “It’s hard to know if we would have had a few hires by now if the stimulus hadn’t been generous.”

To compensate for lack of employees, John and her husband and partner, Luke, will have to work extra hours. She is anticipating working 60- to 70-plus hours a week this summer.

“We don’t want anyone else to burn out, and we don’t want to lose anyone else,” she said.

No Place to Go

Business owners are also finding themselves in housing jeopardy. Sahra Otero, who owns Heartwood Floristry and Planterium (formerly Wanda’s) in Tahoe City, received a letter from her landlord at the end of February notifying her that rent for her three-bedroom Tahoe City home would be increasing by about 50% in October. Otero said that she and her husband, an environmental health specialist with Placer County, could afford a 20% increase, but $1,000 more a month is out of their price range. She has started looking for homes everywhere from Roseville to Nevada City to Sparks.

“This is gut-wrenching, there is nowhere else to go,” said Otero, who has lived in her home for nine years with her husband and two kids. “We are in good shape, we are supposed to have options where we are now in our lives … We are not just waiting tables and running ski lifts; we are professionals. We belong here, we deserve to be here, we deserve to own property here and cultivate the community.”

Lorien Powers, who owns Lorien Powers Studio Jewelry in downtown Truckee, received notice at the end of April that the rental she has lived in for 13 years is being sold. Luckily, through word-of-mouth Powers has some leads in Kings Beach and Truckee.

“I don’t even know where to look for a place to live,” Powers said. “I think it’s widespread. I know so many people in our community who are looking for housing and having a hard time finding it.”

Last year, she lost an employee who wanted to find a new place to live locally, but then ended up moving to Nevada City after being unsuccessful.

Anyone who rents is facing an uncertain future. Monica Caldari, a Spanish and home study teacher at Creekside Charter School since 2008, had to move out of her Donner Lake rental in March because the owners are going to remodel it and rent it for a higher price. Unable to find any place to live around Tahoe/Truckee, she and her husband, a massage therapist at the Hyatt Regency in Incline Village, moved in with her mother-in-law in Reno. Now they both commute.

“It makes me feel like I am being told I just shouldn’t be here,” Caldari said. “I feel so incredibly unstable and completely unrooted. I feel like a visitor.”

Caldari believes the current housing crisis does not bode well for the community.

“There is no community without all the people who make it up,” she said. “How do you get to know anyone if you don’t see them out and about? We still try to go to New Moon because it makes me feel like I am still part of the community. It’s really sad. It feels like I am being replaced.”

Vitas, of the workforce housing agency, fears that if steps to remedy the situation are not taken, and quickly, there could be dire consequences.

“We become Aspen, we become a community where we have to bus people in and the culture is changed forever,” she said. “This place is so special, and without the people who run it, it’s going to feel like a very different place, and none of us want that.”

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