This elected official can’t find a place to live in his own SLO County town

Harry Farmer, a 78-year-old Cambrian, is a member of an unenviable club — people who’ve been displaced from their homes after the residences were sold to new owners who didn’t want renters.

Yet, while lots of people in town and elsewhere share his circumstances, his situation is different.

Since 2016, the active, community-involved man has been a director on Cambria Community Services District board, a position that helps make decisions affecting every property owner, business and resident in town.

And now he can’t even find a place to live in the town that elected him.

To continue serving on the CSD board, Farmer must find housing within the district’s boundaries, something he’s firmly determined to do, somehow, someway.

So, the retired landscaper — who through the decades has had several other occupations in town and now lives on a fixed income of Social Security benefits and the modest pay he gets as a district director — is desperately seeking affordable Cambria housing to replace the garage-topping studio where he’d been living for 29 years.

He’s well known in Cambria beyond his CCSD gig, having lived in town for 35 years and been involved with community affairs during all of them, helping to preserve open space like the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve and Strawberry Canyon.

According to his online bio, “His varied work background includes employment in social services and the mental health field, as well as a disc jockey and radio interview host (on KOTR Radio), gardener, and counseling astrologer.”

Blessings and need

“I’ve been blessed to live in that unbelievably magical studio and this town. I’ve lived here about half my life,” Farmer said in one of a series of interviews about his search for affordable housing. “I love this town. … This community has done so much for me. I’m not leaving Cambria. No way!”

Various members of his community have been trying to help, but it’s tough going in the tight rental market.

When word got out about Farmer’s housing dilemma, people immediately started reaching out to him to find out how they could help.

Farmer said, “within the space of four days” after he posted a notice about his planned garage sale to sell nearly all his belongings, “someone I know offered to have me stay at her place until I found someplace else.

“Right after that, someone else contacted me about something unrelated to my living situation,” he said. Once Farmer mentioned his circumstances, that person immediately told him, “You can stay at our place until mid-October while we’re on vacation.”

He said Oct. 4 that, with no other options on his radar, Farmer hopes that after that person returns from her trip to Hawaii, she will allow him to stay a little longer.

Those stop-gap housing offers, Farmer said gratefully, “have given me a little bit of lag time” after he was evicted in August.

That’s especially true since, in the “kick-him-when-he’s-down” category, right after he had to leave the studio, mechanical problems disabled his car.

He got those fixed, he said, but now the battery and other problems have idled the aging vehicle again. Fortunately, the busy CSD director has been able to borrow a car in the interim.

All that support — moral and beyond — has reinforced Farmer’s instinctive “attitude of gratitude,” he said. “I’ve always tried to look on the good side of people, the good side of life.”

This is “kind of a strange place to be in,” Farmer said haltingly. “People see me differently with regard to what I’m being challenged by now. Not a day goes by when someone doesn’t ask me, ‘How’s your housing search going? How are you?’ … I’m really humbled by it all.”

Even so, after “the solitary nature of my life” in the studio, he said, being evicted and his subsequent housing search “have done serious emotional and psychological damage to me.”

Farmer added that he’s “having a lot of trouble letting go of what I‘ve had that’s nourished my spirit, the things that allow me to call this place home.”

Farmer’s future still in limbo

Since escrow closed on the house sale, Farmer has had to move twice in one month and is now housesitting for that second friend. But that offer runs out about Oct. 15, and when it does, he doesn’t know where he and his “faithful canine companion, Chiron” will be living.

Chiron, a 12-year-old rescue pooch, goes nearly everywhere with Farmer.

At least Farmer hasn’t had to part with Chiron or most of his precious belongings, the things that had transformed a small studio over the garage into his home.

Steve Kniffen, another Cambria friend with a big heart, offered Farmer storage space, so he wouldn’t have to sell all of the things he loves in a tag sale.

“Steve read about the sale online and called to say, ‘Don’t get rid of everything!” Farmer said. Kniffen emphasized that he has “a shed that’s big enough for anything smaller than a bus.”

That shed is now packed with Farmer’s treasures. Now, all he needs is a home to put them in.

What’s next?

Of course, the CSD director would love to find something that duplicates the living arrangement he enjoyed for so long, an affordable, comfortable, private studio.

However, Farmer is a realist who recognizes that rents have skyrocketed in Cambria and beyond and that many local homes with in-house or adjacent rental arrangements have been sold or converted to short-term vacation rentals.

He says he suspects that, if he’s lucky, he’ll be able to find or create a shared-living situation, perhaps in a small home in which he and someone else can live separately but together as housemates.

Farmer knows he’s not alone in his search.

“I’m facing what a lot of people in our community, and all around the planet, are facing,” he said. “It’s the way things are in the world now, and it’s been a common thread for several years.”

Renter woes

The pickings are thin.

In an Oct. 3 email interview about Cambria real estate in general, broker Alex de Alba said simply, “The rental market is ... very scarce and expensive.”

That same day, housing rental listings on the Quality Management Services website, cambriaqms.com/current-rentals-1, offered five options ranging from $2,700 to $5,100 a month.

The next day, QMS owner Robin Cloward echoed what she’d said to The Tribune in August, that she regularly fields calls from working folks who desperately need North Coast housing, but either can’t find it or can’t afford what they do find.

She said there are also a lot more people looking to rent long term than there are homeowners to rent to them.

She estimated that current monthly rents (set by the owners, not QMS) for a studio on the North Coast still range from $1,100 to $1,500, including utilities; from $1,700 to $2,400 for a one-bedroom apartment or house; $2,000 to $2,500 for a two-bedroom; and $2,800 on up for a three-bedroom home.

Cloward and Farmer bemoaned the fact that so many empty residences have been converted to vacation rentals, and lots of people who own second homes here don’t want renters in the short or long term.

The lack of affordable housing has exacerbated an already parched pool of potential employees for area businesses, especially those in the hospitality and restaurant industries, according to Lorienne Schwenk, executive director for the Cambria Chamber of Commerce.

But some people, among them teachers, paramedics, firefighters, office and healthcare workers, also are having a tough time balancing the wages they get from their North Coast jobs with the cost of living where they work.

Cloward spoke of a teacher who’d had to turn down a job offering at a local school because she could neither afford to rent in Cambria or commute from somewhere cheaper.

“We need a solution,” Schwenk said Oct. 3, and in some cases, “we need to compromise.”

Anyone with information, suggestions and encouragement for Farmer can mail him at P.O. Box 65 Cambria, CA 93428, or email him at harry@hfastrologer.com.