www.montereycountynow.com JANUARY 15-21, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 Supervisor Kate Daniels’ discretionary fund, approved 5-0 by the Board of Supervisors last June. As Regenerative California’s efforts get underway, other organizations and coalitions are pursuing plans to add more infill housing to the region. “If we’ve got the political capital and the social capital to do it, we know the financial capital is there,” says Gabe Sanders, executive director of Opportunity Housing Trust, vice president of ReVision West, and a Regenerative California volunteer. “It’s just a matter of connecting the right people at the right time, and this is the right time.” There are two main categories to affordable housing. There’s what some refer to as affordable with a capital “A,” government-subsidized, low-income housing built by nonprofit developers. Prime examples include Moon Gate Plaza in Salinas’ Chinatown by MidPen Housing, Alfred Diaz-Infante Apartments in East Garrison by CHISPA and Lightfighter Village in Marina by EAH Housing and the Veterans Transition Center. Then there’s affordable housing spelled with a lower-case “a,” housing that’s affordable by design, typically infill apartments, smaller houses, or starter homes and condos. The word Regenerative California leaders are using is “attainable.” Nonprofit developers use a complex mix of federal and state government funds, foundation grants, tax credits, federal housing vouchers and land donations or greatly reduced ground leases. To meet federal Department of Housing and Urban Affairs requirements, people eligible to live in subsidized units must make a percentage of the area median income (AMI) or less, usually no more than 80 percent. In Monterey County, 80 percent of AMI for a family of four is $115,700. At the other end of the economic spectrum, those wanting to purchase a market-rate home need an income of 200 to 300 percent of AMI, which for Monterey County is between $215,000 and $320,000 annually to afford a home priced between $830,000 and $1.2 million, according to estimates by Regenerative California. Between that 80-percent AMI and 200 percent is what’s been dubbed “the missing middle,” which encompasses a lot of middle-income workers including teachers, managers, first responders, nurses and others. They’ve been locked out of the market as buyers, while remaining saddled with high rents. It’s this missing middle that some advocates are turning their attention to, while still advocating for capital “A” affordable housing. “We have to take a both/and approach,” says Matt Huerta, vice president of community development with the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership, known as MBEP. “While I’m optimistic and happy we’re building more teams around the missing middle, we can’t take our eyes off [the need for affordable housing]. That continues to be the biggest need to address.” He points out something else, that those in the missing middle are occupying less expensive housing, crowding out lower-income households. “So the missing middle is applying pressure on the lower tier,” he says. “We need to free that up.” Sibley Simon has his eyes on housing the missing middle, as well as those at lower incomes, by investing private capital, or a mixture of private and public capital, to construct infill housing. He’s proven the formula can work. The former tech entrepreneur and CEO who once created software and content for virtual worlds is now immersed in the very real and complex world of creating affordable housing. Simon’s background in mathematics and physics lends itself to attacking the problem logically. After 15 years in the tech world, Simon says he was feeling burned out and wanting to do something more meaningful. He began volunteering with the Homeless Services Center in Santa Cruz, now known as Housing Matters, as its treasurer and helped launch two successful campaigns to house hundreds of the most vulnerable and chronically homeless. “It was very successful in getting a lot more people out of long-term homelessness, but it’s not solving the problem fully, because more people are becoming homeless,” he says he realized at Thanksgiving in 2014. “I decided I want to become a more mission-driven housing developer with the first priority on permanent supportive housing.” The realization led him to found nonprofit New Way Homes in 2015, which operates an impact investment loan fund used to build mission-based and below-market-rate rental housing in the Monterey Bay region. He also became managing director of Envision Housing, a developer that specializes in building apartment buildings with more affordable rents. In 2022 he became a principal and impact development executive for Workbench, an architecture, development and general contracting firm based in Santa Cruz that focuses on denser infill housing that includes environmentally sustainable, below-market rate units, helping to solve the missing middle problem. Simon says they’ve built 275 accessory dwelling units and infill apartments over the past few years, with another 2,000 units in the development pipeline. “We’re really interested in workforce housing and affordable housing that takes less or no public money,” he says. That’s where New Way Homes and its impact investment loan fund comes in, helping to pay the early expenses of projects, launching those projects and making them more affordable in the long run, without depending on government subsidies. “The reason we built it is because the early stage cost of a project is the hardest to fund, and in the market rate Attainable Sibley Simon in his office at Workbench in Santa Cruz, a housing development firm. He leads New Way Homes, a nonprofit that operates an impact investment loan fund to build mission-based and below-market-rate rental housing in the Monterey Bay region. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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