2 Years After the Half Moon Bay Shooting, New Housing for Farmers Starts to Take Shape

It’s been two years since a mass shooting at a mushroom farm in Half Moon Bay left seven people dead and shed light on the harsh and crowded living conditions for many farmworkers. This summer, new homes built nearby will become available to the farmworkers who remain there and others looking for housing.

By mid-June, San Mateo County officials hope to open Stone Pine Cove, a collection of 47 single-family homes located a mile away from downtown Half Moon Bay and east of Highway 1. About half of those homes will be available for purchase through a state grant program, which partially subsidizes the homes for low-income farmworkers.

“If you look on the coastside and throughout San Mateo County, finding affordable housing is very difficult,” said Supervisor Ray Mueller, whose district includes Half Moon Bay. “It’s just a really exciting project both for what it means for our community and what it means for farmworker housing in the state.”

The homes are manufactured by Skyline Homes, a company specializing in factory-built mobile homes based in Woodland, northwest of Sacramento. Once constructed, the homes are trucked to the site in Half Moon Bay to be installed in the new community. As of January, about two-thirds of the site’s infrastructure, including the laying out of new roads and placement of utilities underground, has been completed.

The project, which should open to farmworkers by June 16, initially only included 28 homes on the site, Mueller said.

“After we identified the lot with the city of Half Moon Bay, we quickly did an assessment and realized it could accommodate even more homes,” he said. “We also, candidly, were able to find more funding.”

Officials collected $16 million in federal, state and local funding, including at least $6 million from the county’s own budget to fund the project.

Approvals for other housing developments for farmworkers are moving their way through the city and county. Just last June, city leaders approved a 40-unit affordable housing project for very low-income senior farmworkers, despite receiving appeals from locals who sought to block the project because it could lead to more traffic and have impacts on parking.