St. Helena citizens and housing officials have formed a new group with the goal of creating housing for workers who’ve been priced out of the local real estate market.

“Unless we as a community take some fairly creative actions soon, our town’s make-up is going to change drastically,” said Mary Stephenson, one of the group’s founders. “We want a community where everybody has an opportunity to live here.”

The founders of Our Town St. Helena include Bob and Linda Beckstrom, Jon-Mark and Colleen Chappellet, Greg Desmond, Robert and Sharon Freed, Bonnie Long and John Ponte, Peter and Christy Palmisano, Carol Poole, Tom Redmon, Stephenson and Rudy Papale, Bill and Charlotte Savidge, Frank and Colleen Toller, and Joel and Lisa Toller.

The group started to take shape in 2007, when the St. Helena City Council was considering a request to convert apartments on Monte Vista Avenue into condominiums.

Stephenson, who also owns rental property on Monte Vista, was a vocal opponent of the project, which she said would displace low-income residents and set a poor precedent.

Stephenson said that experience caused her and several associates to realize that the preservation of affordable housing would have to be driven by private individuals, not local government.

The group’s mission statement lays out three primary goals: advocate for low- and moderate-priced housing in St. Helena; partner with others to create that housing; and create a clearinghouse to share information about local housing opportunities.

For now, advocacy is key. The group has to convince people that preserving affordable housing is more important than making a killing off St. Helena’s real estate market, said Stephenson.

If the group wants to convince St. Helena residents to support more affordable housing, it has a long way to go.

Lobbying by a vocal group of St. Helenans derailed plans to build affordable housing on the city-owned property at Adams Street and Library Lane. The Magnolia Oaks subdivision on El Bonita Avenue, which is a mixture of affordable and market-rate homes, has drawn criticism from neighbors.

“The motivation for everybody involved would not be profit,” said Stephenson. “It would be to maintain the quality of life that we have in St. Helena, which includes a middle class. Right now we’re losing that.”

If the community rallies around the affordable housing cause, the group plans to work on ways to make that housing happen.

That’s where the expertise of Peter Palmisano comes in. As a partner with Pacific Union Realty, Palmisano was project manager for Meadowood in 1979. Today he sits on the board of Bridge Housing Corporation, which developed Hunt’s Grove Apartments in St. Helena and has built 16,000 units of affordable housing in the Bay Area.

He said there are plenty of ways to build affordable housing: through permanent deed restrictions, housing trust funds, inclusionary zoning and trust arrangements where a housing firm is given a lien on an affordable home.

Housing discrimination laws can make it difficult to ensure that housing set aside for local workers actually goes to local workers, but governments and nonprofits can devise lottery systems to give the targeted groups preference without running afoul of the law, said Palmisano.

The real problem is “making the numbers work” for developers, he said. Tax incentives, low-cost loans and government subsidies are instrumental in making affordable housing financially feasible.

St. Helena can build more affordable housing without compromising the Ag Preserve if it targets underutilized properties within the city limits, he added. An affordable housing firm is already interested in a 10-acre property on Pope Street, one of the largest and most attractive undeveloped tracts in the city.

Our Town St. Helena uses the metaphor of a tree to represent three groups that are in need of housing:

• Unskilled workers making minimum wage or slightly more are the roots

• Skilled workers employed in the wine and hospitality industries and making $15 to $25 an hour form the trunk

• Educated professionals making upwards of $50,000 who still can’t afford a home in St. Helena are the branches

The existing affordable housing system, in which eligibility is based on how one’s income stacks up with the county’s median income, is designed to serve people in the first two categories.

But it doesn’t offer much help to the branches. That group includes middle-class people whose jobs are crucial to meeting the community’s basic needs, such as police officers, firefighters, teachers and city employees. Many of those workers are forced to commute from more affordable neighborhoods in Napa or outside the county.

Creating housing for workers stuck in that no-man’s land could prove to be one of the group’s biggest challenges.

Going by the rule of thumb that no more than 30 percent of a person’s or family’s income should go toward housing costs, a family of four making the Napa County median income of $79,600 can afford to buy a house for $317,759, or pay $1,075 a month for a rental.

But the median price for a St. Helena home is about $1 million. The average rent for a three-bedroom apartment is $2,200.

Affordability might be a long climb for more many local families. For information about Our Town St. Helena, contact Stephenson at 963-1548 stepcomm@aol.com, or Palmisano at 963-4080 or PJPAL@aol.com.