Attainable Housing Spotlight: Bill Hayward
Flourishing communities are home to growing families, thriving businesses, and the people whose labor and leadership power the local economy. Housing is essential to making that possible, and its absence can become one of the greatest barriers to a community’s vitality. What happens when young families move away, when businesses can’t hire employees, and when workers must commute from afar?
As a Monterey Peninsula native and fourth-generation business owner, Bill Hayward knows these challenges intimately.
“When I grew up here, families lived in Pebble Beach, families lived in Carmel, families lived all over, and that just slowly disappeared,” Bill says. “Now people are commuting hours to get to work, and as an employer we can barely hire anybody from outside the area, or even inside the area, who can afford to live here. That doesn't make for a healthy, sustainable community.”
While Bill can tell you about the challenges, he’s more inclined to dig in on the solutions. As Chairman and Chief Sustainability Officer of Hayward Lumber, founder and Board President of Hayward Institute, and former chair of the U.S. Forest Stewardship Council, he is a longtime leader in sustainable and healthy homebuilding, with a regenerative-minded focus on doing what’s right for people, the economy, and the planet.
In Monterey County and beyond, attainable housing isn’t just a housing solution, it is vital infrastructure for a thriving, resilient economy.
“We need to create attainable housing,” Bill emphasizes. “There's a huge market for market-rate and luxury housing, and there's this market for affordable, tax-credit based, really-low income housing, but the market forces do not work for what we call the “missing middle” - the housing for people who work in retail, who drive lumbertrucks, who work in management jobs, who are nurses and even doctors. That part of the market is broken.”
Yet, as Bill explains, there are not only community members and leaders who are hungry for change, there are existing approaches and models that can solve this challenge. We just need to bring them all together, and that’s where Regenerative California comes in.
“We have the tools, and in Monterey County, through the Regenerative California housing effort, we're pulling those tools together,” Bill shares. “We're pulling the government's willpower together to change the process of entitlement and permitting and land development, and really create a model here in Monterey County where we can actually build 3,000 affordable, attainable, energy-efficient, healthy workforce housing units over the next five years.”
Bill, who is an advisor and supporter of Regenerative California, has been an active participant and leader in the Attainable Housing Initiative, bringing his diverse perspectives as an employer, builder, and long-time resident.
“The Attainable Housing Initiative brought in the best ideas with the highest potential to work in Monterey County, and because every county is unique, we then started to explore examples, working models, throughout the nation,” Bill says. “It really brings great hope to me that we can actually achieve this in the next couple of years because we're not really reinventing the wheel. We're bringing parts of systems that work around the country, and in California, together here and working together to learn how to apply them in Monterey County, in our community.
As Bill explains, a key piece of the puzzle is breaking through the inertia of the entitlement process, including streamlining approvals, reducing permitting fees, and changing how properties can be zoned and, therefore, how and what kinds of housing can be built.
Moving beyond traditional single-family zoning can unlock the housing communities actually need. On the Monterey Peninsula, the classic three-bedroom, two-car-garage home is often priced for the vacation market—not the local workforce. More flexible zoning can make room for multifamily and systems-built housing that is attainable, sustainable, healthy, and designed for the people who keep the region running. This change would also enable the purpose-driven development of more properties with willing landowners, including local governments, churches, and places like Fort Ord.
For Bill, other important tools for overcoming key barriers to housing include leveraging nonprofit and philanthropic funding to make construction loans more affordable and pushing back on overengineered housing requirements to focus instead on energy efficiency and home health to reduce long-term costs.
The three sprint teams that emerged from the Monterey Attainable Housing Forum are tackling these issues through targeted projects aiming to map and match mission-driven land stewards with developers and builders in Monterey County; explore blended capital funds to invest in attainable housing and lower borrowing costs; and develop a streamlined approval roadmap to support and strengthen the entitlement and permitting pathway for attainable housing across the county.
For Bill, the process of bringing diverse stakeholders together through the Attainable Housing Initiative underlines the collective nature of both the challenge and the solutions. “As I called other leaders of other large organizations, I found that we’re all in the position of needing to help our employees find housing, from the medical system to other construction leaders to you name it,” Bill shares. “We're all trying to solve this problem individually, as opposed to solving it systemically, and so the need is clear: let's all get together and make this a problem that we can solve together at the county level. We're on the path now, and it's really urgent that we get it done.”