Seeing “Keep Willow Valley Country” signs sprouting along Willow Valley Road, even a mile or more from the HEW site, is maddening. I purchased my home in 2021, so I saw who had blue or red signs in their yards in 2022 and 2024. And yet here they are, united in opposition. It tells you the real objection isn’t ideological. It’s about something neither side wants to say plainly, and I’ll get to that.
As someone who has lived here since 1980, I know change isn’t new. But this time, we’re changing in the wrong direction, actively choosing economic decline through housing policies that are pricing out the next generation.
The Graying of Nevada County
When I moved here in 1980, over half the population was under 35. Those percentages are now reversed. Our median age of 50.3 years places us among the oldest counties in California.
I left Nevada City for college in 1997 with every intention of never coming back. I felt hemmed in by a small town. I spent years in San Diego and Seattle and genuinely loved both. But I came back in 2004, and the demographic shift was immediately apparent. There were almost no young professionals. Grass Valley Group was winding down, and the social scene was thin. Romantic prospects were sparse in a way that is hard to overstate if you haven’t lived it. I was fortunate that my mother had built Kroeger Financial, a tax and financial planning firm, and doing taxes gave me a living with enough free time to have fun, build mountain bike trails, and travel. I had reasons to stay that most people my age didn’t. Most of them didn’t come back.
Yes, America’s population is aging nationwide, but Nevada County’s situation is far more extreme. According to the latest U.S. Census data, only 32.3 percent of our population falls in the 0–34 age range, compared to over 50 percent in 1980. The collapse of our young adult population isn’t a natural demographic shift, it’s the cumulative result of housing policy that has priced out working families.
The Economic Cost of Aging Communities
This isn’t just a demographic curiosity. It’s an economic crisis in slow motion. Communities where the 60+ population grows by just 10 percent see their economic output drop by 5.5 percent, according to research from the American Economic Association. Older populations mean less innovation, fewer new businesses, and lower wages for everyone, measured in dollars, but felt in empty storefronts, smaller school classes, and the loss of the young families who run our shops and teach our children.
Small communities that fail to attract young people face particularly dire consequences. Our restaurants, retail stores, and service businesses are especially vulnerable when workers can’t afford to live nearby.
What This Is Really About
The neighborhood association is supposedly in favor of multifamily housing. I want to take them at their word. But their conditions make that support a fantasy. A 33-unit cap, donating 40% of the land to greenspace, and a demand to demolish roughly 80 percent of the existing structure before anything gets built. Stack those requirements together, and you have not a compromise but a veto dressed up as one. No project pencils under those conditions. The opposition may sincerely believe they are being reasonable.
I can imagine designs I might find offensive and worth opposing once they are presented, but placing a unit cap so low that the economics collapse isn’t design review. It’s a veto.
Nevada City has almost no apartment stock. There is King Hiram, and that’s essentially it. Cashin’s Field sits on the border with Grass Valley, is income-restricted, and has been full since the day it opened, serving 51 families from over 1,000 applicants, or roughly 5 percent of documented need. Pointing to Cashin’s Field as evidence that our housing needs are met is like pointing to a single lifeboat as proof that a sinking ship has adequate safety equipment.
The absence of apartments isn’t just a supply problem, it’s a tenure stability problem. The vast majority of rental housing in Nevada City is single-family homes, and single-family rentals are inherently precarious. They get sold. Frequently. A landlord decides to cash out, a wealthy retiree relocates from the Bay Area and makes an offer, and a family that thought they had a home suddenly has 60 days to find somewhere else to live. In a market this tight, there often isn’t anywhere to go.
An apartment doesn’t have that problem. You lose your home if you stop paying rent or break the rules. That’s it. For the people who need housing stability most, workers between 18 and 35 who aren’t buying homes in this market, people new to the area, service workers, seniors who want to downsize, a well-run apartment building is far more reliable housing than a single-family rental that could be listed on Zillow tomorrow.
The HEW building itself makes the case. The existing structure is approximately 37,000 square feet. Convert it thoughtfully and you’re looking at 30 to 40 studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom apartments, the kind of units young workers and downsizing seniors actually need on a footprint of roughly 3.5 acres, including parking. That leaves 8.5 acres for 35 single-family homes and townhomes. At 4 units per acre, that matches almost exactly the density of the 24 parcels between Nursery and Nevada Street, which average 4 units per acre and are closer to 5 when you exclude the six largest lots. Four units per acre is not rural. It is a standard American suburb. Seeing “Rural for a Reason” signs in yards on quarter-acre lots less than a thousand feet from a state highway is difficult to take seriously.
And if “neighborhood character” is truly the standard, consider what that would require: the HEW site’s surroundings were built across more than a century, from Victorian-era structures to postwar ranch homes to millennium-era construction. There is no single character to preserve.
The developer owns 12 acres, not 7.5. The opposition has declared, with no evidence, that 4.5 acres are too steep to develop and should be donated as parkland. They’re asking him to give away roughly 40 percent of the property he purchased, then limiting what he can build on the remainder to a number that makes the economics impossible. What they’re trying to avoid isn’t density, it’s renters of average means as neighbors. That’s the quiet subtext of “neighborhood character” in this conversation, and it deserves to be named. If the goal is not to “Roseville Nevada City,” then adding a 33-unit subdevelopment is a poor strategy to achieve that.
A Challenge to Opponents
Ask a service worker you value, whether handing you a craft cocktail or changing your bedpan, does housing insecurity weigh on them or people they love? How valuable would it be to walk their kids to the creek or to a parade from an affordable home? Are you willing to deny them that over a building that doesn’t look like yours, a couple of extra cars? Are your values about keeping it country?
The HEW project represents an opportunity to make a meaningful dent in our housing crisis while preserving a historic structure. Blocking it won’t keep Nevada County “country.” It will just make it older, poorer, and less economically viable with each passing year.
The Path Forward
Change is unavoidable, and I’m offering data in the face of it because research shows humans are remarkably poor at making rational decisions under uncertainty. What I can tell you with certainty is that the path we are on is a bad one.
If we stay on it, people will have to leave this community, people you value, even if only for the services they provide you. The young teacher who can’t afford to stay. The server who makes your favorite cocktail. The emergency responders who keep us safe. The tradespeople who maintain our homes. They’re already leaving, and the exodus will accelerate.
Multifamily housing doesn’t have to be some brutalist housing abomination. It could be a wonderful mix of apartments, townhouses, and single-family homes, a development that welcomes people who don’t object to befriending someone more or less fortunate than themselves. That’s what a community is: not a gated enclave of similarly situated retirees, but a living place where people of different ages, incomes, and circumstances build a shared life together.
The HEW project represents an opportunity to choose a different path, one that preserves our community’s vitality rather than managing its decline. It is a chance to welcome the workers, teachers, and families we desperately need. Let’s choose vitality over decline.
About Orion Kroeger
Orion Kroeger is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) and a Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA®) who has been a resident of Nevada County since 1980. His professional conflict of interest is that the economic status quo, an aging, affluent population, is highly beneficial to his business, where the median age of his clients is over 60. He writes in favor of the HEW development because he believes there is something profoundly wrong with prioritizing the balance of his accounts over the health and future of his community, a place he hopes his daughter will one day be able to return to and find opportunity.
He has also spent over a decade volunteering to build and maintain public trails on public land. In that work, he has encountered more than his share of private landowners who believe their property rights somehow extend past their property lines, that a personal preference for quiet, or an unchanged view, should outweigh the enormous public benefit that well-designed trail infrastructure creates, to say nothing of the meaningful appreciation it adds to surrounding property values. He finds the same impulse at work in the opposition to the HEW project: the conviction that private preference should trump public good, and that minor personal inconvenience justifies blocking something the broader community plainly needs. After more than a decade of watching that argument deployed against trails, he finds it no less tiresome when it is deployed against housing.