The Dry Creek Valley Association and surrounding Sonoma County community members oppose the intrusion of a non-agricultural business in lands zoned for Land Intensive Agriculture (LIA) as designated in the Sonoma County General Plan. The General Plan specifies that the primary activity conducted in LIA Zoning is agricultural and all agricultural businesses must be ancillary to agriculture on the property. The Pacaso business model (buying up homes in LIA zoning, inflating residential housing costs and selling the homes essentially as time shares) is in violation of the County's General Plan and land use policy.

Pacaso was founded in 2020 by Zillow co-founder and former CEO of dotloop, Austin Alison.  According to Forbes.com, "The company specializes in subdividing vacation homes among multiple owners in most cases buying them up front and managing their use.  The startup says it has also secured $1 billion in debt financing." With its deep pockets and slick marketing, Pacaso thinks it can do business in any community and ignore regulations pertaining to time-shares, vacation rentals, and transient occupancy.  Their position seems to be that because a vacation home is owned by an LLC, rather than being rented, none of these regulations apply.

LIA zoning codes are strict when it comes to businesses; the code permits only; Businesses related to agriculture and/or single family homes.   Pacaso has circumvented the permitting process by purchasing homes without obtaining any use permits compliant with LIA zoning.  We demand that Sonoma County and Pacaso abide by legal land use requirements as clearly specified in the County's General Plan and the LIA code provisions.  We ask the Board of Supervisors to place a moratorium on all "fractional ownership" commercial real estate businesses until they establish guidelines, restrictions and use permit processes required by the County General Plan and LIA zoning codes.