Low-income housing complex planned for Elk Grove neighborhood. Residents are fighting it
They’ve swarmed social media, called on their councilman and on Tuesday flooded a hastily called city forum. Residents of a west Elk Grove community are demanding to know why a housing development for homeless and low-income tenants could soon be built in their neighborhood.
More than 170 residents signed on Tuesday to the special forum on the Elk Grove Apartments project proposed for a 3-acre vacant plot at Maritime and Harbour Point drives in the city’s Lakeside area, armed with nearly as many questions about the project. Among them: How would the apartments affect safety in a Lakeside community of nearly 1,700 homes with a preschool across the street from the proposed site?
City leaders and staffers heard from Lakeside residents ahead of the session concerned about what the proposed project might mean for their neighborhood. The proposal has also been a hot topic among local Nextdoor groups and other online neighborhood forums in recent days.
So many joined the virtual session that only written questions and comments were allowed. One read: “There is plenty of land off of Grant Line (Road) that can be developed for affordable housing. This neighborhood is for our families not for homeless affordable housing.”
“We realize there’s been a lot of anxiety and concern,” said Elk Grove Councilman Darren Suen, who represents west Elk Grove neighborhoods and led the forum. “That’s understandable. This is one of the first (projects) of its kind in the city.”
Elk Grove has opened transitional housing in the past to help get the city’s homeless under a roof but the proposed Elk Grove Apartments will be the city’s first single-site project.
Sarah Bontrager, the city’s housing and public services manager, stressed that the Elk Grove Apartments project is designed to serve as long-term housing, and will not be transitional housing or a shelter. The idea, she said, “combines housing, health care and supportive services to help the formerly homeless lead more stable lives.”
The $31 million, three-story, 50-unit project would be open only to households earning 80% or less of area median income. In Sacramento County, the median income is $91,100 for a four-person household and $63,750 for a one to two-person household.
The majority of the tenants who would reside in the complex’s studio and one-bedroom apartments are expected to be single residents and couples, Elk Grove senior planner Sarah Kirchgessner said.
The proposal includes 33 units reserved for people who are homeless. Sixteen units would be dedicated to those eligible for general affordable housing. A manager would live on site, Kirchgessner said.
The apartment proposal is still in its early stages and must go through either a city zoning administrator, planning officials or the Elk Grove City Council for approvals, Darren Wilson, the city’s development services director, said before the forum. Much of the project’s cost will be covered by tax credit financing, said city officials.
Elk Grove has 18 affordable apartment communities with nearly 2,300 units, according to city officials. At least two of the communities have agreements with the city to take on tenants who were formerly homeless, Suen said.
The project application by affordable housing developer Eden Housing is still under city design review, officials said.
Eden Housing plans a “robust set of services,” Bontrager said. That includes case management, employment training, drug and alcohol counseling and help to connect the building’s residents to other resources. The project would be Eden’s first in the city, but the developer has more than 100 affordable housing projects across the state.
The apartments’ eligibility criteria encouraged Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. To have more than 50% of units reserved for homeless tenants “is really pretty high,” he said.
But Erlenbusch also worries that more people at the top end of the income eligibility scale will get into the building’s general affordable housing units ahead of other applicants with steeper financial challenges and that deeper rent subsidies will be needed to help counter the Sacramento area’s high median income level.
“They’re on the right track,” Erlenbusch said of the proposed project. “But they need to find sources to deeply subsidize these units.”
It’s but the latest proposal to address Elk Grove’s affordable housing gap, a priority of Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen’s in her first months on the job and a deepening crisis felt in cities across the Sacramento region. The city is also funding an additional couple of projects and has active requests for project proposals on its desk, Bontrager said.
“All cities across the region are playing catch-up” to provide more low-income units, Bontrager said.
The city’s affordable housing gap has been years in the making. The State of California and SACOG, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, projected in 2013 that Elk Grove would need to add 3,000 low-income units to its inventory by 2021, but the city had added less than 10% of that number, the mayor told residents in March.
“Banks simply aren’t willing to finance affordable housing projects because the rents charged are too low to support loan payments, so developers have to find other funding sources,” Singh-Allen said in her March State of the City address. “There simply isn’t enough local or statewide subsidies to construct what we need, while the need for affordable housing units has never been greater.”
Little in the city illustrates that need more than the recently opened The Gardens at Quail Run complex several miles to the southeast of Lakeside on Bruceville Road.
Demand for Quail Run’s 96 units was so intense that the city held a lottery for prospective tenants.
The city received more than 28,000 entries for the nearly 100 units.
“There’s an incredible amount of need,” Bontrager said.
This story was originally published May 26, 2021 at 11:04 AM.
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