Is Sacramento building enough homes to keep housing affordable? A city planner explains
Sacramento saw a mini-housing boom in 2025 — though it still left the city far behind its goals for building new housing.
Between 2024 and 2025, the number of building permits went up by almost 15%, with 2,737 units headed into the construction phase. But to stay on track for its state-imposed Regional Housing Needs Allocation, the city would have needed twice that amount: 5,698 units.
At the end of 2025, Sacramento was almost 30% of the way toward its cumulative goal, with three and a half years left in the eight-year plan.
“Is that normal? Are we OK?” said Greta Soos, a senior planner in the city’s Community Development Department. “It’s not abnormal.”
The California Department of Housing and Community Development sets general housing goals for a region, determining how many units at what affordability levels are necessary. Then, after regional governments decide how much of the responsibility falls on each municipality, local governments incorporate the goals into their own plans. Sacramento, as the largest city in the region, is supposed to build a substantial share of the housing stock.
To reach Sacramento’s housing needs goal, the city would have to add 45,580 new units by May 15, 2029. But though the city is lagging behind, California’s capital was the top housing producer in the state per capita from 2020-2024.
“At the end of the day, we live in a capitalist society, and a lot of our housing — actually, all of our housing — is produced by the private and nonprofit markets,” Soos said. “All we can do is try to build as much as we can. For us, that means, make it easy and make it cheaper, and provide more subsidies for affordable housing.”
Soos focuses on long-term planning and policy implementation to help spur development in the city. She helps evaluate progress as well as the efficacy of already-approved policies. This year, the city will likely institute a new policy allowing “tiny homes on wheels” to function as accessory dwelling units on private property. In 2024, the city passed a “missing middle” housing ordinance that made it easier to develop higher-density infill properties in neighborhoods of single family homes.
In March, Soos showed the City Council a bar chart that depicted how housing production cratered after the financial crisis in 2008. The city issued permits for 2,000 to 5,000 units each year in 2006, 2007 and 2008. In 2009, only 265 units received permits. The numbers remained low for the following five years, only beginning to climb back up in 2015.
“We are still feeling the effects of that,” Soos said. “We haven’t been producing enough housing to meet our demands. When you look at coming out of 2014, 2015, we definitely see a steady rebound.”
Then, she said, the COVID pandemic and the inflation that followed presented another problem.
“It slowed production a little bit,” she said, because developers saw that rents had gone down but the cost of interest and materials was going up.
No silver bullet for Sacramento housing policy
In 2025, the city was closest to meeting its annual goal for housing that is affordable to low-income people (a single person could make up to $72,050 and fall into this category).
In 2025, 739 units were permitted that would be affordable to low-income people; the city is supposed to have permitted 788 per year to meet its goal. Of those units, 436 were deed-restricted, meaning they were required to keep rents affordable to people who are considered low-income. The remaining units were expected to be affordable to that group but weren’t necessarily restricted from raising rents. Most of the non-deed-restricted units in this category, Soos said, were ADUs and studio apartments.
Some policies take time to have an effect. The missing middle ordinance has not yet driven development up, Soos said. Under the new ordinance, 19 projects were approved as of February, most of them duplexes. Once a project is denser than a duplex, she said, additional requirements under state code kick in, which complicate things.
“Development is complex,” Soos said. If the city government pulls any one lever, the odds are, it won’t unleash a tide of construction on its own. “We need to address the building code, we need to address condo defect liability, we need to…” she trailed off. There was a lot to be done..”
But the tiny homes on wheels, as well as revisions to parking requirements, citywide rezoning in 2027, limits on the ways landlords might weigh a person’s criminal record in rental applications, and new rules that would allow people to sell ADUs as condos – among other changes — might make a series of dents in the housing problem.
“It’s not an easy thing,” Soos said, “to develop housing.”
