Sacramento has a plan to address its housing crisis. Some neighborhoods are fighting it
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Maggie Coulter moved to Sacramento for a state job in 1981 and immediately knew she didn’t want to live in midtown or downtown. But she also didn’t want to move out to the suburbs.
“I knew I did not want to commute, but I also knew I didn’t want to live in the urban intensity of midtown, which then was much less so than it is now,” Coulter said.
She instead found the Elmhurst neighborhood was the perfect place to buy a home. The neighborhood, known for its long grassy parkway along T Street, features majestic oak and elm trees and century-old homes. Many neighbors know one another and wave hello. It’s about a 10-minute drive to downtown, but as Coulter works in her garden, all that hustle and bustle feels a world away.
When Coulter, now president of the Elmhurst Neighborhood Association, heard of a city proposal to allow multi-family housing to be built anywhere in the city, she had a terrifying thought: Elmhurst would soon turn into midtown.
“My first thought was, ‘This is the end of single-family neighborhoods,’” Coulter said.
Sacramento is in a seemingly untenable housing crisis, and city officials have proposed a change to the zoning code to encourage more housing by allowing duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes to be built in neighborhoods currently zoned for single-family homes. The change would improve equity, city leaders say, by providing housing for low- and moderate-income families in neighborhoods with nice parks, high-performing schools and other amenities.
But the proposal has sparked a conflict that has galvanized some of the city’s wealthiest – and most influential – neighborhoods behind a common cause, pitting those communities against affordable housing advocates and some members of the City Council.
“If we wanted to live among apartments and high rises, we would move to midtown. We would move to San Francisco,” said Mitch Rohrer, president of the Land Park Community Association.
Their fear is that investors will tear down single-family homes and replace them with poorly-maintained rental properties, charging high rents to Bay Area transplants to turn a big profit. They’ve seen it happen in midtown, where historic homes were torn down and replaced by large apartment complexes — big plain concrete slabs butting up against the sidewalk, controlled by property management companies.
East Sacramento Improvement Association president Tricia Stevens said that group also has concerns about the impact on their neighborhood, known for its affluent Fabulous 40s neighborhood, a wealthy enclave with some of the largest lots in the city and the former home of the governor’s mansion.
Despite those fears, even if the City Council approves the change in a year, the housing allowed in the neighborhoods would be vastly different than what’s permitted in the central city, said Matt Hertel, the city’s acting long range planning manager. Buildings would still have their current height restrictions. There would also be historical protections, limits on how much of a lot size a house could take up and on the amount of square footage.
For that reason, neighborhood streets would look essentially the same.
“Some of these larger homes can easily have a few more units,” Hertel said. “The size of the buildings isn’t going to change, you’d just have a few more neighbors.”
Not in my backyard?
City Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela, a midtown renter who represents the central city and Land Park, suspects NIMBYism could be fueling the push back from some homeowners, although not all of them.
“It is a conversation that’s wedded with subtext that’s not always expressed out loud,” Valenzuela said.
“There are some individuals who I think are worried about renters coming in,” Valenzuela said, standing on a path of grass Thursday between the edge of the 207-acre Land Park and a row of charming single-family homes on West Land Park Drive. “I have to say those are unfounded ... I think apartment dwellers love their community just like anybody else and can be great additions to a neighborhood if given the opportunity.”
Coulter, who worked to create affordable housing across the state as a former employee of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, vehemently opposes the NIMBY title. So does Rohrer.
“I’m sick and tired of the NIMBY acronym. That’s not what we’re doing,” Rohrer said. “We all worked hard to build and work our way up.”
The Land Park association also supported a plan to add 500 public housing units to Alder Grove and Marina Vista, and a new six-story affordable housing development at Broadway and 19th Street. Both are near the northern border of the neighborhood. The association is submitting an alternate plan to the city that would increase density in some parts of the neighborhood, along commercial corridors and near light rail stations, Rohrer said. The East Sacramento association also plans to submit an alternate proposal, Stevens said.
Affordable housing equity
Neighborhoods such as Meadowview, Oak Park and Del Paso Heights also have many residential streets zoned for single-family housing, with duplexes allowed on corner lots only. But historically, there were barriers for families of color to rent or buy homes in places like East Sacramento and Land Park.
Although government-sponsored redlining was banned in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, exclusionary housing practices have continued in other ways, such as local zoning codes, according to a report by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments.
“Having more housing options in general anywhere in the city is important for upward mobility,” said Councilman Eric Guerra, who rented an apartment in the city before buying a house in Tahoe Park. “No one here is talking about eliminating single-family zoning.”
In response to claims that the proposal would help improve equity in the city, Rohrer said William Land Regional Park is already open to the public. In addition, Sacramento City Unified School District schools, including those in Land Park, are open to students who live outside the area through open enrollment, he said.
“The demographic of our high school has changed completely,” Rohrer said, referring to C.K. McClatchy High School.
But not all students who apply to go to school outside their neighborhoods are accepted. Of the 104 students from another school in the district who applied for an open enrollment spot at McClatchy in the 2018-19 school year, just nine were approved.
The missing middle
Proponents of the proposal say it would help alleviate the city’s housing crisis.
But the proposal would likely not give low-income families the chance to move to places like Elmhurst because the new units would likely be priced at market rate, Coulter said. A two-bedroom unit in a duplex on a corner lot in Elmhurst is currently listed for rent for $2,400 a month on Zillow. In East Sacramento, six houses are listed for rent for $3,000 or more.
That was one of the main concerns for the East Sacramento association’s board, Stevens said.
“There’s concerns it may lead to more luxury town homes,” Stevens said. “We need to look at other cities that have gone in this direction to see whether or not it really provides more affordable housing.”
The proposal currently does not require the units to cost below the market rate, Hertel said. Even without price caps, Hertel said the plan would create more housing for the so-called “missing middle” – people who are not in the lowest income bracket, but also don’t have the annual income of $87,000 needed to afford a median-priced home in the city.
The change could also help address displacement when the roughly 3,500 to 5,000 new employees are hired for the UC Davis Aggie Square development near the medical center, said Ansel Lundberg, co-chair of House Sacramento, which uses the Twitter handle “SacYIMBY.” Aggie Square is set to open near Oak Park in 2023 or 2024 – around the same time the zoning changes, if approved, would go into effect.
“Yes, growth is going be seen if you have more jobs, in some of the gentrifying areas like Oak Park,” Lundberg said. “We can mitigate that by (adding housing) to areas that have more light rail, like Elmhurst and East Sac.”
How it worked in Portland, Minneapolis
The cities of Portland and Minneapolis have adopted similar policies to eliminate single-family zoning. In 2019, the state of Oregon passed a law allowing multi-unit housing in areas where it was previously banned. Last year, lawmakers introduced a bill in the California legislature that would take a similar action, but it died.
If Sacramento passes the measure, it could be one of the first cities in California to do so, Hertel said.
Minneapolis’ ordinance, adopted in 2019, allows duplexes and triplexes but not four-plexes — a version that would be more palatable to the Sacramento groups raising concerns. The city does not yet have data on how many new units have been created, but a city spokeswoman said many more property owners have requested permits for duplexes than triplexes.
In Portland, which adopted a similar change in August, local officials estimate there could be another 5,000 residential units built because of the change in the next 20 years. That’s significant for a city with a population of about 650,000, not much larger than Sacramento’s 508,000.
While Sacramento does not yet have a similar estimate, Hertel expects it to be much lower — far fewer than 700 new units by 2029 as a result of the proposed zoning change.
To arrive at that conclusion, Hertel looks to how many city property owners took advantage of a new ability to build accessory dwelling units, also called granny flats, in backyards. Last year, out of the city’s roughly 149,000 residential properties, 77 sought permits to build ADUs.
The city expects a total of 700 new ADUs to be built in the city between 2021 and 2029, Hertel said.
“It’s the easiest type of housing to do,” Hertel said of the ADUs. “Tearing down an existing single unit home and building a four-plex is super expensive to do ... I’m just not sure how often it would happen”
To Coulter, it’s not worth the risk to find out. In fact, she’s already seeing it happen. The owner of a home on a corner lot at 55th and T streets has submitted an application with the city to tear down a single-family home and build a duplex.
When could the change happen?
The proposed zoning change is part of a wide-ranging city planning document called the 2040 General Plan.
City staff plans to bring the concept to the City Council for a discussion Jan. 19 and seek the council’s blessing to move forward. If that happens, staff will create the proposal and the details, then bring it back to the council for a vote as part of the full plan in about a year, Hertel said.
If all goes as expected, Hertel said homeowners on affected lots could start opening new units in their homes in about two years.
The City Council is expected to sign off on the idea. In addition to Guerra and Valenzuela, it is also supported by Mayor Darrell Steinberg.
“There is nothing in our general plan proposal that would limit single-family housing,” Steinberg said in a statement. “The proposed plan would simply increase the opportunity to build more different types of housing and more density. We have a housing crisis and a housing shortage that can only be addressed by building more housing.”
This story was originally published January 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
