Elk Grove had a record housing year. Is it a champion or still damaged by past?
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- Elk Grove opened 770 affordable units in 2025, a record for the city.
- That came after it was sued by the California Attorney General.
- City officials argue they were made an example unfairly.
Sarah Bontrager, Elk Grove’s housing manager, was walking through one of the city’s sparkling new developments in October, when she rattled off a series of numbers.
Hundreds of new affordable apartments were opening in the city in 2025. Hundreds more were under construction, ready to break ground soon, or were in the works.
“We know this community needs affordable housing, and we are actively working to make sure that there is a pipeline of projects so that we can keep building,” Bontrager said.
Last year was a record-setter for Elk Grove, just south of Sacramento. It opened 770 affordable housing units, the most since it became a city in 2000.
That may sound surprising to close observers of state housing laws. In 2023, the California Attorney General’s Office sued Elk Grove after city leaders denied a development meant for people with disabilities and at risk of homelessness.
At the time, Attorney General Rob Bonta said Elk Grove, home to 178,000 people, had “chosen to stifle affordable housing projects, discriminate against lower income families and knowingly violate state housing law.” Filing the lawsuit put the city’s name on a Wall of Shame with other communities across the state.
The case eventually settled, and Elk Grove agreed to allow an apartment complex with more units than originally planned, although in a different location. In September, the Attorney General’s Office celebrated its case against the city by publishing a 13-minute video online. In it, Bonta grouped Elk Grove with other communities with battered housing reputations.
So is the city an affordable housing renegade or champion?
Elk Grove officials say the latter. They argue the state’s top law enforcement agency made an unfair example of a community trying to do the right thing.
“The AG’s office took a view of one project and really dialed into that one project, while at the same time the city was working on all of these 700 units that just opened,” Bontrager said. “At times it felt like there was not recognition of all the progress that Elk Grove has made in building affordable housing. There was a laser focus on one project.”
‘A bit more nuanced’
That one project, called Oak Rose Apartments, was a 67-unit development meant for people with disabilities and at risk of homelessness. It was planned for Old Town Elk Grove, an historic stretch of the city that features shops and restaurants in buildings from the 1800s.
When Excelerate Housing Group submitted an application for the project, it did so under a state law known as Senate Bill 35. It aims to make it easier for developers to have affordable housing projects approved in communities that had not met state-required home building goals.
Elk Grove did not hit state benchmarks for low income housing, so the law applied to the project.
But the city’s planning commission in June 2022 denied streamlining approval of the development under the law, saying the project did not meet certain standards for the Old Town area because it would have apartments on the ground floor.
Residents at the meeting raised fears that the development wasn’t right for the area, compromised resident safety and many other concerns. The following month, more opponents showed up, and the City Council also rejected fast-tracking the development under SB 35.
Around that time, Elk Grove resident Nicole Restmeyer alerted the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
“I remember at the time being frustrated because I knew they were going to get sued if they denied this project,” Restmeyer said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee. To her, it was clear that city officials were not treating the Oak Rose project right. She is a director at Sacramento Housing Alliance, which pushes for affordable housing in the region, and a staff member of the Assembly housing committee.
Bonta would later give her a shoutout when announcing the lawsuit against the city, and she is also featured in the Attorney General’s Office video.
While wishing Elk Grove officials would prioritize more housing in the center of the city, Restmeyer recognizes that the community is moving forward with a lot of affordable developments.
So where does she stand on Elk Grove’s reputation?
“It’s not like an easy one way or the other narrative to paint,” Restmeyer said, “it’s a bit more nuanced.”
‘Double standard’
A key argument in the lawsuit from the Attorney General’s Office was that Elk Grove leaders treated the Oak Rose project differently from another development.
In May 2022, the planning commission approved a Railroad Courtyards project in the Old Town area that also had ground-floor residential units, according to the attorney general’s lawsuit. There was a major difference in the two projects: This one wasn’t an affordable housing development.
In a letter to the city, the state housing department said Elk Grove officials were applying a “double standard” and were in violation of housing laws.
The city, in a response letter, said it understood the “apparent disparity” but that it was not a discriminatory decision because the Railroad Courtyards project was approved under a review process that was different from the one used for the Oak Rose development.
That didn’t sway the Attorney General’s Office, which filed its lawsuit in May 2023 that suggested the decision to reject the Oak Rose project was because of the people who would be living there, not because it planned to include apartments on the ground floor.
The attorney general’s Housing Strike Force, which Bonta started in 2021, has sued and warned other communities including Fresno County, Huntington Beach and Woodside over housing issues.
“Whatever city you are, you have a duty and an obligation to follow the law of the state of California,” Bonta said in a news conference after the settlement with Elk Grove was announced in 2024. “If cities try to skirt them, try to avoid building the housing we need, try to illegally deny housing proposals, discriminate against communities as Elk Grove did, the DOJ will hold them accountable,” he added, referring to the California Department of Justice.
Excelerate Housing Group filed its own lawsuit against the city in 2022 arguing Elk Grove had shown a pattern of opposing and rejecting more affordable housing developments that include services for people struggling with homelessness. Elk Grove denied that allegation in a legal filing.
Developers with recent projects in the city painted a positive picture of their experience and Elk Grove’s record on affordable housing.
Mike Kelley said he believes it has done more than any other similarly-sized community in the state.
“The fact they got sued for affordable housing is absolutely ridiculous,” Kelley said, as he stood near the front of Lyla Apartments, a complex of almost 300 homes he developed. It was one of several projects he has worked on in Elk Grove. “The city’s super, duper proactive in deploying their funds and producing housing.”
The Lyla project was approved in October 2022, just a few months after the Oak Rose development was denied. It received a $6 million loan from the city and opened last year.
A few miles south along a busy road is MOSA apartments, a row of buildings with almost 390 total units, the largest affordable housing development in the city. Elk Grove officials approved it in May 2022, and it opened last year.
Reese Jarrett, a co-developer, said the city was an attractive place to build because of the employers, schools and other resources in the area.
“They were very eager to see the affordable housing be developed there,” Jarrett said of Elk Grove officials. It was his first time working on a project in the city.
“We had no resistance from the city.”
‘Moving forward’
When asked if she felt the Attorney General’s Office unfairly targeted the city, Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen in an interview last year replied: “Absolutely.”
Singh-Allen, who was mayor when the Oak Rose development came before the City Council in 2022, said the agency’s lawsuit was the result of misguided but well-intentioned state housing laws.
“It was an unfair characterization, but we’re moving forward.”
In an email, the mayor also said she did not believe the lawsuit resulted in the development of any new projects in Elk Grove. The city has more than 3,100 units of affordable housing. Another 140 are currently under construction and expected to be completed this year.
Bonta, in an emailed statement, said Elk Grove officials were warned multiple times that the denial of the Oak Rose project was unlawful.
“While we ultimately reached a settlement that held Elk Grove’s leaders accountable,” he said, “it was entirely avoidable.”
As part of that settlement, the city agreed to pay the California Department of Justice $150,000, undergo five years of monitoring by the state housing agency and to identify a new site for lower income housing that was not currently zoned for it.
It also settled with Excelerate Housing Group, ultimately paying more than $2 million in damages, the developer’s legal fees and other costs. The city purchased the lot where the Oak Rose project was planned as part of the agreement, and gave ownership of another vacant lot, about three miles away, to the developer.
Excelerate Housing Group is planning a new project there which will also be affordable housing, and other support, for people experiencing homelessness. It is called Coral Blossom Apartments and will have 81 units. Elk Grove also agreed to provide a $5 million grant for the development.
Karen Hallock, an attorney who represented Excelerate Housing Group in its lawsuit, said the developer’s relationship with Elk Grove took a 180-degree turn since the settlement.
“There’s more work to be done to open and get those units online, but so far we’ve been able to work together and collaboratively,” Hallock said.
Construction is expected to begin in a few months.
Matthew Struhar, a deputy attorney general who worked on the case, said the relocation of the apartment complex, in and of itself, was not a victory.
“The developer should be building this project now, at the original site, in Old Town Elk Grove,” he said in the Attorney General’s Office video about the case. Not only will the Coral Blossom development have more units than the Oak Rose project, he said, but they will also be larger than they would have been at the previous site.
“That aspect of it, the fact that more housing, more supportive affordable housing will be coming to Elk Grove, as a result of that settlement with the developer,” he said. “I do think our office had a lot to do with that.”
