How Gov. Newsom can use his budget to promote sustainable development, economic growth

The Sacramento region has a unique opportunity to meet the housing demand in our diverse rural, suburban and urban region. We need more housing and better connectivity, while reducing our contribution to climate change.

Fortunately, there is a solution that will spur economic development, if state leaders will support it.

Our organizations, the Sacramento Metropolitan and Sacramento Asian Pacific Islander chambers of commerce, are requesting that the Governor’s Budget include, and the state legislature vote to support, $100 million a year for four years to fund an innovative pilot program called “Green Means Go.”

California and the Sacramento area are experiencing a housing crisis. Our region needs to build at least 11,000 new housing units per year to meet demand for the next 20 years. But the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), which created “Green Means Go,” forecasts the region will build just 6,500 units in 2020. This gap of 4,500 units annually means we won’t meet the housing needs of market impacted by an incoming tide of Bay Area transplants and growing homeless community.

Where we build is just as important as how much we build. The further homes are from jobs and amenities, the more people must travel to get to them. Longer distances decrease economic productivity, worsen our air quality, and increase fossil fuel consumption that contributes to climate change. We also need to build in areas less susceptible to wildfire.

We can meet housing demand and make our region more liveable by developing in “green zones.” These are economic development corridors where building housing and businesses yields emission reductions by reducing driving. Examples of green zones identified by local governments include aging commercial corridors such as Stockton and Del Paso Boulevards.

But many of these corridors lack critical infrastructure such as enhanced sewage or water capacity to accommodate housing. Expanding infrastructure is usually too expensive for local housing builders. Instead, local agencies can partner with the state to provide seed funding for these investments.

This is not just about making the urban core denser. In cities like Rancho Cordova and Marysville there are many potential building sites along the commercial corridors of Folsom Boulevard or 5th Street that could host denser development instead of sitting vacant or being under-utilized. And rural communities such as Winters and Isleton have stocks of older buildings with great potential to convert to housing but face challenges such as seismic retrofitting costs.

Supporting the revival of commercial corridors for housing and small businesses is a priority our chambers of commerce for several reasons:

• They are the small business hearts of our communities.
• Small businesses make up 99 percent of California’s roughly 4 million businesses according to the Small Business Administration.
• In 2016, 36 percent of job growth in our region came directly from the successful launch and growth of small business, according to Sacramento Business Journal.
• They are where growth occurs, providing an environment to grow small employers into thriving mid and large-scale employers.
• Revitalizing these areas with innovative housing and making them walkable and bikeable makes them environments desirable to workers.

We urge state legislators to fund SACOG’s Green Means Go pilot program in the fiscal year 2020-21 budget. This four-year initiative will accelerate infill development, transportation options, and electrification of passenger vehicle trips. Our region can grow smartly while tackling the ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals the state has set for our region.

In the short term, Green Means Go will help our region identify how to best meet urgent housing and climate challenges. For the long term, this investment will build the foundation needed to support a changing economy and increasingly diverse population. The time has come to embrace these problems head on and Green Means Go provides the essential resources to do that.