A Sacramento planning commissioner shows why young voices on city boards are vital | Opinion
As one of the youngest members of the Planning Commission, Oak Park resident Dov Kadin is representative of not only his community but also a generational shift within the city of Sacramento on housing policy.
“If you’re not trying to change the status quo, then you’re are locking disparities in amber,” Kadin told me at a coffee shop in Oak Park.
Kadin, along with the rest of the city’s Design and Planning Commission, are some of the most influential people in the city.
“(The Planning Commission) actually have the power and authority to make final land use decisions,” said councilmember Caity Maple, who appointed Kadin to the commission. “They can make the decision that doesn’t even involve the city council, so that means a lot of power and also a lot of responsibility.”
What’s different here is that Kadin’s sensibilities reflect the frustration that young people feel with how the city of Sacramento does housing.
The 33-year-old is originally from San Luis Obispo but moved to the Sacramento region in 2017 and began working as a Senior Planner at the Sacramento Area Council of Governments after he got his Masters in city planning from UC Berkeley.
At 31, Maple is the youngest member of the Sacramento City Council. Fittingly, Maple said she discovered Kadin on X (formerly Twitter), and was impressed by his knowledge of the city’s housing issues. Kadin said he first met the councilwoman while she was canvassing the neighborhood prior to her election, and they immediately clicked on policy.
“We’re both very much of the mindset that Sacramento is a great place,” Kadin said. “We need to be willing to right past wrongs, to open up our community to people of all income levels.”
The ‘Missing Middle’
The Planning Commission’s latest project is for the city to amend decades-old zoning laws to encourage “Missing Middle Housing” development. Think duplexes, triplexes, cottage courts or small-courtyard buildings. They’re needed because cities like Sacramento were, for too long, addicted to single-family homes that priced young and poor people out of the market and exacerbated a housing shortage across California.
On average, the study found, that about 81% of residential land is restricted to single-family homes only, while only 10% of total land is available for multi-family developments. “Zoning ordinances throughout the Sacramento region are exceptionally hostile to density,” researchers wrote.
To meet housing targets assigned by the state, Sacramento needs to produce 45,580 housing units by 2029, at an average of 5,700 units for the next six years. Yet, for the past decade, only about 2,000 new units have been produced annually in the region.
In Sacramento, a major obstacle for years has been that the city has restricted the number of units that could be built on a single lot. For the last two years at least, the city has tried to remove barriers to building needed duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes that people can afford. The city is moving to formalize its own General Plan so that this type of housing can be built more quickly, and a city council vote on the issue is expected in February.
When city staff came in October with a recommendation to reinstate the unit cap, the city council balked at the idea of holding to a status quo for housing that clearly hasn’t worked.
Of course, more housing doesn’t necessarily equate to cheaper housing, but quickly getting a mass amount of more units onto the market will help every level of the state’s housing crisis.
“Absolutely, there is a subset of households that are at a certain income level that will never be able to afford market-rate rents, and we need to provide subsidies for them,” Kadin said. “But we absolutely have to dig ourselves out of the shortage of private units.”
Stopping neighborhood segregation
Sacramento also needs to be thoughtful about exactly where these units go in the city. The amount of land currently locked up by zoning regulations is directly linked to the racial makeup of the community — it’s modern-day redlining for communities that can’t afford single-family homes. (Redlining, famously the practice of labeling typically low-income and diverse neighborhoods as hazardous to investment; and thereby excluding them from development.) The city’s report on where the Missing Middle housing could go is also rife with potentially exclusionary practices. can we spell some of them out?
Consistent with advocates’ advice, the city marked prioritization for middle housing in areas of high opportunity, with multiple options for transportation (including access to mass transit such as light rail), in neighborhoods near employment centers, and labeled parts of the city according to those amenities, with “transitional” neighborhoods less suitable than a neighborhood deemed “compact and connected.”
“What makes Elmhurst or East Sacramento ‘transitional’ but Oak Park ‘compact (and) connected’?’ asked Kadin on X. “It’s not transit (the former has light rail and decent bus service). It’s not lot size or access to jobs. It’s that those neighborhoods have managed to exclude multifamily (development) historically.”
It’s questions like these that help keep a city on alert against too-long-tolerated discrimination. Kadin will be present at an update the city is giving at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 28 about missing middle housing, the draft 2040 General Plan, and the city’s draft climate action and adaption plan. I highly suggest you be there too, to ask questions of city officials. and figure out how they plan to implement these plans. Public comment is a powerful tool to hold the elected to account. Don’t let the opportunity slip by.
