The Sacramento region has approved too much sprawl already; a reckoning is here | Opinion
The politics of the Sacramento region have long been fueled by its expansion, with land speculators, developers, builders and trade unions funding political campaigns. But the extraordinary power of this political bloc needs to be checked before they cost the region hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding and blow up Sacramento’s climate goals.
Cities and counties throughout the six-county region have approved, or are considering, about eight times what is needed by 2035 for new housing in “greenfields,” the industry term for community expansion onto undeveloped land.
With state mandates to lower vehicle travel and greenhouse emissions, regional transportation planners say most future growth must happen within the existing footprints, not on lands the wealthy expansion industry owns.
All those elected officials who have said yes to these projects over the years, need to learn a new word: No.
Call it sprawl. Call it greenfield development. “The challenge is an oversupply,” said James Corless, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments.
SACOG is tasked with developing a new 25-year housing plan that lowers emissions in Sacramento’s six-county region. A key SACOG committee gets important new information on the region’s future housing demand today.
To fulfill this goal may mean that most of the new growth envisioned by the development community should not happen any time soon, if ever.
“That’s not all going to come into the (housing) plan,” Corless recently told a roomful of his elected board members, environmentalists, and heavyweights in the region’s development communities. “It just can’t.”
Corless’ words mean the math of sound regional planning is on a collision course with politics as usual for city councils and boards of supervisors throughout the region. Many of the building projects coveted within Sacramento’s community of developers and builders will make emissions worse rather than better. There is no getting around the math. Something has to give.
The math begins with this statistical fact from SACOG: Every man, woman and child in this region travels in some vehicle about 18 miles per day, with longer drives happening outside the Sacramento urban core.
Under pioneering legislation in 2008 by then-Senator Darrell Steinberg, all urban regions of the state are under different mandates to lower their greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. SACOG’s target is an ambitious 19 percent reduction by then compared to 2005 levels.
The primary solution for achieving these goals is the political approval of new housing closer to jobs and shopping. They will reduce driving on average. New housing in far-flung “greenfields” will do the opposite.
But here is where the math gets hard. For every one new housing unit by a greenfield developer beyond the edge of town, SACOG planners says we will need two new housing projects somewhere inside existing communities.
Elected officials have been so prolific at approving or planning new developments, there are about 400,000 units of greenfield dwellings that have yet to be built, according to SACOG estimates. That is an astonishing figure. SACOG also estimates that perhaps an eighth of these units, something in the 50,000 range, can be built in some 2035 plan that also lowers emissions by 19 percent. This means saying yes rather than no seven times out of eight.
Among those struggling with this new reality is Sacramento County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy.
“We’re hearing from industry folks and others that the numbers (of needed new housing) that we’re assuming at SACOG are far lower than what they’re assuming will be built,” he said. “As for growing twice as much inward than outward, Kennedy said, “I want to just be cautionary that we don’t do…utopian planning, so that we plan something that’s never going to happen.”
Yet here is how Kennedy’s own math would make matters even worse. Even if demand for greenfield housing proves greater, building more of it via sprawl only makes it less possible to reduce average daily driving in the region. That wouldn’t be utopian planning. That would be disaster planning.
Sacramento County in particular is in the crosshairs. County Planning Director Todd Smith wants SACOG to add 2,745 housing units northeast of Rancho Cordova known as Cordova Hills to their 2035 plan. From a climate change perspective, a new SACOG analysis shows that Cordova Hills is the worst project in the county. An average Cordova Hills resident in 2035 would drive 157 percent more than the average person in the region. Yet that is what Sacramento planners now want.
Former SACOG executive director Marty Tuttle, now a developer himself, knows the political pressure the planners and its board is up against. “There is a lot of money, a lot of lobbying resources, that go into any (greenfield) project,” he said. “You’re going to grab at anything you can to make a case.”
Sacramento County could lose a half a billion dollars in future state transportation assistance if they keep saying yes to development beyond existing communities. They could also be dumped from office by voters.
“I don’t want to be the first region (in California) that loses out on the half a billion,” Corless said.
SACOG’s 32-member board must say no by June. That is when staff will need a preliminary housing strategy that identifies how much new greenfield development should happen and where as well as how much the same communities plan to build new housing within their existing boundaries.
As June approaches, “that level of anxiety is only going to grow,” Yolo County Supervisor Oscar Villegas told his fellow board members.
The coming months mark a historic turning point in regional planning, for better or worse. Stay tuned.
This story was originally published March 7, 2024 at 5:00 AM.