Speculators have a stranglehold on Sacramento regional planning, but it’s suicide | Opinion
Too many politicians in the Sacramento region are addicted to approving development projects that may never happen because they can’t say no to big campaign contributors.
As a case in point to this political reality, our six-county regional transportation and housing agency is on the verge of adopting a 25-year housing strategy that borders on fiction because it tries to make too many developers happy over more important considerations.
By law, our local elected leaders are supposed to prioritize environmentally friendly housing projects through an achievable strategy based on reducing emissions on the regional roadway system. Reducing emissions will reduce pollution and lessen the effects of climate change.
The Sacramento Area Council of Governments is tasked with achieving this mission, but the problem is that many board members are elected officials who are having trouble saying no to developers/speculators and leaving them out of the region’s official housing strategy.
Last week, SACOG Executive Director James Corless was uncharacteristically blunt at how politics is screwing up planning. “You all have had a very difficult time - am I wrong? - making priority decisions on growth areas,” Corless said. “This is why everybody wants to be in the plan. But not everybody can be in the plan.”
Why this matters to the voting public is simple: We don’t want human greed paralyzing our regional planning. Our region can’t afford to lose millions in transportation dollars if our 25-year housing plan doesn’t pass muster.
Legislators are already onto the kind of games that local communities play with planning. A bill that is making its way through the Legislature would allow state regulators to reject regional housing strategies like the one being contemplated by SACOG that are unlikely to be implemented. Assembly Bill 6 by Laura Friedman, D-Glendale, has a key hearing today. This portion of the bill in particular is crucial for passage to ensure integrity in regional growth plans.
Sacramento’s growth planning is a mess despite it being obvious what the region needs to do.
SACOG is seeking to steer two-thirds of the growth inside existing communities and transit corridors. That leaves only so many new housing units for expansion, aka sprawl. A sensible plan would focus new growth solely on the most logically located greenfield projects with the most jobs that require the least amount of driving and say no to the rest. In Sacramento County, that would mean focusing development along the Jackson Highway and discouraging sprawl-inducing development along Grant Line Road, where a four-lane expressway should never be built because it encourages growth that requires too much driving and thus too much emissions.
Some elected leaders are having a hard time embracing the need to grow more inward than outward, despite the challenges. Before he left the SACOG board, county supervisor Patrick Kennedy took a swipe at calls to build more inside communities, calling that “Utopian planning.”
Kennedy’s comments are beyond ironic given that SACOG is on the verge of adopting a Utopian plan that tries to make a lot of land speculators happy when it’s simply not possible. A glut of planned regional projects will make many of them harder to actually get financing from nervous investors.
Out of 48 major development proposals in the region, SACOG’s draft housing plan assumes that only nine would be completed by 2050, the rest taking decades longer. This draft plan was devised by staff and intended to promote board discussion and refinement. With the board unable to agree on anything else, there may only be votes to approve a draft that inevitably is flawed.
How flawed?
Rare is the local meeting when a leading developer and the leading environmental advocacy group agree on growth. They both are telling the SACOG board that its draft housing plan assumes an unrealistic pattern of growth.
“It doesn’t represent how the region will actually grow between now and 2050,” said Susan Herre, president of the Environmental Council of Sacramento.
Clifton Taylor, a Roseville-based home builder, agrees.
The proposed housing plan “is not a failure of the SACOG team,” Taylor said. “That is a failure of local politics, treating all projects as viable.“
Some Taylor projects provide an example of the problem. To sprinkle some housing construction among projects by many speculators, SACOG is assuming a slow buildout of two Taylor projects, Placer One in Placer County and Delta Shores in Sacramento.
But that is not what is happening.
SACOG’s mythical plan assumes the construction of only 750 single-family homes at Placer One in the next 11 years. That’s just not true. “We have agreements in place with home builders to deliver 1,750 lots over the next three years,” Taylor wrote to SACOG. At Delta Shores in southern Sacramento, SACOG is assuming that most development will happen between 2035 and 2050. That’s not true either. “Our current projection is the delivery of the last single-family lots at Delta Shores in 2028,” Taylor wrote.
A “significant amount” of proposed developments “are not viable and may never be,” Taylor told the SACOG board last Thursday. In response, not a single board member had anything to say.
SACOG set itself a target for the board to tentatively agree on a new 25-year Sustainable Communities Strategy at its June 20 meeting. This is a leadership moment in particular for the Sacramento County supervisor representatives on the board.
Is it a Utopian world to think that elected officials can say no to the speculators and developers who helped get them elected in order to do the right thing?
This story was originally published June 11, 2024 at 5:00 AM.