Why approving a bad mega-project in Natomas won’t add to regional housing | Opinion
When Phil Pluckebaum was the lone Sacramento city councilmember to side against the city’s opposition to a 25,000-resident project in the unincorporated county in the city’s Natomas region, he said he did so because California needs more housing.
“We are vastly undersupplied for this particular type of product,” Pluckebaum said.
Sacramento County’s Board of Supervisors is expected to decide the fate of the project known as Upper Westside on Wednesday. It is surrounded by an objecting city on three sides. Based on the county staff’s sales pitch to county planning commissioners in June, Upper Westside’s biggest appeal is how it would provide more housing close to the downtown.
Yet the Sacramento region is stuck in a planning paradox on housing. While new housing projects are scarce in other parts of California, that is not the case here. If anything, the six-county Sacramento region has approved too many housing units that aren’t getting built for reasons ranging from lack of financing to a lack of consensus on priorities among regional leaders.
Enough housing for a century of demand
Regional planners anticipate that only a quarter of urban expansion projects planned or approved will be built in the next 25 years. The Upper Westside housing project is a manifestation of our region’s lack of leadership. And it is viewed by the city of Sacramento as a destructive development that could ruin smarter growth projects within the city’s existing footprint.
“We have enough approved projects to provide a century’s worth of demand,” said Mike McKeever, a former executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), the region’s transportation planner. “What we don’t have is enough economically viable approved projects.”
Upper Westside is so partially baked in its planning, it is remarkable that supervisors are actually considering it. The project, as two examples, has no secured water supply (it was banking on the city that opposes the project) and no funding agreement to help build hundreds of millions of dollars worth of needed schools.
The county’s urban march into Natomas is the dubious brainchild of the local supervisor, Phil Serna, a close friend and ally of the project developer. Six years ago, he recommended giving the green light for this project to move forward with planning. And so far, the other four supervisors have simply been going along.
SACOG cares about what housing projects actually get built. It must develop a sustainable housing strategy that meets new housing demands while lowering the region’s greenhouse gas emissions. So it meticulously tracks development in Sacramento’s six-county region.
The region has more than 412,000 approved and planned housing units in “developing communities” outside of existing urban footprints, according to SACOG. Of those, however, only 88,755 are expected to be constructed by 2050. The overwhelming majority of this new housing is expected to sit on some drawing board.
The glut is even more dramatic for unincorporated Sacramento County, which the supervisors control. There, the county has more than 100,000 housing units either approved or plan on undeveloped land. SACOG expects only 11,600 of these units to be constructed by 2050.
An ‘Uncity’ in Natomas?
Sacramento County’s largest city has no official name. Call it the Uncity. Carmichael, Fair Oaks, Arden-Arcade and Antelope are among the unincorporated communities that add up to about 600,000 residents (the city of Sacramento has about 530,000 residents). The Uncity is where the county must provide the whole array of municipal services.
So far, there are no unincorporated communities in Natomas. All the current growth (save for Metro Air Park) is happening within the city limits of Sacramento. Growth has been orderly, which stands to reason because in 2002, a previous generation of Sacramento County supervisors agreed to place the city in charge of expansion, a pact that has not been formally abandoned to this day.
Approving an Un-Natomas, the basin’s first Uncity, would be a huge step backward, regional planning at its very worst. For being so close to downtown, Pluckebaum’s rosy perspective aside, Upper Westside is a last century project, as it sets aside more than half of its housing land for low-density neighborhoods.
The glut of unrealized housing developments in the Uncity isn’t some accident. Conspicuously missing from county planning is a solid strategy that identifies which areas get priority, and which ones don’t, for those precious public funds for transportation and other infrastructure improvements. That is what would build rooftops in a strategic way.
Whatever happens Wednesday with Serna’s new Natomas Uncity won’t change how much housing gets built in the region in the future. There are plenty of approved projects out there. In Sacramento County, they await leadership and focus from supervisors to make the best ones actually happen.
This story was originally published August 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM.