The city council should obey the law and approve apartments in East Sac | Opinion
The California Legislature’s efforts to restrict local governing bodies from rejecting new housing are about to tie the hands of the Sacramento City Council. Tuesday night will illustrate that state lawmakers are doing the right thing.
Neighbors in East Sacramento are opposing a proposed 332-unit, six-story apartment complex between 30th, C and D streets. It would largely if not entirely accommodate all the necessary parking, with 332 on-site spaces.
In the opinion of city staff, the council can’t do anything about this project. The Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom have exempted housing projects like this from being subject to exhaustive environmental reviews via the California Environmental Quality Act. Nor can the council reduce the density of the project so long as it is consistent with the city’s general plan and zoning designations. This project, says the city, is consistent with city plans, designations and policies in every way.
There’s no doubt that neighbors will see this all differently. But if the council were to try to over-ride every finding of its staff and reject this project, it might as well cut the developer a big fat check Tuesday night to advance the winnings of the sure-as-the-sun lawsuit.
I get why some in a neighborhood are upset about a project that would be the tallest residential development in the area and look different from the single-family home surroundings.
But this is right on the edge of Sacramento’s urban core, on a road leading to a freeway entrance. This is the kind of site for a project to maximize this housing opportunity.
Proposed by Demas Communities, neighbors fear this project would overwhelm the adjacent and antiquated sewer system that combines both raw sewage and stormwater. The project has no affordable housing component, which is permissible under city codes. There are also questions about hazardous waste on the site and neighbors don’t want a project whose architecture is too box-like and severe.
Missing in this litany of grievances, however, is how California has a housing crisis that has made the state unaffordable for too many and that we need to build as much housing as quickly as possible. And that will mean new projects, hopefully, throughout the state at scales that are new to neighborhoods.
CEQA has been fatal to countless housing projects that managed to get approved at the local level. One study found that lawsuits challenged 48,000 units worth of housing in a single year, 2020. The Legislature, led by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, gave the quest for housing construction a big boost by removing this legal weapon for the arsenal of opponents.
While I lived in East Sacramento for a decade and love the community, it has a track record of claiming Armageddon regarding projects that turn out to be community assets.
There was widespread neighborhood opposition in 2014 to the McKinley Village housing project, which is now an asset to the community. Then four years later, in McKinley Park, there was great concern about digging up a portion of the park to install a giant cistern (the so-called McKinley Park Water Vault), to store excess stormwaters so that untreated sewage doesn’t reach the Sacramento River. The park was restored to its prior majesty. And now 312 much-needed apartments are going to destroy East Sacramento and its surroundings as we know it?
This site, formerly warehouses for Mary Ann’s Bakery, is now an eyesore. It needs to evolve into a complex that hundreds of Sacramentans can call home. This is how California can address its housing crisis one landmark project at a time.