Sacramento needs affordable housing, and fast. It’s time for city leaders to get innovative

Could smaller, more innovative and efficient types of housing be an answer to Sacramento’s housing crisis? Mayor Darrell Steinberg thinks so.

Steinberg wants to fund what he calls “efficiency housing,” meaning non-traditional housing that is quicker and cheaper to construct.

A draft proposal lists examples of efficiency housing types as “attached microunits, tiny homes, Accessory Dwelling Units, premanufactured homes, modular construction housing units, container unit housing, 3-D printed housing units, and shared facilities such as rooming houses.”

“Let’s put some real public resources in developing a market for one or more of these common sense ideas,” Steinberg said.

The Sacramento City Council is expected to vote Dec. 10 on the spending framework for the first $50 million of a planned $100 million affordable housing bond that will be repaid with Measure U funds. Steinberg proposes putting 70 percent of the funds toward traditional affordable housing projects and the remaining 30 percent toward these alternatives. Projects would be required to meet affordability requirements for 55 years.

With a $30 million investment, the city could create at least 300 affordable efficiency units, said city spokesperson Mary Lynne Vellinga.

Steinberg said these projects could also seek additional funding from state and federal sources, but that the type of housing he wants to promote “may not require the stacked financing that is so onerous” for standard affordable housing projects.

“If you can build faster, you should get higher priority,” he said.

The city of Sacramento needs to add roughly 17,000 lower-income housing units between 2021 and 2019 to meet state-projected housing needs, according to Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG.) But trends have been in the opposite direction.

Rents in the area went up 45 percent in the last 7 years, adjusting for inflation. Homelessness in Sacramento County surged 19 percent over the last two years to at least 5,570 homeless people -- mostly long-term local residents. Meanwhile, housing vacancy in the region is just 2.5 percent, according to SACOG.

“To even make a dent in the low-income requirement, we’re going to have to do something different,” said Julia Burrows, senior policy advisor to the mayor.

Developer and architect Ron Vrilakas, who is familiar with the plan, is interested in building complexes of small affordable units, scattered across less expensive infill plots. He worked as an architect on the Ice Blocks apartments on R Street.

“Smaller is a big piece of the puzzle here,” he said. He estimates he would need a subsidy of $30,000 per unit to make units affordable and predicts total construction cost would be $110,000 per unit.

The mayor’s plan is still developing and questions remain. For example, we don’t know if the city’s local hire ordinance would apply to labor for projects using efficiency funds.

“I think it’s really important that the people who produce affordable housing are being consulted as this gets fleshed out,” said Cathy Creswell, president of the board of Sacramento Housing Alliance.

Yet the plan is an important step in the right direction and should spark productive dialogue. The city, and the state, must find ways to build affordable housing faster.

If the old way of doing things still worked enough, we wouldn’t be in the current predicament of an apocalyptic housing crisis. The mayor is right -- it’s time for Sacramento to innovate.

Correction: An earlier version of this story did not specify how Ron Vrilakas was involved in the Ice Blocks development. He worked on it as an architect. He was not a developer on the project.

This story was originally published December 2, 2019 at 5:00 AM.