California officials are right to bust Elk Grove for discriminating against homeless people

Well, that didn’t take long.

On Tuesday, a builder and nonprofit sued Elk Grove for rejecting an affordable housing project in order to keep formerly homeless people from moving into Old Town. The next morning, The Bee’s Editorial Board reported on the suit by the Excelerate Housing Group and HOPE Cooperative. The same day, the state notified Elk Grove that it had indeed violated multiple laws.

Now Elk Grove must correct its mistake. Other towns similarly determined to do nothing to help solve California’s housing crisis should also sit up and smell the new construction.

This is exactly the kind of aggressive action that state officials had promised to take, and their follow-through here is important.

Elk Grove was not going to let the law get in the way of the suburb’s continuing efforts to discriminate against its homeless residents. But now the state has shown it’s willing to force officials there and elsewhere to help house homeless people instead of just declaring them unwelcome.

A Wednesday letter from the California Department of Housing and Community Development to Elk Grove City Manager Jason Behrmann was marked “notice of violation.” It says the city violated Senate Bill 35, the Housing Accountability Act, the Discrimination in Land Use Law and the Housing Element Law in denying the Oak Rose Apartments’ application for 67 units of permanent supportive housing at 9252 Elk Grove Blvd.

In a post on the city’s Facebook page, Behrmann wrote, “Due to the litigation, we are unable to respond to specific questions; however, the community and those in the region should know that the City of Elk Grove is committed to providing housing options for everyone.”

Since January 2021, the post said, the city has approved 1,016 affordable housing units, including supportive housing units. But this would be the first project specifically for formerly homeless people, according to those working on it.

SB 35 was part of a major 2017 legislative package aimed at addressing the state’s acute shortage of housing. It requires localities that have not made sufficient progress toward meeting regional housing needs — that’s you, Elk Grove — to use a streamlined approval process “to facilitate and expedite the construction of housing.” Elk Grove ignored the law, the letter says, when its Planning Commission decided in June that the project was not eligible for that streamlined approval under zoning restrictions that limit Old Town to commercial use.

It also broke the law when the City Council denied the project’s appeal in July, the notice says. The council voted unanimously that the project wasn’t eligible for streamlined approval because of its ground-floor residential use. Yet it gave away its true intentions when it approved a market-rate housing project with ground-floor residential use in the same area around the same time.

The notice also says Elk Grove didn’t respond either in sufficient detail or within 60 days, as it has to under the law: “If timely written notification is not provided or if the determination insufficiently describes the inconsistency, the project is deemed to satisfy the objective planning standards.”

For pages and pages more, the state outlines the ways in which Elk Grove was late and kept changing its excuses for failing to comply with the state’s housing laws, which are going to have to be followed if we’re ever going to solve the housing problem that everyone seems to think should be solved somewhere else. That hasn’t worked and isn’t ever going to.

“In denying the project,” the notice says, “the city violated discrimination in land use law,” which “deems any action taken by a city or county to be null and void if such action denies to an individual or group of individuals the enjoyment of residence, land ownership, tenancy, or any other land use in the state due to illegal discrimination. … The law further states the imposition of different requirements on a residential use by a protected class or by persons of very low, low moderate, or middle income, other than those generally imposed upon other residential uses is discriminatory.”

In May, the Planning Commission approved the Elk Grove Railroad Courtyards Project, at 9676 Railroad St., in the same neighborhood. That project, as the state notes, “is a multifamily, market-rate project that includes ground floor residential units.” Oops, busted.

Approval of that project, the state says, “demonstrates a double standard” that’s “particularly notable” given that the city met 195% of its above-moderate-income need but just 7.2% and 7.5% of its very-low-income and low-income needs.

The city has until Nov. 11 to respond in writing with “a specific plan for corrective action, including allowing the project to move forward.” Otherwise the state can take action, “including revocation of its findings of compliance for the city’s housing element and/or referral of the violations to the Office of the Attorney General.”

The attorney general could sue the city for violations of state housing law, impose fines of up to $100,000 a month or strip Elk Grove of land use authority.

The state has gotten serious, and now Elk Grove and other scofflaws will have to as well.

This story was originally published October 14, 2022 at 10:00 AM.