Modesto approves 527 houses. They won’t be cheap, but they could ease the overall shortage
The City Council has approved 527 new houses in east Modesto, far more than have been built citywide in recent years.
The prices will start at nearly $500,000, beyond the means of most Modesto residents. But supporters said many of the homes will be bought by people now living in apartments, freeing up the rentals for other residents.
The project, dubbed the Crossings, is near the northeast corner of Briggsmore Avenue and Claus Road. The 84-acre site is now mostly almond trees, bounded on the east by the Amtrak station.
“This is a great project,” Councilman David Wright said just before the 7-0 vote Tuesday. “We just need more of them here in the city of Modesto.”
The application came from D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest home builder, based in Arlington, Texas. The first units could be ready by late this year, said Adam Foster, entitlements manager in the company’s San Ramon branch office. A timeline for build-out of all five phases was not available as of Thursday.
The lowest-priced homes will be “in the high $400,000 range,” Horton advance planner Avery Jones said. The company has not announced the upper limit.
The Modesto Bee used Horton’s online mortgage calculator to estimate the cost of a $480,000 home. The payment would be $2,909 per month assuming 7% interest over 30 years and a 20% down payment. The total includes property taxes and insurance.
‘There’s no supply,’ Realtor says of local new and existing homes
New and existing homes sold in Stanislaus County had a median price of $468,100 in the third quarter of 2023, the California Association of Realtors reported. Only 24% of households could afford a mortgage at that price.
“There’s no supply, demand is high, prices are up,” said Michael Kelly of RE/MAX Executive, a past president for the group’s Central Valley region. He and other industry leaders spoke in support of the Crossings at the council meeting.
Just 64 homes were built in Modesto in 2020 or later, according to a new plan aimed at easing the shortage. They had totaled 14,006 in the 1980s, 8,054 in the 1990s, 6,582 in the 2000s, and 1,738 in the most recent decade.
The steepest dropoff was amid the national housing crash of 2008. It happened because too many mortgages exceeded families’ ability to pay.
Modesto’s population has grown more slowly in recent decades than the 1980s and 1990s, but the housing crunch continues.
This means more people competing for apartments in the city. In November, its average rent was $1,659 a month, vs. $1,265 four years earlier, according to rentcafe.com.
Development to include parks, bike lanes and roundabouts
The Crossings will offer homes with two or three bedrooms on lots from 3,400 to 7,000 square feet. Residents will have two new parks totaling seven acres.
Jones said the project will have about three miles of bike lanes, including a portion along Claus fully protected from motor vehicles. That road already has such a path between Briggsmore and Scenic Drive, connecting to trails through Dry Creek Regional Park to downtown.
For motor vehicles, Claus will be widened from two to four lanes in the project area. The city has dropped its long-held plan to make Claus a six-lane expressway from Sylvan Avenue to Yosemite Boulevard. It already is that wide from just north of Creekwood Drive, near Johansen High School, to Yosemite.
Claus will still have plenty of traffic near the Crossings, so the city is planning a roundabout at the Merle Avenue entrance to the subdivision. It is designed to protect children near Freedom Elementary School and Savage Middle School. Another roundabout will be on Briggsmore just west of Amtrak.
The Crossings will have 7-foot-tall soundwalls along Claus and Briggsmore to buffer vehicle noise. A 9-foot-high wall will run along the Amtrak corridor, also used for freight by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway.
Amtrak is expanding in Valley
The Amtrak station is on the San Joaquins route. It has five daily round trips between Bakersfield and Oakland and a sixth branching to Sacramento.
Amtrak has funding to reach four daily trips to the capital as soon as 2026. It also plans to tie in at Merced to California’s first high-speed rail segment to Bakersfield, if the state secures enough money.
Modesto’s housing goals are in a plan required under a state law promoting affordable dwellings. Modesto seeks to build 11,248 units by 2031, ranging from “extremely low-income” to affluent.
Much of the plan involves putting small apartment buildings on underused parking lots on commercial strips. The rest is in areas already annexed to the city but not yet developed, including the Crossings.
Stanislaus County has some 210,000 total acres of almonds, so losing about 80 to the new housing is not a big concern. And farmland preservationists prefer building in east Modesto because other areas have relatively better soil.
