Sacramento is at a tipping point. What’s the future of housing, sprawl and racial inequality?

The Sacramento region is at a tipping point. And the next few years will determine what shape we leave it in for the next generation.

The region’s housing is less expensive than California’s coastal cities, a selling point that motivated thousands of new residents to move inland since the start of the pandemic. Yet housing prices and rents have skyrocketed the past three years, and fewer than one-third of residents here can now afford to buy the median-priced home.

Within the past few months, the Sacramento area became a “minority-majority” region, meaning white residents now make up less than 50% of the population. Still, substantial racial disparities in income, education and access to housing persist, even after the racial reckoning of 2020. Many commercial corridors remain starved for investment, especially those running through lower-income neighborhoods.

Thousands of new homes are being built each month, from the vast open spaces near Sacramento International Airport to the Sierra foothills. The variety of housing stock that’s being constructed, however, is out of balance. Despite the urging of planners a decade ago, Sacramento lags far behind other California regions in the percentage of new homes that are apartments, condos and other compact models that place far less pressure on the region’s infrastructure and are typically more affordable to low-income earners.

Sacramento sees more days of sunshine each year than any major city in California. But when we’re not worrying about a drought we’re thinking about how to keep overflowing rivers from flooding communities. Wildfires in the mountains blanket the region in smoke every summer and fall, conditions that are worsening as the climate continues to change.

“I think it’s a region of promise and peril,” said James Corless, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG). “Our upside of promise is huge. And our downside of peril is something we need to address immediately.”

SACOG, the six-county region’s lead planning agency, is developing a new blueprint for the area’s transportation, climate, housing, economic and equity priorities for the next 25 years. With input in the months ahead from the public and each of the 28 local governments represented by SACOG, the blueprint will help set a direction for how the region will expand between now and 2050 and guide how and where local officials invest hundreds of millions of dollars.

Will the region — made up of Sacramento, Placer, Yolo, El Dorado, Yuba and Sutter counties — prioritize dense, infill housing close to job centers and public transportation? Will money be invested into aging corridors such as Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights, Stockton Boulevard and Watt Avenue? And will bike paths, express buses and an expanded light rail system become the foundation of the region’s transportation network?

Will the region’s future expansion instead focus on developing the region’s open spaces, keeping in line with its recent history of emphasizing single-family, large-lot homes? Will the freeway system expand to accommodate thousands of new residents moving to new communities in outer ring suburbs?

Or can the Sacramento region, one of the few metropolitan areas in California whose population is growing, finally strike a balance?

SACOG wants the public to decide. It has released a survey seeking input on transportation, growth, housing and equity decisions, and will hold a public workshop on June 16 at the Folsom Community Center to launch its public campaign.

The Sacramento Bee is launching its own survey asking readers for their thoughts on the region’s future and where they believe investments should be made. We’ll use the responses to inform future stories, leading up to a public event sponsored by The Bee later this year with community members, elected officials and other leaders.

The last regional blueprint was drafted nearly 20 years ago, right before the Great Recession. At the time, “the region said it did not like the look of where it was headed,” Corless recently told the Sacramento City Council.

The region failed to meet many of the goals established the last time a blueprint was written, according to SACOG’s latest progress reports. Housing affordability worsened, not enough investment was made in transportation networks and the economy has remained overly reliant on government jobs.

With new pressures intensifying on our communities, regional leaders want the next blueprint to help the region avoid repeating mistakes of the past.

“It asks the fundamental questions of what kind of place do we want to live in?” Corless said. “What kind of housing do we want to have? How affordable should it be? How are we going to move around? Our children, our grandchildren, our next generations — are we going to leave them a place that is better than we found it?”

The regional blueprint does not carry the legal authority to force local governments to follow the recommendations. However, ignoring it could still create peril for jurisdictions; those who follow its recommendations will be considered more competitive for a share of precious state transportation and housing funding aimed at making communities more livable.

Housing challenges

Sacramento’s housing boom is visible nearly everywhere you go.

The first homes have been constructed in the Northlake community, a development east of Sacramento International Airport that will one day feature more than 2,000 homes. Houses are finally being built in Delta Shores north of Elk Grove, where more than 5,000 homes are planned to fill a vast 782-acre expanse. Perhaps the largest new development in the region — a planned 11,000-home mini city south of Highway 50 in Folsom — is already drawing families fleeing the Bay Area and other urban centers in search of quick access to the foothills.

Meanwhile, Roseville built more single-family homes last year than any California city besides Los Angeles and San Diego, according to recent data from the state Department of Finance. Lincoln and Folsom ranked in the top 10 in the state in terms of their percentage growth of new single-family housing units. Yuba and Placer counties had the two largest percentage increases in new housing units among the state’s 58 counties.

The Sacramento region is building more housing than it has in years. The issue, housing experts contend, is that not enough of the right housing is being built.

Roughly one quarter of the homes constructed in the region in recent years are what experts describe as “attached.” Those are residential units that share a wall with another unit, such as apartments, condos and townhomes. In 2010, a regional blueprint report called for nearly 70% of the housing built before 2050 to be in that category, but the region has fallen well short of that goal.

At the same time, in the Los Angeles, San Diego and Bay Area regions, more than 70% of the residential units built in recent years were attached.

“We struggle as a region to build more compactly,” said Dov Kadin, a senior planner at SACOG. “We also are continuing to spread out, and that growth on the edges of our existing urban footprint is much more on the single-family (residence) side.”

Emphasizing smaller lot homes and apartments will offer more choices to low-income earners and renters seeking to buy a home. A housing study released in 2020 by SACOG found the region needs to zone for more than 60,000 units of affordable housing this decade to meet demand.

“We need to make sure housing is affordable and that there are mechanisms that prevent displacement as neighborhoods grow,” said Evan Schmidt, the chief executive of Valley Vision, a Sacramento nonprofit research and civic advocacy firm. “And we need pathways to homeownership and other neighborhood and community structures that support people’s ability to thrive in their neighborhoods and live there long term.”

Valley Vision and SACOG conducted a poll this spring that showed nearly 80% of respondents think first-time homebuyers in Sacramento will struggle to afford a home in the next five years. Nearly half of those polled said they found their own neighborhood unaffordable. Just 29% of Sacramento County residents and 30% of Placer residents can afford the median-priced homes in those counties, according to the California Association of Realtors.

It would cost roughly $30 billion to fund enough income-restricted affordable housing units to meet the region’s demand this decade. Instead of trying to set aside that seemingly impossible amount of funding, experts said local governments should instead focus on factors they can control, such as zoning land for a variety of housing.

“The only realistic path forward to deliver affordability for as many people as possible is to deliver lots of housing types,” Kadin said. “We need to deliver more attached housing so over time, (the overall housing market) becomes more affordable.”

The Stone Beetland development in south Sacramento may provide a model for future planning decisions.

The proposed development by Taylor Builders is on 141 vacant acres along Cosumnes River Boulevard, next to the Morrison Creek light rail station. In other parts of the Sacramento region, that size of a parcel would be ripe for a subdivision of large single-family homes.

But Taylor Builders is instead proposing a “transit-oriented, mixed-use community” of 1,163 residential units, with as many as 711 of the homes offered as rentals. What’s more, at least 198 of the homes will be offered to households making less than 80% of the area median income.

Commercial space and more than 32 acres of parks are also in the plans, and its proximity to a light rail station will make it “an ideal location for all types of households that desire to reduce dependency on single-occupant vehicles while maintaining extensive mobility options,” the developer wrote in its project application to the city of Sacramento..

The nearby light rail station opened in 2021. Other infrastructure has been built over the years by the city and the developer of the adjacent Delta Shores community. Having those amenities in place provided the developers flexibility to offer a mix of market rate single-family homes and affordable rental apartments.

“The public has to be thoughtful about where it invests in infrastructure,” said Clifton Taylor, president of Taylor Builders. “You’re starting to see people recognize that while the region clearly needs more housing and growth in our suburban areas, there are also these corridors that have infrastructure and are connected to services that make them desirable for redevelopment.”

Roseville, for example, is working to rezone and redesign old commercial corridors such as Douglas Boulevard, Atlantic Street and Sunrise Avenue to encourage dense housing and better pedestrian networks. Hundreds of condos and apartments have been built in West Sacramento, a short walk or bike ride from the state Capitol. Major apartment buildings are also under construction in the downtown Railyards and surrounding a busy light rail and bus station near the California State University, Sacramento campus.

Housing, equity and the climate

Building too much suburban sprawl will not only keep the dream of homeownership out of reach for many, it will also have lasting impacts on the region’s climate, experts said.

Longer commutes lead to an increase in harmful greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, many rural areas are at risk of wildfire, including the Sierra foothills, far eastern Sacramento County and parts of western Yolo County, according to the most recent fire hazard assessment by Cal Fire.

Policies that encourage large-lot homes and sprawl can also lead to the loss of farmland; more acres of agricultural land in the region were developed into housing in 2019 than in any year since 2007, according to SACOG. That’s despite a message from a 2010 blueprint report that stated “we must preserve and maintain our open spaces, natural places and farmland.”

Without serious planning today, the region may not be as welcoming in the future.

“Can we have a place that people can still live in 50, 75 years from now?” Corless asked. “If we continue in some ways the way we have planned over the last 30 years, that is not going to work for the next 30. We have to approach this differently. We have to think differently about the future.”

The choices local leaders make today will also determine whether Sacramento — once described by Time Magazine as “America’s most diverse city” — will elevate the needs of all communities.

A decade ago, a regional housing study showed the region needed to open more than 40,000 units of affordable housing by 2021 to meet demand. By 2018, however, local builders had completed just 12% of that goal, according to a SACOG study.

The pressure that lack of housing has created has played out across racial lines. An estimated 51% of Black families in the region are “housing-cost burdened,” meaning they spend more than one third of their incomes on housing. Roughly 44% of Latino households are cost burdened, while 36% of Asian families and 34% of white families are stretched by housing costs.

SACOG also found the median household income for Black and Latino families were well below the region’s median, as were the percentage of Black and Latino residents with a college degree.

“If we don’t actually address racial disparities head on and don’t try to have an inclusive culture that is welcoming of people of all backgrounds,” Corless said, “we will lose.”

Even small investments in under-resourced communities will have an impact, advocates said.

The Sacramento City Council set aside $50,000 in federal COVID-19 relief funding to provide grants to 20 businesses on the Northgate Boulevard corridor in the Gardenland Northgate neighborhood of north Sacramento. The grants will be used for back rent payments, improvements to storefronts and other investments along a busy yet often overlooked commercial strip.

“(These investments) are not impossible,” said Cathy Rodriguez, president and CEO of the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “Those of us who live in areas that already have certain amenities — safe streets for bikes, cars and walkers, better lighting — it doesn’t take away from us when we invest in other communities to just get to that. Equity isn’t about taking away from others.”

The blueprint workshop hosted by SACOG will run from 8 a.m. to noon on Friday at the Folsom Community Center, 52 Natoma St. in Folsom. It is the first in a series of such events throughout the region to gather public feedback. SACOG officials expect to accept public input for several months and release the blueprint in the next year.