Did Sacramento Just Approve the Best Local Housing Reform Yet?
Fourplex in Sacramento’s Midtown. Photo by Dov Kadin. Used with permission.
The movement to unwind some of the most destructive policies associated with America's suburban experiment continues to pick up speed. We're barely into 2021, and already we've seen great news out of South Bend, Indiana, which voted to abolish its minimum parking requirements on January 13th. Less than a week later, Sacramento, California, went a step further, committing in the same night to strike down both its parking minimums and its exclusive single-family zoning districts.
There are very few policies that we at Strong Towns would unequivocally recommend across the board. We believe that local needs are varied and complex and best understood by those with skin in the game. Not to mention the benefit to everyone that comes from a diversity of policy approaches in different places, so we can see what really works.
There are two land-use policies we have recommended unequivocally for every city, however. They are:
Legalize the next increment of development across the board. No neighborhood should be frozen in amber, completely forbidden from continuing to grow and evolve.
Remove mandatory parking minimums. There is no need for government to dictate that land be used for car storage, and these mandates have often-massive opportunity costs, stifling the viability of missing-middle housing and small, local businesses in particular.
Sacramento has now approved both of these landmark policies. In one night. By a unanimous vote of its City Council.
Regional planner Dov Kadin has the details on Twitter.
The action taken on January 19th is merely a step in the city's full revision of its General Plan, which is a massive work in progress expected to take another year or more. Likely beginning late in 2022, the nitty-gritty details will still have to be worked out in the city's zoning code. The code (which actually governs what can be built) will be brought into compliance with the new general plan (a broader policy document stating the city's priorities).
But with Tuesday's action, the City Council has committed to implementing these policies, and given city staff its blessing to go ahead with the technical work of assembling a detailed proposal.
Learning From Other Cities
A couple specific things in here are really promising signs that Sacramento has learned from the pitfalls other cities have faced.
Example of Floor Area Ratio. Each of these buildings would have a FAR of 1.0. (Source: portlandoregon.gov)
One is that the city is allowing a FAR of 1.0 on normal residential lots. FAR stands for Floor Area Ratio, and is equal to the ratio of the total square footage of a building to the total square footage of the lot it sits on. (See diagram.) It's a common metric planners use to determine how massive buildings can get, and thereby regulate intensity or density of land use.
A map from the proposal to increase FAR limits citywide, and eliminate strict single-family zoning.
FAR has been a bugaboo of zoning reformers in recent years, notably in Minneapolis, where part of the political pitch for legalizing triplexes citywide was that they would be required to fit into the same "box" (height and ground footprint) that a single-family house would be. The problem with this, of course, is that a triplex is not a single-family house, it's a three-family house, and if it's limited to a FAR of, say, 0.7 on a 5,000 square foot lot, the most space you could (optimistically) build is about three 1,100 square foot apartments. This may be suitable for a couple or two roommates, but hardly for a family or other larger household, who are thereby excluded.
Sacramento's FAR of 1.0 is much more reasonable and may render it possible to build multi-family homes on standard residential lots that are large, or tall, enough to contain comfortable and marketable apartments.
The other promising difference in Sacramento was actually approved in mid-2020: ministerial approval for housing projects under 200 units. Called "administrative approval" in some places, this means that if a project is allowed by the zoning for its lot, it can be automatically approved with a review by city staff, and does not need to go through a public hearing and a vote of the city council.
Sacramento sets a 90 day timeline for ministerial approval of multifamily housing projects, which should prevent the costly, interminable delays and uncertain timelines that opponents in other cities sometimes weaponize to deter development.
Momentum for Change
I spoke with Ansel Lundberg, who is a co-chair of House Sacramento, a local YIMBY group, and was instrumental in organizing grassroots support for these changes. Lundberg is optimistic that these changes will stick and not be rolled back, because momentum toward them has been a long time coming. In 2019 the City Council approved a Vision and Guiding Principles document which included priorities like seeking to cultivate a broad mix of housing types throughout the city for residents of all income levels, concentrating new growth within the city’s existing limits to promote compact development, and protecting surrounding open space.
Lundberg and his group have had productive meetings with city staff, who have been supportive of the need for zoning reform to achieve those goals, and House Sacramento also published a 2018 op-ed around the kickoff of the General Plan process to spark discussion. House Sacramento has shared resources with allies on this issue including the Environmental Council of Sacramento, and has reached out to regular citizens who support legalizing more housing, sharing updates and helping them know when and how to make their voices heard.
The result is a community conversation that has evolved to the point where—perhaps shockingly if you live in one of California's other major cities famous for acrimonious, zero-sum housing politics—a majority of the public comments in the January 19 City Council meeting were in support of the changes to zoning and parking rules. This fact reflects a growing understanding, throughout California and nationwide, of the harm that these regulations due to local prosperity and to racial and socioeconomic equity—the latter point something that was reportedly a subject of frank discussion in the Sacramento hearing.
Lundberg says the Covid-19 pandemic has created both unique challenges and opportunities for public engagement around these issues. Traditional in-person outreach, by city staff, and organizing, by activists, has been off the table, but the city takes public comments online in text form, or you can call in live to a public meeting. This is easier than going to City Hall, Lundberg says, and has made it easier for a diverse range of Sacramento residents to be heard.
Midtown Sacramento. Photo via JD Weiher on Unsplash.
The Sacramento Bee article on the changes contains a telling anecdote on this front: although the neighborhood associations of several of the city's wealthiest and most exclusive areas declared their opposition to the zoning reforms, a significant number of individual residents of those neighborhoods wrote or called in to indicate that they supported the change and opposed their association's position.
Anyone who is a veteran of local housing and development politics knows that in-person public meetings, in almost any city, tend to be dominated by a regular cast of neighborhood-association leaders and seasoned advocates who claim to speak for the consensus views of their neighbors. The democratization of public comment via the internet, combined with the organizing efforts of groups like House Sacramento, has begun to demonstrate that that isn't always so.
The Power of Precedent
Sacramento has elected officials who get it. (“If you think that a quadplex is always gonna be ugly, I urge you to drive down J Street and take a look at some beautiful quadplexes,” Councilwoman Angelique Ashby is quoted in the Bee as saying.) It has advocates who are energized and vocal. It also has the precedent of experiments already undertaken in cities such as Minneapolis and Portland, and a decade of intense focus on housing affordability within California, to draw on.
As the Sightline Institute's Michael Andersen wrote on Wednesday, "Suddenly, zoning reforms are popping up everywhere." Every city that undertakes one of these fixes to a long-broken system, and observes that the sky doesn't fall, is an inspiration to countless others, where emboldened local leaders can now point and say, "See, they did it!"
Let Sacramento be the next step forward in loosening the strait-jacket of suburban-style zoning code on American cities. And let it inspire a host of imitators to improve on it in turn.
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