How Sacramento ended the racist zoning laws that limited affordable housing | Opinion

Sacramento, like too many cities in California, has historically dedicated most of its residential land exclusively to single family homes. Known as exclusionary zoning, this policy walks in the shadow of redlining and racial segregation, and these restrictions stifle the creation of new dwelling opportunities on the same land.

But Sacramento just did something momentous: The city council unanimously voted recently to end the city’s discriminatory practice of exclusionary zoning.

The details of the zoning ordinance are dense, but put simply: The city has moved from regulating its housing by the number of units to regulations based on the size and scale of lots and buildings.

Opinion

This radical but simple shift in the city’s code allows for multi-family housing units to be built on the same size lot that might have once been reserved for single-family homes. Setbacks and height limits and other restrictions still apply, but now, within the lot size, developers can build as many units as possible — there are no longer any caps.

It sounds mundane, yet it pushes the city of Sacramento to the forefront of the nation’s most progressive housing ideals and policies that will make housing more equitable and accessible to thousands who desperately need it; all while making Sacramento a more walkable, liveable community.

This single decision will create more rental opportunities in neighborhoods that offer few multi-family housing options or have historically resisted them. Single-family homes can become duplexes and triplexes, and new developments won’t be restricted by unit caps that vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. It also gives homeowners new opportunities to convert their single home into residences for adult children or grandparents; and it gives would-be home buyers new potential ways to afford a property, if half or two-thirds of it can be attached rentals. And it can all be accommodated within the city’s existing infrastructure, the smartest of smart growth imaginable.

“The city has done a lot, it’s already easier to build multi-family housing in Sacramento than in any other city,” said Ben Raderstorf, Vice President of House Sacramento, an all volunteer, grassroots group that lobbies for affordable homes and equitable communities. “But this capstone takes this core policy of exclusionary zoning and unwinds it in essentially every way.”

Agreed. Sacramento City Hall has had a tough time in recent years, particularly since the beginning of the COVID shutdowns almost exactly four years ago. City elected leaders and bureaucrats have heard plenty from residents over their response to homelessness and they have been criticized for granting big raises to city employees they can’t afford. I’ve been one of the loudest critics — but this time it’s different. This is a genuinely great decision, and credit must be given where credit is due.

And it almost didn’t happen.

Sacramento’s political bravery

Typically, cities operated on exclusionary zoning principles placing restrictions on the types of homes that could be built in a particular neighborhood.

“Exclusionary zoning … has always been, from the very beginning, a racist policy,” said Raderstorf.

“When cities were no longer able to redline, they realized they could achieve much of the same ends by keeping certain types of people out of wealthy communities through rezoning alone,” Raderstorf said. “Lower-income communities and communities of color are more likely to live in apartment complexes — so all they had to do was make those types of housing illegal.”

In December 2023, the Sacramento City Council considered scaling back zoning reforms and imposing 4-6 unit caps across 70% of the city.

But then something happened.

“I am in favor of not having any caps at all,” said councilwoman Caity Maple at that meeting. “This is the inertia of the status quo. We see this around this all the time in policy. Because something has been done in the past, it carries forward and it carries forward and it carries forward, and at some point we have to stop and ask ourselves, ‘Was this a good policy in the first place?’” Mayor Darrell Steinberg and council members Karina Talamantes, Lisa Kaplan and Katie Valenzuela agreed.

They showed political courage to reject the status quo and send it back for more work.

When the motion returned at the Feb. 27 council meeting, the city’s new proposal included no unit caps and no parking minimums, the latter of which increases a building’s cost and the city’s continued reliance on personal vehicles. The Little General Plan Update That Could had truly snowballed into a progressive housing policy that Sacramento and the entire state could be proud of, and the council passed it unanimously.

Instead of accepting an incremental step, Sacramento’s new zoning policy demolishes the link between local zoning policy and America’s housing affordability crisis.

Building for the future

The bold new policy comes at a good time: The United States is short by millions of housing units and California alone, by some counts, needs more than 3.5 million. Recently, Sacramento ranked the seventh least affordable in the country for first-time Generation Z homebuyers, and the city’s homeless population is the third largest in the nation, behind only New York City and Los Angeles.

“People get frustrated at the slow pace of government and so do I, but this is what happens when we come together,” Maple said. “A neighborhood like (Oak Park) is going to see the positive impacts of this. I’m excited these things are happening because it’s many years of work.”

But while Sacramento is working to make housing more equitable, cities like San Francisco are working in reverse. The city recently imposed density limits in several historic neighborhoods in North Beach, despite agreeing to reduce barriers to building housing under a state-mandated requirement to approve 82,000 new homes by 2031.

“There’s a real perception that this is a third rail,” said Raderstorf. “(Politicians) think that it’s a controversial issue and if they mess up they’ll be voted out of office. But the success and the unanimity and the public support around this has proved that the politics have changed radically.

“It was never the boogeyman that a lot of local electeds thought it was. It took courage to be the first, and Sacramento has shown this is a winning recipe both in policy terms, and also in political terms.”