The vote on the Upper Westside project by the Board of Supervisors (BOS) has been scheduled for Tuesday, June 16 at 2 pm.
Please put June 16, 2 pm on your calendar and plan to attend at 700 H St, Sacramento.
The BOS vote has been cancelled (with about 18 hours notice) twice. So, on June 16, plan to check whether or not the vote is on the agenda. The County only needs to post the agenda for a public meeting 72 hours prior to the meeting.
Places where you can get updates include:
- The ECOS Natomas Campaign webpage
- Facebook, Instagram, X and Bluesky
- The County webpage with BOS agendas
- ECOS will send out updates. Join our email list here.
If you have submitted written comments for either of the previously scheduled votes, they will be included with the materials for the BOS on the new date.
Sacramento’s Housing Crisis
One of the arguments used in favor of developing Upper Westside and other green spaces in Sacramento, is the housing crisis. Sacramento does have a housing crisis, however, the solution isn’t to approve more farmland for development, but to actually construct more homes.
Securing an entitlement, or an approval by a jurisdiction such as Sacramento County to develop land, does not build more homes. Sacramento County has already entitled far more land for residential development than the market will bear, as demonstrated by how slowly the housing units are being built out.
Since 1995, eleven land developments designed for 70,000 housing units have been entitled by Sacramento County. In these developments, only 5,000 housing units were constructed by 2020, and it is projected that only 17,000 housing units will be built by 2050. One reason for the slow pace of construction is the builders’ fear of saturating the market. If many houses are under construction at the same time, sale prices fall, negatively affecting builders’ profits.
Approving the Upper Westside Project will not help to solve the Sacramento housing crisis, but it will add to the excess of entitlements, further disincentivizing builders from building.
The jurisdictions in our region must incentivize construction, not entitlements.
In Natomas, large parcels of land entitled by the City of Sacramento over 20 years ago for residential development, are still sitting there as open space with no construction. The clip of the aerial photo below shows these large areas on both sides of I-5, north of Del Paso Road.
ECOS recognizes the gravity of Sacramento’s housing crisis and its impact on home buyers. We support infill and higher-density building as solutions to the supply and affordability problems. Because of the increasing impacts of climate change and the rising risk of flooding in Sacramento, we believe it is important to protect open land. We also believe strongly in Sacramento as the Farm to Fork Capital and that we must protect our agricultural land. We do not need more development projects entitled on agricultural land.
To read more about ECOS perspective on the housing crisis, see this position paper.
