March 20, 2025
Finding and paying for housing these days is difficult. A recent study by the Pew Research Center says the U.S. has a shortage of between 4 million and 7 million homes. Sacramento, California, is no exception. There, nearly three in four renters are rent-burdened and transplants from the Bay Area are driving up costs even more.
The good news is that crises often inspire and catalyze change. Sacramento Director of Community Development Tom Pace and his fellow planners are shifting the way the city approaches housing supply. On an episode of the People Behind the Plans podcast, Pace joined APA Editor in Chief Meghan Stromberg to talk about the city's efforts to streamline permitting processes, relax restrictions about parking, and create more attainable housing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity; the whole conversation is available at planning.org/podcast.
STROMBERG: First, congratulations to Sacramento County on receiving a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) PRO Housing grant in January. I know you work for the city, but do you have a sense of how the $2.7 million grant will be used in your area?
Tom Pace is Sacramento's director of community development. Photo courtesy of Tom Pace.
PACE: I think it will be a benefit for our county as a whole and for the region. The county plans to do comprehensive corridor planning: modernizing land use planning documents for commercial corridors with opportunities for mixed-use development, looking at infrastructure needs and priority phasing analyses in those areas, and establishing financing districts to help build the required infrastructure.
Also, they'll be looking at an adaptive reuse program and streamlining affordable housing in several sub-areas of the county (called special planning areas), and they'll continue working on the housing element of their general plan, which is what we call comprehensive plans in California. And that relates to a larger state planning effort called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation.
STROMBERG: Sacramento has made significant changes to accelerate the supply of housing, focusing particularly on infill housing. How did zoning reform actions get started?
PACE: During the recession in 2009, we realized that we needed to promote economic development. Housing development was part of that, but ... at that moment, we were just thinking broadly that any and all development would be good. This, coupled with the planned implementation of our new general plan, led us to imagine some radical changes to our zoning.
Around 2011, the La Valentina Apartments was a smart-growth, affordable apartment project right next to a light rail station. In other words, it was exactly the kind of project that we said we wanted to encourage for urban infill, affordable housing, and transit-oriented development reasons — but this project needed about 19 special permits, variances, exceptions, and other approvals under our antiquated zoning and development regulations just to get to the building permit stage.
We started with parking reform.
STROMBERG: How did you handle that?
PACE: We were forcing projects to either request a waiver of the parking requirement or build incredibly expensive parking garages or parking lots, which was not something we wanted downtown. We began to realize we were not helping ourselves, so we cut back dramatically on the amount of parking required initially.
Then, we used a contextual approach. We realized that the needs in the suburban parts of our city that were more conventionally sprawling were different from the needs of downtown. We also had older inner-ring neighborhoods between downtown and those suburban areas, so we had different requirements that gradually increased parking as you got farther away from the core and transit facilities.
Since then, we've eliminated parking requirements entirely.
STROMBERG: You also made changes to the city's zoning code to ease the way for more housing. What were they?
PACE: In Sacramento, we set out to be a pro-housing, pro-infill, pro-transit community, so transit-oriented infill housing projects are our number one priority. For these projects, we eliminated parking requirements and maximum density limits. We increased height limits and allowable floor area. We reduced setbacks and open space requirements. We removed conditional-use permit requirements for housing development, and we updated design guidelines to reflect the kinds of projects that our local development industry was trying to deliver.
Let's do good planning and set our regulations up to encourage the type of development that we identified in the plan. We should be able to delegate approval down to the staff level for most projects.
We've also changed the way that we review development projects. In the past, most of those required public hearings before our planning commission, and many projects required city council approval. It was a very onerous process, and I think it subconsciously sent a message to the community that they needed to show up and oppose it, so we've tried to turn that on its head.
We said, "Let's do good planning and set our regulations up to encourage the type of development that we identified in the plan. We should be able to delegate approval down to the staff level for most projects or to a director-level hearing process for minor adjustments that are needed." That's what we've done, and now very rarely do development projects go to the city council or the planning commission for development approvals — those are almost always approved at the staff level.
STROMBERG: That's a big change. Did it cause any issues?
PACE: The real challenge was getting buy-in for the idea that staff could approve different scales of development. We started out relatively small and gradually expanded the authority of staff over time as we saw success. We had more and more projects going through in a noncontroversial way, and people accepted this new process pretty readily.
STROMBERG: What have some of the outcomes been since making the changes?
PACE: During the recession, we had an extremely low level of housing development, down to 265 to 400 units a year. The last four or five years, we've been in the 3,000- to 3,700-units-a-year range. I think we're in the top handful of cities in the entire state in terms of overall housing number of units per year.
Also, I think we were the leader recently in deed-restricted affordable housing units. That's one trend that we've seen in the past five or six years. I would attribute that to the approvals streamlining that we have done, because affordable housing had to run the gauntlet before: You advertise a proposed affordable housing project to the public and then take it to a planning commission meeting with a public hearing. I think that sets up a dynamic that can be very negative and make it difficult for projects like that to get approved. It adds more time and uncertainty, and the potential — and temptation — to tinker with the project at a public hearing podium can result in making the project less feasible.
STROMBERG: APA and its partner, the National League of Cities, created the Housing Supply Accelerator Playbook that gives planners strategies for their own communities. What aspects of Sacramento's planning approach can be adapted to other places?
PACE: Focus on updating outdated regulations and regulations that aren't achieving local objectives. Try to help the local leadership understand how the rules that are in place may not be meeting their goals and what could be done to streamline, right-size, or update them in a way that would help achieve those goals.
In Sacramento, we wanted to see our downtown and our commercial corridors be revitalized, and we realized that parking regulations, height limits, and density restrictions were not getting us there. Neither was our cumbersome development review process. When we explained that to the community and to our decision-makers, they were willing to adjust to achieve the goals that we agreed we all wanted to achieve.
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