After more than two years and an equal number of lawsuits , the state’s battle against the city of Elk Grove for its refusal to build affordable housing is over. But the war is not, unless the rest of the state is sufficiently cowed into building the units that low-income residents desperately need to call home.
California Attorney Rob Bonta announced Wednesday morning that because Elk Grove illegally blocked the Oak Rose affordable housing development in its “Old Town” district in 2022, it is now subject to numerous penalties.
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Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom stood together on Wednesday and crystallized their stance for cities that still haven’t gotten the message: “Whether you are Huntington Beach or Elk Grove or Woodside or Pasadena,” Bonta said, “you have a duty and an obligation to follow the law of the state of California.”
But if Bonta and Newsom truly wanted to bring the hammer down on wealthy cities that refuse to build their fair share of housing — be it Huntington Beach or otherwise — then the punishment they cooked up for Elk Grove doesn’t exactly fit the crime.
I was hopeful Bonta’s involvement would give these laws the legal “oomph” they deserve , but the AG’s settlement with Elk Grove wound up sounding more like a “pfft.”
Elk Grove’s denial was illegal
The saga started back in July of 2022, when the Elk Grove City Council denied a proposed 66-unit supportive housing project for lower-income households at risk of homelessness, even though those same city officials approved a similar project for market-rate housing just a few blocks away. After the developer sued, the supportive housing project was ultimately relocated to a city-owned property earlier this year. But the state launched its own lawsuit against Elk Grove for breaking several state housing laws that require cities to approve such projects under certain circumstances.
“We were very appreciative of the state taking action the way that it did,” said Excelerate Housing CEO Dana Trujillo, the development company behind the Oak Rose Apartments. “If the state had not taken action, our legal dispute with the city would have dragged on for probably several years longer.”
In the settlement with the state, announced Wednesday, Bonta said the city of Elk Grove had agreed to strict reporting requirements over the next five years to monitor its compliance with the state housing laws it had broken. It will also be required to identify a second site, somewhere in a “high resource area,” Bonta said. Trujillo confirmed Excelerate has not been approached by the city to work on that project.
Elk Grove will also be required to repay the State of California $150,000 in attorneys’ fees and other costs.
$150,000 in attorneys’ fees is practically Monopoly money for a city like Elk Grove which boasts a $374 million budget , but I’m not suggesting that the punishment necessarily needs to be monetary (or, ultimately, out of the pockets of taxpayers.)
It just needs to sting.
A slap on the wrist
Bonta’s settlement requires that, instead of the originally-proposed project of one affordable housing complex near the city’s downtown core, Elk Grove will now need to build two.
“They don’t want the 66-unit housing project built?” Bonta said. “They’re going to get 146; so you tell me if that worked out for them.”
That’s a good start, but perhaps forcing the city to build 300 — or even 600 — affordable units in the inner boundaries of the city would have truly hurt (and it would have had a better chance of sending the kind of message Bonta clearly hoped to convey).
That’s the kind of punishment that would command the attention of the stuffed shirts in Elk Grove and any other city that thinks it should cater above poor and working class Californians, who are increasingly priced out of the state’s housing market.
To their credit, Bonta’s office stipulated that there would be no more pushing affordable housing developments to the corners of the city limits — which is exactly what happened in Elk Grove after they settled with Trujillo and Excelerate.
The city likes to boast that it has “provided $78 million in funding for affordable housing projects in Elk Grove” since 2004, including transitional housing and permanent supportive housing. But a quick look at a map shows most of those projects have been on the outer edges of the sprawling city, with little or laborious access to nearby grocery stores, retail or transportation.
The new site they had to hand over (for free, by the way) to Excelerate Housing is mere blocks from the city limits, at 8484 Elk Grove-Florin Rd. The old site, at 9252 Elk Grove Blvd., was a stone’s throw from multi-million dollar housing developments and in the heart of a commercial district, including a grocery store. The city can pretend it didn’t want the Oak Rose development built too close to a nearby daycare all it wants, but the real reason wealthy neighbors fought so hard to keep that overgrown lot empty is clear to anyone with eyes to see.
Bonta also stipulated that this mandated, second development will have “to be in a higher resource area than the original project … surrounded by even more supports, job opportunities, educational opportunities, transit opportunities (and) business opportunities,” a demand for more from cities that choose to blatantly flout state laws.
But Bonta declined to say exactly where the new development would be, likely because he doesn’t know yet — and that’s a shame. His office should have stipulated that the original site be used for affordable housing.
Punish cities the way we punish the homeless
The last two years have been a long and vastly annoying saga for both the developer and the state, mostly thanks to Elk Grove officials choosing to fall over themselves trying to explain why they broke the law, rather than just admitting they did. (But with developers’ sweethearts like Elk Grove Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen and Sacramento County Supervisor/former Elk Grove City Councilman Pat Hume at the wheel in the south county, that’s not surprising.)
Ultimately, I suppose the settlement is a win, but I’m not sure how far limited state oversight, a measly fine and a stern look from the governor will go to persuade cities like Huntington Beach — which seems determined to push the boundaries of state housing laws as far as they can possibly go — to change their ways.
Elk Grove may have learned its lesson (for now), but who’s to say that after the five years of oversight they won’t be back to their old games? A housing development pitched to the city council this very week may not even be completed in the next five years; 10 or even 20 years of oversight might have been a more suitable penance.
As Bonta himself said: “California’s housing laws are not optional.” The state’s punishment for breaking those laws must be as damaging — or worse — as its punishments for Californians forced to sleep on the streets.
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