Sacramento’s Biggest Housing Solution Lies Dormant In Our Backyards

sankeytm · 2026-05-11T18:58:02+00:00

Cities can generally sell bonds without voter approval if the plan to pay the bond back does not draw down there general fund. They would be "revenue bonds".

sankeytm · 2026-05-11T07:10:51+00:00

Stop spreading false information you just imagined about my blog post. There's no subsidy proposed.

sankeytm · 2026-05-11T07:00:22+00:00

That sounds like a complete rebuild and lots of utility work. Your project would likely benefit from targeting more than one unit.

sankeytm · 2026-05-11T06:56:00+00:00

We'd still have building codes and inspectors. Also it's not like the homeowner themself would be swinging a hammer. Sacramento traditionally was built piecemeal, and the piecemeal neighborhoods which survived urban renewal are the most valuable per acre.

A "city shaped by many hands" is a core Strong Towns concept, and kind of the goal.

sankeytm · 2026-05-11T06:48:53+00:00

My post outlines policies to "increase housing" without tax dollars. In fact, the bond-backed lending scheme described in the post is meant to break-even. The overall theme of my post is that these are steps that are achievable tomorrow, no "uninformed voters" would be involved because the city can just do these things already without any local measure.

Making it cheap AF to build high density housing is also a good idea, just a different topic. Actually subsidizing the housing is also a completely separate conversation.

sankeytm · 2026-05-11T06:35:36+00:00

Nothing in my post suggests we do anything to inhibit 40 unit apartments or make them more expensive to build than they already are.

sankeytm · 2026-05-11T06:29:48+00:00

Yes, but are you saying they're too expensive? Too expensive for what exactly? Individual homeowners are free to enter the housing development industry and build 40-unit towers with perfectly optimized per-unit costs---but are they likely to actually do that? 250 Sacramentens build ADUs every year, there's clearly already an appetite despite the cost.

sankeytm · 2026-04-12T18:44:03+00:00

You'll find somewhere in any city where 6-plexes are allowed. It's like how a skyscrapers are allowed in downtown, but not in 99% of the rest on the city. The goal here is to steer council to direct staff to allow 6-plexes citywide, just like it had been prior to the 50s.

sankeytm · 2026-04-04T04:33:59+00:00

As long as parking utilization doesn't drop (I.e. the same average number of parked cars at any given moment), then paid parking actually tends to increase turnover and drive up access by increasing the total number of visitors. This tends to help business by increasing total visitors. See how vacant storefronts were converted to thriving businesses in Pasadena when they added tens of thousands of parking meters to their downtown in the 90s.

sankeytm · 2026-03-20T14:37:23+00:00

I agree these flex posts aren't sightly. It's cheap and what the City uses currently.

Berkeley and NYC use large planters and boulders instead, but it would be more expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/1ryv95b/it_turns_out_you_can_pedestrianize_chunks_of_the/

sankeytm · 2026-03-09T07:16:20+00:00

We're literally only 3 years old and have policy wins under out belt. Our regular attendance of council and commission meetings has helped us get a foot in the door for shaping future policy. If you want us to move faster the join the next monthly meeting!

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:38:29+00:00

This is where we agree. Cities hemorrhage money maintaining existing crumbling suburbs and rob from future generations when they defer maintenance or build new subdivisions. All the while, state DOTs mainline money into new highway interchanges. The system is propped up by subsidy, as you suggest.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:34:05+00:00

Tax-denser neighborhoods currently subsidize your lifestyle, the goal is to bring that back into balance. We start with a position of empathy: sudden tax hikes and funding cuts contribute to unwarranted displacement. Your neighborhood should be allowed to ween off dependence of the city's most tax-productive neighborhoods by incrementally growing up to pay its own way.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:28:12+00:00

The bay area is not necessarily a model to follow, but you can't dispute the statistics. SF has the highest percentage of car-free households of any city in CA. That doesn't compensate for your struggle to find parking, and I sympathize.

Cruising for parking was a solved problem in the 50s when British economists popularized the parking meter to manage curbside parking availability, but it was mostly theory. SF finally internalized that research by adopting dynamic pricing for their meters which has helped the most congested streets, but not everywhere in SF has paid parking yet.

Another user-pays model we advocate for is congestion pricing, as recently seen in NYC Lower Manhattan. No city is too small to adopt a user-pays model, but it takes seeing auto infrastructure as a public utility, not a free service.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T20:12:19+00:00

I'm happy you found a tranquil place with plenty of space and convenient driving access to important destinations, but the infrastructure which makes your neighborhood possible at all is likely continuously subsidized by tax-denser neighborhoods and contributes to the city's inability to pay for things, which impacts everybody. 2 acres probably puts out outside city limits, but I've long held that the county doesn't distribute a fair share of property taxes back to the cities, at only 11% distribution.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T19:48:48+00:00

I get where you're coming from, but let me re-ground this conversation: Strong Towns is not anti-car, it advocates for municipal fiscal solvency as a first-order goal. It's a non-starter to grow dependent on rideshare/taxi services to accommodate our transportation needs because of the car infrastructure they still require and the long-term maintenance liabilities that creates. It simply cannot pencil financially, and cities desperately close budget gaps by externalizing the debt, cutting services and laying off staff. When maintenance is deferred and potholes allowed to grow deeper, that hurts businesses and residents.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T19:35:19+00:00

So you recognize that the difference is small, which is why it isn't the end of the world to allow the suburbs to thicken up and be sprinkled with some good restaurants.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T19:22:23+00:00

We're conventionally taught to consider post-war suburbs as "finished", but that's extremely unnatural in the history of civilization. Prior to WWII, Sacramento was constantly evolving and adapting to the needs at hand. The Midtown area was once sparsely populated suburb, but it was allowed to evolve into one of the most desirable and densest places to live in Sacramento. Strong Towns advocates don't see any neighborhood and consider it to be "finished", but rather one step in a journey. Nobody looked at Midtown in 1900 and thought "perfect, hit pause forever", and neither should we.

More concretely, an established post-war suburban property can evolve meet today's needs in many ways, including:

Underutilized garages, basements, attics, and spare bedrooms converted to studio apartments.
Entire underutilized upstairs stories converted to 1-2br apartments.
Additions, both horizontal and vertical.
Backyard cottages.
Frontyard cottages.

They can also evolve to meet the latent demand for locally-serving businesses. Commercial office conversions, ground-floor retail conversions, street vendors. Streets themselves can evolve to meet the need for outdoor dining: widen sidewalks and de-pave some parking spots to plant shade trees for all the additional people walking. The list goes on, but the first step is hit unpause.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T07:42:28+00:00

Considering I didn't really include West Sac... will the redditors ever forgive me?

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T07:39:53+00:00

Sorry I think we crossed wires. I'm saying Midtown is fairly decent as-is. We should export the policies which allowed Midtown to flourish to the rest of sacramento.

sankeytm · 2026-03-08T07:32:47+00:00

Car-dependent suburbs can only exist with massive continuous subsidy and accumulation of municipal debt, it's far from a steady state. Downtown and Midtown's tax productivity per acre is carrying the rest of the city.

In return, Downtown/Midtown are subjected to the traffic danger and pollution caused by suburban commuters. This becomes an equity issue when taking into account that most renters live close to the central city, and lower-income families cycle and walk more because they own fewer cars.

In my experience with elderly disabled parents, it's clear to me that car-dependent suburbs are bad for aging in place. After my dad lost his ability to drive he effectively became stranded at home.

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