Some Sacramento city council members are putting forward a suite of policy proposals designed to prevent more people in the region from becoming homeless.
“This is not a problem we can continue to ignore,” Council member Katie Valenzuela said during a press conference announcing the program Tuesday morning. “We can't continue to focus just on triaging our homelessness crisis … This is what moving upstream looks like.”
For Valenzuela, the only tenant on the city council, “moving upstream” means strengthening renter protections, requiring tenants be given the opportunity to purchase the buildings they live in when they go up for sale, and building more affordable housing. She said it's crucial the new housing be built by developers paying fair wages, so they’re also putting forward a proposal to require minimum labor standards.
The package, which will be announced with more details next week, is called “Sacramento Forward,” and is a joint project of Valenzuela and her colleagues on city council, members Caity Maple and Mai Vang. In addition to various local legislation, it includes a 2024 ballot initiative that would create a pot of money to help fund affordable housing units and emergency support for renters.
The Law and Legislation Committee is expected to consider the package during their meeting next Tuesday, and members will determine whether city staff can begin working on finalizing the proposals. Vang says she hopes the broader council will eventually take it up, and help develop the ballot measure.
“At the moment, the details of our proposal are still being determined, but as you heard earlier from community members and my colleagues, what we're doing right now is simply not working,” Vang said.
Developers say ‘the devil’s in the details’
At the press conference, council members were flanked by members of the Nor Cal Carpenters Union and SEIU Local 1021.
Carpenter Alonzo Quintana spoke about how getting connected with a carpentry apprenticeship program in 2018 changed his life. With his new earning potential, he went from living in a van in Oakland after leaving a state correctional facility to becoming sober and feeling like he’s a part of his community.
Carpenter Alonzo Quintana speaks during a "Sacramento Forward" press conference outside the Sacramento City Hall on Tuesday Aug. 8, 2023.Kate Wolffe / CapRadioNow, however, he said, “I see less and less work in the Sacramento area that provides this living wage and the benefits that allowed me to become successful.”
Although the full proposal is yet to be announced, the council plans to advocate for minimum labor standards that require any projects receiving “public support,” or funding, to pay their workers a prevailing wage and include health care.
Prevailing wage is a rate set by the California Director of the Department of Industrial Relations, and is normally informed by rates developed in collective bargaining agreements.
John Vignocchi is co-founder of Urban Capital, a Sacramento-based real estate development company, and said he attended the press conference because he was curious about what would be proposed. He said he’s worried there will be unintended consequences for developers, and will be watching where the package goes.
“I don't really think we need to add more red tape, but we definitely need to make sure that we're supporting our development community, that we're building more housing. That's the only way that we're going to get out of this crisis,” he said.
Vignocchi said his company supports builders unions, but they “don’t want to be forced to work with them.”
Roberto Jiménez runs Mutual Housing CA, which has been operating in Sacramento for more than 35 years. He says affordable housing projects used to be covered by the federal low income housing tax credit, but the credit hasn’t kept pace with inflation, and now only covers 50 to 75% of a project. The rest of the funding has to come from somewhere else, and can take years to secure. He says a revenue-generative ballot measure, if it were to pass, would streamline the process.
“If we're going to have a prevailing wage, then we need significantly more resources to cover that,” he said. “We want to make sure that the resources are available so that we can continue to deliver the housing.”
Jiménez says projects that pay prevailing wage cost about 30% more than projects where workers aren’t paid prevailing wage.
“The intent of these policies is good. And if the details line up, then we could have more and growing impact,” he said. “But the devil's in the details. We have to see the details.”
Councilmember Valenzuela said the increased costs are worth it.
“I'm not disputing the fact that it will make things harder," said Valenzuela. “We recognize that this is a change of the status quo, but the status quo simply is not working, especially for the individuals who are actually building the housing that we need to live.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified the departments which run the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program. It has been updated.
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