By Ken Magri

The City of Sacramento has attempted to come up with an imaginative plan to meet its housing needs through its new Small Developer Incubator Program.

The program seeks to recruit local contractors, architects, finance professionals and others involved in housing who can work to build more living units faster, but on a smaller scale than large housing projects.

The incubator program will concentrate on building what is called missing-middle housing, which consists of backyard cottages (also called accessory dwelling units, or ADUs), duplexes, fourplexes, work/live spaces and multi-family units that can fit into smaller single-family home sized lots. 

These buildings are too small and infrequent for conventional developers to build. Their profits come from building large scale projects. But small developers can be more resourceful and adaptable, benefiting from relationships they build and their understanding of a particular locale.

Beginning with a February meeting and a March workshop, the program will conclude with a middle housing boot camp to connect and train the participants, asking them to find more creative solutions.  

“Now it’s time for Sacramento to build a homegrown network of developers to realize our city’s potential to meet our great housing needs in an equitable and sustainable way,” said Greta Soos, senior planner for City of Sacramento’s Community Development Department.

To accomplish this, Sacramento is working with the nonprofit organization Proactive Leadership Advocating for Climate & Equity Initiative (PLACE). Based out of Washington DC, PLACE works with cities to create sustainable mixed-income, transit-oriented housing developments, especially catering to artists and other creative people. 

Sacramento is also partnering with the nonprofit organization Incremental Development Alliance (Inc Dev). Based in Minneapolis, Its goal is to train new small-scale developers who can build housing that is more considerate to location and style. 

After World War II, there was an immediate need for quick, cost-efficient housing. At that time, the solution was to build planned communities of single-family houses with cookie-cutter floor plans and minimal landscaping in newly created suburban lots. The first such community, built by Levitt and Sons in New York, inspired the nickname “Levittown” for any subsequent housing project with these same tract home qualities. Such planned communities offered quick affordable housing, but with little regard to style or sustainability,

But anyone growing up in Sacramento in the 1950s and 1960s remembers a different era when housing development was a more gradual thing. New houses, duplexes and smaller apartment complexes with varying designs slowly filled in the vacant lots that peppered local neighborhoods. Although factors like energy efficiency and sustainability were still barely considered, the homes built over time in neighborhoods like Southside, Curtis Park and Arden Park were more customized and attuned to changes in architectural stylings over the years.

In later decades major developers came into the Sacramento area and built large-scale planned communities like Gold River, Laguna and North Natomas. Similar in concept to Levittown housing, these planned communities were more energy efficient and used more sustainable materials.

But despite the variation in floor plans and home shapes, this housing was dominated by a bland sameness of brown and gray coloration. Due to zoning codes, the need for cost-effectiveness and buyers’ own expectations, these building trends spread across the nation, creating housing that looked the same from city to city.

The incubator project aims to get away from such architectural redundancy by enabling community-minded builders who are more in tune with our local needs. 

Kevin Dumler, a member of House Sacramento, a nonprofit that advocates for zoning reform, says changing zoning practices is key to making strides in affordable housing. 

“These types of small developers used to be quite common but their business model became impossible with exclusionary, single-family zoning,” Dumler said. “By ending exclusionary zoning, Sacramento is paving the way to bring back this ecosystem of builders and is cementing our city as a center for housing innovation.”

Sacramento City Council adopted a new general plan earlier this year to encourage development. 

“The City recently made a monumental shift in how we are regulating new housing development through our 2040 General Plan Update and subsequent Missing Middle Housing Interim Ordinance,” Soos said. 

That 2040 General Plan not only seeks to build housing where building is already possible, but to free up more possible sites by making changes in zoning ordinances. “The focus is on giving tools to local people who can decide what is best for their local neighborhoods [and] context,” Soos said.  

On Feb. 5, the City of Sacramento plans a free networking and information event. It is looking for experienced developers, commercial bankers, architects, designers, adaptive reuse builders, appraisers, insurers, community leaders, neighborhood activists, small businesses, labor organizations, realtors, representatives of housing agencies and related nonprofit organizations. 

The city especially wants builders of color, women and other people from historically underrepresented backgrounds who work in the development community. Representatives from PLACE and IDA will explain the Small Developer Incubator Program, hoping to assemble an initial group of participants. 

That event will be followed on March 7 by an 8-hour workshop specializing in small-scale development. This in-person class explains the processes a small developer encounters when creating a project to meet both the buyer’s and the city’s needs. After the March workshop, a two-day boot camp will be planned, either in-person or virtual, as the first part of an “ongoing bi-yearly training” for those who join the program, according to the city’s press release. 

Interested applicants can apply online by Nov. 22. 

This story is part of the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative. Solving Sacramento is supported by funding from the James Irvine Foundation and the James B. McClatchy Foundation. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our monthly newsletter.