Sacramento Central City Specific Plan
City of Sacramento, CA
BAE served as the housing and economics subcontractor to ESA for this assignment to prepare a Specific Plan and design guidelines, Historic Resource Survey, and EIR for the City of Sacramento. This work is a key program to implement the Downtown Housing Initiative, which aims to provide 10,000 new places to live within the central city area, in ten years.
BAE’s work included an in-depth housing market analysis, including detailed projections of housing demand by income level, by tenure, and by household size. BAE’s work also included case studies of central city housing development in five peer cities across the U.S., examining housing production levels and the local policies and programs that supported increases in central city housing supplies. BAE also prepared a housing cost development comparison for Sacramento and peer cities; identifying key factors and opportunities for the City of Sacramento to facilitate cost effective development of higher density housing. BAE assisted ESA in drafting recommendations for a holistic set of housing and economic policies and actions that would encourage and support robust central city housing production for households at all income levels. This project included extensive community outreach, including developer/stakeholder focus group sessions and community outreach events. Companion work commissioned by the Capitol Area Development Authority (CADA) and the City of Sacramento included more detailed analysis of downtown workforce housing demand, including a worker survey that attracted over 4,000 individual responses, and interviews with key central City multifamily property managers regarding worker household demand and issues surrounding preservation of older Class B/C apartment properties as sources of moderate-priced housing. This plan won a Statewide Award of Excellence in Planning from the California Chapter of the American Planning Association.