By Nick Brunner | Solving Sacramento | Special to the OBSERVER
There’s a hum in the city around the year 2040. Sounds distant and mysterious — but, really, it’s only 16 years away, and it’s the year Sacramento is focusing on for its next general plan.
Danielle Foster and Roshaun Davis have been planning ahead. Foster, the executive director of the Capitol Area Development Authority, and Roshaun Davis, founder of Unseen Heroes and CLTRE, discuss the city’s present and future housing needs and challenges, from continued home shortages and rent hikes to first-time homebuyers about how to stay local.
Foster: I began working in city planning and community development in the region a little over 20 years ago. I joined the City of Sacramento team in 2019, ready to give back to my community and our paths crossed during that time. Roshaun … what brought you to the interest in housing and focused on diverse artists?
Davis: I’ve just always been an artist. I’ve always been a creative, a poet, rapper, writing and practicing in my bedroom and performing in high school. I’m always looking out for the little guy, representing for the underdog, which brings the city into perspective.
I feel like we have a chip on our shoulder because we aren’t San Francisco. It’s changing now, but for a long time it’s: We weren’t LA, we weren’t San Francisco, we weren’t New York. So, for me, it’s like: How do we implement things here to make this place better? It starts with creativity.
One of our friends, Julie Young, reached out and just really started talking to me about ownership and how not to be displaced in a lot of these different spaces. And we had a beautiful conversation. … She talked to me about development and showed me the ropes of how we can do that. And so then it was like, OK, what would this mean if we actually own space? What would this mean if we owned our homes and the places that we live in or that we do business? And part of my background too, living in Oak Park and doing business below where I lived, I got to see some of those benefits where you only pay one smart bill or you only pay one wi-fi [bill]. So it’s actually a cost reduction, as well.
That’s kind of how we came up with the concept for The Nest – how do you take a single-family lot, split it into eight parcels, give ownership opportunities to eight different artist creatives and then have them live, work? And then also create community around it where they can open up on First Friday or Second Saturday in unison and make money to then pay for living there.
Foster: Riight around the time of COVID, we started seeing a big influx of folks coming from the Bay Area and our housing prices continuing to go up. At the city we were focused on the Aggie Square development around the UC Davis Medical Center and trying to figure out how to stabilize housing there, which includes parts of Oak Park. … As part of our community outreach, the community wanted to see more homeownership opportunities. So we identified partners that could help us with anti-displacement programming and our paths crossed again. …
Can you talk a little bit about what the CLTRE Keeper program is and what the community response was when you introduced it?
Davis: CLTRE Keeper is our first-time homebuyer program. But there’s some other things that we’re working on…how do we keep culture in neighborhoods? With our first-time homebuyer program, we are taking 25 people through an 8-week course on homeownership. Through these eight weeks, they learned just the basics of homebuying, like what they should look out for. We brought in lending partners, so they got to talk to lenders. We brought in other ancillary things … so folks got to talk to, like, a pest control person. What we found is folks are ready for this, but they just didn’t have the education component. So for us to be able to sit in space every Saturday for eight weeks and just really teach them not only about the process of actually purchasing your home, but also how to maintain it, how to keep it.
Foster: That’s what I’m hearing: how to be a homeowner.
Davis: And then also how to be a better person in the city. … We’re talking about civic engagement and what it means when you own your home and a ZIP code and who your council member is so you can really start to play an active role and community. Someone in our cohort had been living in Oak Park for 28 years and had never owned a home because she just didn’t think that she could. Other folks in there have been displaced multiple times where they rented a place and the owner sold it and wanted to live in it. … Just being able to move the needle on those things has just been amazing.
Foster: When you introduced the program, how many applicants did you get?
Davis: So we put it out for two weeks and there were 367 applicants, which just goes to show you the need for housing. … We only had spots for 25. There’s a demand there that has to be addressed. For a lot of folks, people think of housing being just like someone who’s unhoused. But there’s people who are living like check to check that if they miss one payment, the landlord may kick them out. So we address that in a different way, but kind of putting that education component in there to make sure that it’s there and we can change that narrative by the year 2040.
Foster: You brought in a lot of professionals in the real estate area, in the homeownership maintenance side of things. Collaboration has strengthened our response and I hope it will continue to do so.
Davis: Collaboration is key. It’s like you don’t know what you don’t know, you know? And I feel like a lot of times if you’re stuck in a space where you feel like you know everything, you’re probably not the right person in the room to get it done.
Foster: I think the exciting thing that I am seeing in our community is more creativity about how to respond to the needs of affordable housing. More people coming to the table thinking through options and what resources they can bring to have more housing and a range of housing types in Sacramento, which is really thrilling for me to see. So I’m grateful for our local developers who are tapping into this space — maybe even outside of their comfort zone — to think about how do we do workforce housing, how do we do first time homeownership?
What we’re starting to see are different sectors figuring out what their best resources and skills are to bring to this challenge so that we can piece those together and most effectively provide a range of housing types for Sacramento. I get excited to have those conversations I just want to keep nurturing and supporting. But you’re right — we have to think of the whole person, all of the components that help someone be successful. Housing is definitely stability and support, but if you don’t have the income to pay for housing or the transportation or all of the many components that go into successful stability, then, yeah, you don’t have an active community member who wants to stay, who can engage with Sacramento and support it.
Davis: In 2008 when we first started, literally all of our creative friends were leaving – 15 years later, folks are now starting to move here. … But the folks who have gone out and made a name for themselves in different cities are representing for Sacramento and then bringing culture back. There are a lot of folks who have made it to high, high levels and still represent Sacramento on a national level, which then turns around and creates better opportunities for us here. … We’re reading all these different studies where Sacramento is becoming a mega-region and folks from San Francisco are now coming in. … I think as long as we continue to collaborate those opportunities will continue to happen and be able to effectively change the culture of Sacramento by the year 2040.
Foster: Well, what’s exciting for us as CADA — because we are a state and city partnership organization — I think Sacramento was a little city in the past. I think we’ve fully grown into the capital city. I’m sure it will continue.
Davis: We’re the little engine that could. …
I always give this picture to folks: There are people right now — and it sounds funny to say, but it’s real — that work at the city, that drive in to their office in 2023, sit down at their desk, get teleported to 2040, and work on what Sacramento is going to look like in 2040. Then they clock out and then they’re back in 2024. If we don’t have community and folks on the grassroots involved, then we’re going to get the same results. Because the folks that are planning for 2040 right now aren’t necessarily folks from the community. And that’s been one of the gaps that have existed in Sacramento for a long time.
When I look at 2030, I’m looking at how many partnerships did we create? How many community-driven initiatives did we create? I’m looking at where the planning for, let’s just say, the Broadway corridor. … When you drive down the Broadway corridor now it looks a lot different than it did two years ago, because now all of these developments are going up. But if we look at …. 2030, there is going to be housing there. There’s housing being built right there right now. So what kind of community activations can we have there? How can we have community space there? So now it’s [about] building those partnerships out. Meeting with some of the developers over there and saying, OK, you have 136 units coming over here, what are the amenities for the community? How do we help with that? The Broadway corridor as one of those spaces that’s going to look completely different right before our eyes.
Foster: CADA has focused most of its energy into the area around the state Capitol, and then added the R Street Corridor in the ’90s. And we’ve seen great success in all accounts of the revitalization of both of these neighborhoods. I think what we are starting to see more of is some of that work, more residential properties happening down R Street to the west and we are looking at more of the downtown. Given the shifts that have happened in employment downtown and the opportunities to bring more residents downtown, as CADA, we’re looking for more development partners and creative solutions to provide a variety of housing downtown.
With the loss of redevelopment funding that happened in 2012, we’ve seen a decrease in that workforce housing component. And so we’ve got market rate developers coming to the table with us and figuring out how do we do this cross-collaboration with nonprofits and have an efficient use of space, higher-density housing that we can provide at workforce housing prices so that we have employees that don’t have to commute very far to get to work. And we have employees that are here on the weekends and supporting the vibrant qualities of downtown. CADA is really stepping more into the space of how can we help facilitate more residents and more events and more art downtown and be a supporter of those pieces and help with those conversations?
Davis: This is one of the things, just coming from the creative class, like not really understanding our value coming into a neighborhood and creating content, whether it be storefronts, block parties, music circles, writers circles — all of these different things that are natural to us as creatives and then the equity that comes with it got me into the ownership side.
I moved into Oak Park in 2014 before the big boom in Oak Park – people are finally able to afford to buy a home and then ] couldn’t buy a home in Oak Park, which is crazy. Then year after year, seeing the equity in my house in Greenhaven go up, and just then being, like, oh, if this is how it goes up in Greenhaven, how did it go up in Oak Park and spaces that we really made cool.
Foster: I remember during COVID it coming up even more around the value of the creative community, because it was keeping us together and holding us together in this spirit of Sacramento and that we’re in this together. And it was very apparent that the artist community was an integral part of that work.
Davis: I had lived through the gentrification of Oak Park. Our CLTRE Keeper program is literally an anti-gentrification tool. When you can put people who have lived in a neighborhood for 28 years, 10 years, or whatever it may be, when you can change that from being renters to being owners. … That’s what it’s all about. If we don’t own, then we can’t bring culture. … The more and more that we get people to really understand, as creatives, as artists, the neighborhood and the needle doesn’t move without us. So if we can get ahead of it in these spaces and come up with community ways to own that dilapidated building, that the owner doesn’t even live in Sacramento, he lives in Folsom and can’t even find his key. If we can take that away and own that as either a few of us or a group of us, then that creates those roots. And that’s what it’s all about, is like getting those roots. … So that’s why it’s so important for homeownership with creatives or business ownership.
Gentrification is going to happen. It is the cycle of a neighborhood and the value is going to go up. It is going to happen. But we put in place these anti-gentrification tools of ownership in the right folks’ hands … that’s really what we’re looking for here.
Foster: CADA was doing some of this work early. CADA did the Warehouse Artist Lofts with CFY Development early on. There has been some focus on: How do we keep the creative community in Sacramento? But I think what’s exciting to me now is we’ve got champions in the space that are focused on artists specifically. And so the creation of CLTRE as a community development corporation is a big deal because we have nonprofits who’ve been, or for-profits that have been, dabbling in the work of providing housing for artists. But now we have an organization that is really focused on that in a full force way.
We’re also seeing more policy shifts in the city side of things where there was a lot of conversation with Aggie Square around anti-displacement. That’s what was overlooked in Oak Park. And I think with the Aggie Square development specifically, there were resources set aside: $10 million; $5 million from the city, $5 million from the university to work on housing programs. So that’s a big deal and that’s a big investment, ensuring that … the community has the ability to stay. I think we’re just looking more holistically at the issue. And there’s that convergence of not just anti-displacement programming, but also the cultural arts side of things.
Davis: I grew up in a neighborhood called Lincoln Village. Outside of that space, people would probably say, oh, that’s an underserved neighborhood. But, to me, I call it a culturally rich neighborhood. For me, it’s how do we better serve our neighborhoods? I always think about hip hop, just in general. Hip hop started just on a block, you know.
Foster: In a neighborhood.
Davis: In a neighborhood, and now it’s this 50-year tradition that’s been around. That’s how we shape and move culture on a grand level.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This conversation has been edited for length, flow and clarity. It has been adapted from our podcast, “Housing in the Capital,” which is recorded, edited and produced by Nick Brunner. 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.