Can Sacramento Build Its Way Out of the Housing Crisis? Experts Weigh In

This story is part of our April 2026 issue. To read the print version, click here.

For more than a decade, elected officials have acknowledged that
the Capital Region is suffering from an affordable housing
crisis, one that’s crippling the ability of locals to handle rent
and blocking thousands of families from the home-buying market.

Experts agree that creating more housing supply is key to
stabilizing prices in the long run. Accordingly, city and county
leaders across the Capital Region have been trying to support
developers in quickly getting projects off the ground. The idea
behind this cooperation is that bringing new apartments and
single-family homes online, on a grand scale, will start to
alleviate the atmosphere of insecurity that’s lingering from
Fairfield to Folsom — and everywhere in between.

Comstock’s recently summoned an expert panel to discuss how these
partnerships between builders and local municipalities are going.
Our gathering included Justin Walters, vice president of land
development and project management of Somers West; Ron Brown,
president and CEO of Brown Construction; Anton Garcia, vice
president of asset management for Taylor Builders; Kevin Carson,
president, Risewell Sacramento division; Craig Adelman, CEO,
Mutual Housing California; Milo Terzich, vice president for
development and entitlements for USA Properties Fund and Tim
Murphy, president and CEO of North State Building Industry
Association.

A housing development in Sacramento. (Shutterstock photo)

We started by discussing whether the various elected officials
who have been asking builders for help have actually followed
through with directing their governmental staff to cut red tape
and streamline processes. Our development gurus in the room
agreed that, on the whole, public officials are now attempting to
quickly usher in new projects. However, they say that major
roadblocks remain, most notably in the form of excessive local
building fees, the ongoing forces of NIMBYism, and the
weaponization of the California Environmental Quality Act.

On that last point, journalists have independently documented
that CEQA is sometimes used by labor unions and special interest
groups as a negotiation leveler for business contracts, rather
than for its original intent of guaranteeing clean air, soil and
water. Builders and a number of environmental advocates are now
gathering signatures for a potential upcoming ballot measure
called the Building an Affordable California Act, which is aimed
at spurring home creation and green energy projects in a way that
mitigates the misuse of CEQA.

Here is how what was ultimately a solutions-oriented conversation
on all these topics transpired.

Comstock’s: I believe the term “housing crisis”
has been a part of the Sacramento region’s political conversation
for nearly a decade. What’s your view of the crisis level?

Craig Adelman (Mutual Housing California): We
have, in my mind, a structurally deficient housing system in
California. And so, when I hear your question, I think of it
particularly through a lens of housing equity and housing
attainability. The region is falling further and further behind
on those measures. Market-rate housing is an important component
of producing the housing stock we need; and yet, both that and
our system, are not going to come anywhere close to meeting the
needs of the entire population any time soon. Frankly, not in my
lifetime. We have to recognize that.

And so the region is trying to do what it can to address
affordability through both policy and subsidy, and it’s an uphill
battle. We have seen, over the period you’re asking about,
homelessness explode. We’ve seen housing affordability become
less and less accessible, and those are failures. … I do think
the region is doing what it can, but we are swimming upstream
when it comes to meeting the needs of the Sacramento area.

Justin Walters (Somers West): When it comes down
to the brass tacks, there’s still a lot of hurdles to getting
projects approved. Every builder in the region is trying to get
their projects done quicker, while reducing fees as much as
possible, because at the end of the day, those fees go right down
to the end user, which is the homebuyer.

Tim Murphy (BIA): It’s been challenging to
educate local governments on fees and what effect the fees have
on overall housing attainability for families. … For our MSA
(metropolitan statistical area), the median home price is
$569,000, and someone needs $161,000 in income to qualify. So,
for every thousand-dollar increase in that median price of a
house, there are 575 families who are priced out.

Comstock’s: What exactly is the role that local
building fees are playing in making housing and rent prices so
high in this area?

The average fee total in Sacramento County, before you turn a
shovel in the dirt, is $109,000 for a single-family home.

Tim Murphy, president and CEO, North State
Building Industry Association

Tim Murphy (BIA): In the last five years, fees
have gone up 25 percent. The average fee total in Sacramento
County, before you turn a shovel in the dirt, is $109,000 for a
single-family home. … That $109,000 doesn’t include the costs
around what the environmental mitigation might be. It doesn’t
include inclusionary zoning or affordable housing mandates. That
number is just for the critical infrastructure that goes along
with building a single-family home.

Kevin Carson of Risewell Homes.

Kevin Carson (Risewell): The problem is, BIA may
get a big win on reducing a fee, but then lumber is up 21 percent
since December. And then building codes get updated every three
years, adding $8,000 to $12,000 to the price of a house. … We
need to look, globally, at what the whole price of a house is.

Anton Garcia (Taylor Builders): We’re building a
project right now that took 20 years to get certified.
These homes are going to sell for $500,000 to just shy of a
million dollars. So, a wide spectrum. It took 20 years to entitle
it, and an additional $100 million in costs for public
improvements, just to flush the first toilet. … There’s not one
fee involved which doesn’t go up every year for the cost of
living. And it’s not just a 2 percent or 3 percent escalation; it
is a full-blown update to the fee.

Comstock’s: Are there any potential solutions to
the situation with fees beyond governments just abandoning them?

Justin Walters (Somers West): What every
jurisdiction could do is defer them. Builders should be able to
pay their building permit fee at the final inspection, so they’re
not carrying those costs. Because we’re not building one house at
a time. We might go in for 20 permits at once. That’s more than
$2 million just on the fees; and if it’s a five-to-six-month
build-out on a single-family house, and we don’t have a buyer and
we’re holding that house — maybe it’s nine months — time is
money. Loans with interest are money. If we were able to defer
that burden until the close of escrow, that would be huge.

Anton Garcia (Taylor Builders): I agree. These
are impact fees. They’re about impacts on schools, traffic, sewer
and water. The impact doesn’t occur until someone is living in
the house, so I think it’s only reasonable to ask that they are
deferred until someone moves in.

Comstock’s: Housing instability has touched so
many people in the region. Has that changed the traditional
dynamic of instant community pushback whenever a new project is
proposed? The so-called NIMBYism phenomenon?

Kevin Carson (Risewell): Over the last 15 years,
it has gotten better. When we built The Cannery in Davis and
McKinley Village near East Sacramento, there was a lot of
pushback during the process for each, even though, today, those
are both projects that are well thought of. In fact, some of the
biggest opponents of McKinley Village ended up buying houses
there.

Ron Brown of Brown Construction.

Ron Brown (Brown Construction): I will say about
The Cannery, being a Davis resident myself since 1968, it is a
great project. Yet, back when it was proposed, I’d hear endlessly
from friends and family, ‘Oh, this is bad.’ It was a cannery
before, and you could smell it from August to October. The whole
town smelled of tomatoes. But it was still popular to complain
because it was one of the only things going on at the time.

Craig Adelman (Mutual Housing): One of the more
interesting manifestations that I see now around traditional
NIMBYism is this realization of, “Oh, my family had to move
away.” It’s this mentality of, “Didn’t have a housing crisis
until it hit me, and I can’t see my grandkids anymore.”…

At the end of the day, California has given way too much power to
homeowners who don’t really care about something like The
Cannery: They just care about change. They don’t want it. That’s
because they see it as a threat to the biggest asset in their
household, which is their home. And as long as we both empower
those folks and have a system where they are feeling economically
threatened by the addition of new housing, we are going to
continue to shoot ourselves in the foot. …

(Mutual Housing) has a development under construction right now
at 16th and T streets in downtown Sacramento. It’s a five-story,
appropriate urban-dense multi-family development. There’s a
historic old home next door, and the daughter of its owners —
who’s a resident there as well — came to the groundbreaking of
our project. It ended up being a good example of some of the
generational complexity around this issue. The daughter was
really excited to see that an old auto repair shop at a prime
intersection was now becoming housing. But, she said, “My folks,
they’re upset about the shadow on their house.”

Tim Murphy (BIA): I do think the newer
Yes-In-My-Backyard movement, or the YIMBY approach, is real, and
it’s budding.

A housing development under construction in West Sacramento in
2026. (Shutterstock photo)

Comstock’s: Let’s talk about the relationship
between CEQA reform and solving the housing crisis.

Milo Terzich (USA Properties): NIMBYs wouldn’t
even exist if CEQA didn’t give them the power to. We build
projects all over the state, and we get more CEQA challenges from
labor unions than we do from NIMBYs. We’ve seen CEQA challenges
in some communities that we’re building in, and the challenges
came from the city next door, just because they didn’t get a
transportation agreement. Very few CEQA challenges are
environmentally related. Very few. It’s labor — and it’s a
lever they get to pull.

NIMBYs wouldn’t even exist if CEQA didn’t give them the power
to.

Milo Terzich, vice president for development and
entitlements, USA Properties Fund

Anton Garcia (Taylor Builders): CEQA is its own
business. That’s the least-kept secret. … There’s a lot of
appreciation around the environment when it comes to development,
or at least more than I think people would ever really recognize.
If you really sit in these meetings, and look at the open space
management that we’re looking at — with us buying off-site
mitigation pieces of land to be put into perpetuity for
conservation, essentially forever — I think people would
recognize that we’re trying to do our best to really conserve
what we can, while still trying to meet the needs of the public
in delivering housing in the most affordable way.

Milo Terzich (USA Properties): CEQA has been the
No. 1 barrier to housing in California over the last 40 years,
bar none. You can say that costs are, but if we didn’t have to
run the risk of not getting our CEQA approvals, it wouldn’t cost
so much, and that cost wouldn’t ultimately be on the homebuyer.

Ron Brown (Brown Construction): I agree. When it
comes to CEQA and the pressure that comes from labor groups
through it, that needs to be removed from the law. I personally
don’t understand how it’s allowed to be used as a weapon like
that. I mean, I know why they use it — I’ve been involved
in a lot of those discussions. They’re being allowed to utilize
it to hamstring projects, so that they can force the developer’s
hand into certain agreements.

Tim Murphy (BIA): CEQA is not going to go away,
but I’m very optimistic about the ballot initiative that is going
to be coming forward later this year (the Building an Affordable
California Act). It was designed with input and negotiations with
the environmental community. This is something that I think is
going to be broadly appealing to a lot of different voter blocks.

Kevin Carson (Risewell): There’s no question
that if builders get the development timeframe down from six
years to two years, they’re going to get financing, and they’re
going to get people interested in projects. Right now, time
delays and costs are still making that affordability a huge
issue.

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