Thanks to the advocacy of the California Apartment Association and other business groups, the city of Sacramento has shelved a proposal to penalize owners of underdeveloped private properties with fees as high as $2,146 and nearly $900 a month.<\/p>\n
The proposal, titled the Enhanced Vacant Lot and Vacant Building Monitoring and Enforcement Program, began in September 2025 as a push to institute a vacancy tax on undeveloped properties. CAA successfully argued with its allies to prevent creation of the tax, but the ordinance re-emerged Tuesday in a new form \u2014 a code enforcement strategy that would have generated city revenues through a monthly monitoring system.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is nothing surgical in this proposal, it\u2019s an obvious cash grab,\u201d CAA Vice President of Local Public Affairs Matt McDonald told the city\u2019s Law & Legislation Committee. \u201cIt paints all property owners with a broad brush instead of going after just bad actors.\u201d<\/p>\n
CAA\u2019s advocacy stressed the importance of a targeted enforcement strategy \u2014 one that holds negligent property owners accountable without penalizing responsible landlords and developers already navigating difficult market conditions. Rather than imposing broad fees, CAA urged the city to partner with housing providers to facilitate development of vacant parcels and help expand Sacramento\u2019s housing supply.<\/p>\n
Supporters of the fee joined the debate, accusing landlords of driving up housing costs through inaction. \u201cWe are in a housing affordability crisis, and one key issue contributing to that is speculative land hoarding of real estate,\u201d said Jeff Kessler, president of the Vacancy Project.<\/p>\n
Committee members sided with the business community, declining to advance the ordinance to the full city council. Among their concerns: the burden the fees would place on property owners of every size and the addition of as many as 25 new staff positions at a time when the city faces a $66 million budget deficit. The committee voted 4-0 to indefinitely table the proposal \u2014 a significant win for private property owners throughout Sacramento.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thanks to the advocacy of the California Apartment Association and other business groups, the city of Sacramento has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[121,123,122],"class_list":["post-229922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}