ASP Scope
Scope of Work for Fall ULI Technical Assistance Panel
In California, the smart-growth plans promoted by cities, regional agencies, and other public institutions in major metropolitan areas are not delivering the residential units needed to address our state’s housing crisis. Even in cities that have embraced policies intended to increase housing production, housing affordability remains a critical issue.
More specifically, in the Sacramento region, commercial corridors are generally dominated by former “miracle miles” that are now over-retailed, under-utilized, unfriendly to pedestrians, and lacking in identity and community character. For smart-growth policies to work in the Sacramento region, they need to address, revitalize, and reinvent the existing urban fabric, while furthering the state’s climate change, transportation, and housing goals. The introduction of higher-density housing can serve as a catalyst for revitalization–if implemented properly. Yet the development economics in the Sacramento region often are not strong enough to spur the private sector to build the 7,000 infill housing units a year the region needs to accommodate population growth while meeting shared regional objectives around greenhouse gas reduction.
In response, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) has developed the Green Means Go program to catalyze development in Green Zones- locally designated areas that have capacity for infill development and show a reduction in vehicle miles travelled in the region’s Sustainable Communities Strategy. Green Means Go is supported by all 28 local jurisdictions in the six-county region.
The Advisory Services Panel (ASP) of the Urban Land Institute will identify challenges and provide a suite of recommendations to facilitate and accelerate equitable residential and mixed-use infill development within locally-adopted Green Zones, most of which are aging or outdated commercial corridors. The ASP will include national and regional experts in housing and planning policy, on behalf of both the public and private sectors, who can provide reputable feedback, development perspectives, and tangible solutions to produce the desired outcome of increasing infill housing production.
The objective of the ASP will be to evaluate and synthesize SACOG’s existing Green Means Go infill housing-related policies and planning projects already underway in the Sacramento region, identify the barriers to facilitating residential development under that program, and provide recommendations that will assist SACOG in allocating up to $40 million in state planning and infrastructure funds that have been awarded to SACOG to expedite the production of infill housing.
The Advisory Services Panel will help answer a set of key questions relating to accelerating attainable and affordable infill housing through the Green Means Go program:
- what is the market feasibility of infill development within the studied corridors and what, if anything more, is needed to make that development market feasible?
- what are the most salient developer or market-oriented concerns with regard to infill policies that result in per-unit costs being unattainable to middle-income households?
- how can the region build on efforts to expedite entitlement processing, permitting, environmental review or other local policy/planning processes that will expedite and reduce per-unit costs of higher density housing?
- how can existing state funding leverage local and regional efforts to prioritize funding for commercial corridors that have the highest VMT and GHG reduction potential, and other benefits that are achieved through higher-density development?
- what are recommended financing strategies for infrastructure upgrades (especially for the ‘backbone’ water, sewer, stormwater and utility infrastructure) needed to facilitate higher-density infill development?
- how can jurisdictions and developers tackle the issue of split governance in infrastructure planning and purveyance, including coordinating across numerous special districts within wet and dry utilities?
- how can answers to the above questions center on racial and economic equity, and address needs related to equitable community revitalization and anti- displacement?