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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Regional Focus: February 2007
Growing Pains
Can the city of Sacramento handle Natomas, or is secession in the stars?
Story by Don Lipper
“Here be Dragons” wrote ancient cartographers wherever a map had blank spaces. For Sacramento, Natomas — the city’s last large planned neighborhood — is growing at an alarming rate into a very large dragon.
Natomas currently has 68,000 residents living in 35,000 homes and close to 10,000 apartments, with approximately 100 to 150 families arriving a month. This has been the pattern for five years.
“It is my best estimate that Natomas, in its entirety, will constitute one-third of Sacramento in five years,” says Will Craig, publisher of the Natomas Journal. “The growth that we have seen is what the city of Sacramento anticipated in 2010.”
In addition to growing in population, Natomas is also annexing territory — as much as 12,000 acres (and 80,000 new residents) in the next 15 years. Even weakened levees that threaten Katrina-like flooding can’t quench the thirst for growth.
As such, a lot of the city’s urban-planning action is taking place in Natomas. For example, according to Craig, when Sacramento found out it was out of compliance with national and state laws with respect to providing low- and very low-income housing, the city passed an ordinance that required 15 percent of all new growth to make that provision. In other words, notes Craig, since Natomas is the city of Sacramento’s designated growth area, the new ordinance affected virtually Natomas alone.
“Sacramento City Council members will say to us that they have Natomas fatigue, or in City Council meetings they’ll express concern about having to deal with another Natomas issue,” says Barbara Graichen, president of the Natomas Community Association. “You can’t blame them. They are elected to represent a certain area of the city, not just Natomas.”
With only one Council member representing the area, can the city handle Natomas’s issues? “I would not argue that Natomas is getting too big, but whether the jurisdictions that control or service that growth are fully prepared to really attend to it,” says Craig. “North Natomas did not even exist the last time a census was taken. I believe it would be fair to say that it is underrepresented.”
This is leading some in Natomas to consider forming their own incorporated city. A survey in the Natomas Journal found that 70 percent of respondents believed Natomas would become a city, but that they were unprepared to make a go of it now.
“It is my best estimate that Natomas will constitute
one-third of
Sacramento in five years.”
— Will Craig, publisher, the Natomas Journal
Obviously the Sacramento metropolitan region doesn’t want to see Natomas break away. “The city of Sacramento provides high-quality services to the Natomas area,” says Scot Mende, new-growth manager for the city of Sacramento. “The economic future of Natomas is tied to the future of the city of Sacramento. The city has ensured a high level of participation in the planning and implementation of decisions that affect Natomas.”
Other Natomas community leaders agree. “Fractionalization and balkanization of urban areas is, in my opinion, harmful,” says John Roberts, executive director of the Natomas Basin Conservancy. “Plus, the city of Sacramento has invested heavily in Natomas on water supply, wastewater treatment, parks and other public functions. The Natomas Basin Habitat Conservation Plan alone has cost the city millions in planning, permitting, biological and environmental assessment, legal defense and public works. Institutional memory and knowledge counts for a lot in urban development, but in the case of Natomas, it’s huge. And the city has it.”
Natomas residents might argue about the wealth of city services. Residents and business leaders complain that police, fire and other emergency services are woefully understaffed, falling far short, for example, of the 1.6 officers per 1,000 residents in North and South Natomas plans. If Sacramento isn’t providing the staffing now, residents wonder, why is the city considering so much growth?
Part of the math powering Natomas’s growth was based on the belief that the city would handle growth and provide municipal service in the urban areas while the county would handle the Natomas Basin Conservancy and other environmental-mitigation areas. The development formula was simple: For every acre of development, half an acre of mitigation or open-space land would be created.
The Natomas Greenbelt was supposed to be the beginning of the city’s implementation of an “urban separator.” It has mostly happened with the conservancy’s recent acquisition of additional land at the separator site. However, the development speculation in the area keeps the separator from being as deep as the city envisioned. How deep the separator should be — deeper than 250 feet or shallower than 100 feet — is a number that constantly shifts.
Many longtime Natomas residents are exasperated by how the city agrees to grand-sounding plans only to change the rules seemingly at a developer’s whim.
“After spending eight years hammering out the North Natomas Community Plan — a legally binding growth document — the first thing the Sacramento City Council did is pass a major amendment to the plan allowing what is currently the Natomas Marketplace area to become rezoned to its current retail status — over, by the way, the objections of Natomas Council Member-at-the-time Heather Fargo, the lone dissenting vote,” notes Craig.
“The developmental community has been playing the pea-under-the-shell game with the provisions within the North Natomas Community Plan for high-density homes with the city, allowing them to proceed with the promise that someday they will fulfill that end of the agreement,” he continues.
“I would also note that out of one side of their mouths, the city and the county have said that they look forward to a 1-mile buffer along the Sacramento River and the Sutter County line, but when I challenged them, I saw developmental plans that extended right to the border. They expect Sutter County to provide that buffer,” says Craig.
“There is and has been a pattern of allowing these kinds of changes because it fills the city coffers and provides revenue for all the other districts, with little consequence to those districts other than revenue,” complains one resident.
Residents are also smarting over smart-growth claims by developers that seem to change with the market. Some old-time residents who remember tomato trucks rolling through town say smart growth was promised but not delivered, especially now that previous high- and medium-density projects have been shifted to more single-family homes.
Also, smart growth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Developers are building transit-oriented, high-density housing in anticipation of a light-rail line that won’t reach Natomas until 2027, according to some officials. “We’re talking about it being ready by the time my kids leave home,” says one resident.
City officials say Natomas developments are consistent with the smart-growth principles laid out by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments in its Blueprint plan because they provide right-of-way for light-rail, standard and innovative housing types, and town center- and transit-oriented development.
Additionally, Natomas utilizes existing drainage facilities as open-space corridors and provides for housing and employment opportunities close to the downtown area. Its Habitat Conservation Plan preserves farmland and habitat for Swainson’s hawk, the giant garter snake and other species. And the 14 neighborhoods of North Natomas are each centered around a neighborhood park and school.
Officials admit that in the early years, Natomas development did emphasize single-family development in response to market conditions. As the Natomas market became more established, they say there has been increasing diversity in housing types.
By far the biggest concern for Natomas residents is the levee system. Originally, growth in Natomas was allowed to occur because the levees were deemed strong enough to handle a heavy storm that would come, on average, once every 100 years.
The Army Corp of Engineers has declared the levees too weak to withstand a major storm, and a levee break could fill the basin with 15 feet of water. In January, the Federal Emergency Management Agency proposed designating the entire Natomas basin in Sacramento and Sutter counties as a Special Flood Hazard Area, which means the area has a 1 percent chance of flooding every year. FEMA has also mandated that property owners with federally backed loans buy flood insurance by November.
Now everyone from the federal government down to the man on the street is wondering who is going to pick up the $414 million price tag to repair the unstable levees.
Some say the brunt of the burden should fall to current residents. Others say the cost should be borne by new residents via developer fees, with state and federal funds hopefully taking up the majority of the cost.
While the debate and the repairs go on, some residents want to stop any more building. How long will it be until the levees are ready for prime time? The Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency hopes to provide 100-year protection by 2010, then reach 200-year protection by 2012.
While officials are very aware of the Katrina-like potential for disaster — Natomas is a low-lying basin at the confluence of two rivers — they urge keeping the flood question in perspective.
“Sacramento City Council members say they have Natomas fatigue.
You can’t
blame them.”
— Barbara Graichen, president, Natomas Community Association
“Natomas is not in the center of a flood-protection bull’s-eye,” says Carol Shearly, director of planning for the city of Sacramento. “Other areas of Sacramento have deeper and faster flooding than Natomas. Natomas is in a deep floodplain, but it is big. It takes a long time to flood that space. But in the Pocket area, Campus Commons and other areas, if you have a levee break, we’re talking hours instead of days to fill. In Natomas we worry about property damage, but personal injuries and fatalities are something we’d worry about in some of these other areas.”
Nonetheless, the Natomas Community Association is asking the city to stop Angelo Tsakopoulos’s proposed 577-acre, 3,450-home mixed-use Greenbriar project, which would be the first of a series of proposed annexations up to 12,000 acres. Before as many as 40,000 homes are built on the low-lying plain, residents want the flood of levee costs to be controlled.
Despite the specter of levee breaks, the building continues. While there is a general slowdown in residential construction in the region, the massive K. Hovnavian Forecast Homes development, also know as Natomas Central, is taking shape. The builder plans to erect 1,828 homes on the 434-acre site.
Developers such as David Bugatto, a Natomas landowner, are bullish on the area’s prospects. “The additional residential projects will add diversity to the existing housing in Natomas,” says Bugatto, president and CEO of Alleghany Properties LLC.
“The benefit is more alternatives in both rental and owner-occupied housing for people to choose from in a broad range of prices,” Bugatto continues. “The development community has worked hard to deliver affordable housing, both rental and owner-occupied, within each of the project developments. This is a benefit to future employers that will consider Natomas their location of choice. Having various housing options available with an adequate supply of product type means a better chance to secure a user that knows there is a place for their employees to live near work. Jobs-housing balance is being achieved in Natomas.”
KB Home has been the largest homebuilder in the Natomas area since 2006. “KB Home remains very interested in the market and looks forward to building homes for families in this very clean and vibrant area,” says Barry Grant, territory president for KB Home Sacramento.
KB Home’s four active communities in the area have all enjoyed tremendous success. In fact, the Ryness Report listed KB Home’s Hamptons-Montauk and Westbury as the two top-selling new-home communities in the entire Sacramento area as of November 2006.
Obviously the flooding risk isn’t giving KB cold feet. “You can’t build in Northern California without addressing the potential impacts of flooding. We actively participate with local, state and federal agencies to ensure our compliance with all regulations. We are very proud of our participation in the privately funded levee improvements in Sutter and Yuba counties,” says Grant.
City officials and developers are confident that the levee situation will resolve itself. “The changing of the flood protection hasn’t slammed on the [development] brakes yet. Most of the planned projects are proceeding,” says the city of Sacramento’s Mende.
“New construction required flood insurance for the first couple of years. How this will affect the next wave of growth for areas that are to be annexed into the city, we won’t know until we have public hearings in February, March and April,” continues Mende. “But we’re still proceeding as if [the future annexations] will be approved. The presumption on the part of the builders is that they will be breaking ground in spring 2007.”
