Chico has a big housing problem.
In order to satisfy the state of California, Chico has to produce a comprehensive “Housing Element” to the city’s General Plan. In it they have to look at the estimated housing needs of people with varying incomes, then demonstrate that their laws plan for enough housing to be built.
Anyone with limited means looking to buy or rent a home (especially with children, pets, or bad credit) experiences the acuteness of the local housing shortage. If one is a “seller’s market,” the other is a landlord’s. And sure enough Chico has failed miserably to meet the goals for housing needs, even though they were set with no anticipation of town-consuming wildfires.
Yet there have been more than enough houses built for people of above average incomes. Why?
To make sense of this, we should look at three points of context: First, the local government has the power to stipulate how land is used, and Chico, like most cities, has all kinds of government mandates on housing construction from fees for city infrastructure and services, to mandatory parking requirements, setbacks, maximum lot coverage, minimum and maximum lot sizes, and units per lot.
Second, the state doesn’t actually require that cities invest in solving their housing crises.
Third is that the dominant thinking in our local government itself is that the city has no responsibility for solving a housing shortage. To elaborate on this, city manager Mark Orme, on the subject of providing legal camping space, described the organization he runs as fundamentally “an enforcement agency.” Investment consultant and councilmember Sean Morgan might describe the city as having “core services” which are “police, fire, and roads.” But it was Mayor Randall Stone, a liberal, who would make it a point to say “the city is not in the business of providing housing.”
The regulations I mentioned are accused by the building industry of impeding development. Their criticisms mostly focus on fees; principally Development Impact Fees (DIFs) which go towards infrastructure and other city services. More of this would be covered by an ongoing source of funding rather than one-time fees, but property taxes have been limited by Prop 13 in California since 1979.
It’d certainly be cheaper if there was no infrastructure necessary, and it is cheaper for everyone when buildings go up where there’s existing public infrastructure and neighbors that can share in maintenance and improvements. It’s also cheaper to have more people in a building sharing land and utilities. Yet new housing in Chico comes principally in the form of large single-family houses on new streets and, secondarily, apartment buildings, usually sported as “luxury” and set back behind a driveway off a main road designed, as the city requires, to accommodate a spinning fire engine.
This is a deliberate effect of our zoning codes. The vast majority of residential land is dedicated exclusively to detached single-family houses. Single-family zoning notoriously originated in 1916 as a scheme by white property owners in a Berkeley neighborhood to prevent black people from moving in nearby. Post WW2 Chico also saw outright racist housing policies which we’ll explore in another piece, but suffice to say that a comparison of the 1974 and today’s zoning maps show that sprawl has been overwhelmingly low-density with apartments mostly confined to busy arterial roads while most of the core neighborhoods designed around Chico’s streetcar system were downzoned to prohibit new housing. Today’s 2030 General Plan expresses hope for walkable and mixed-use areas but asserts the intention to maintain the existing balance between single and multifamily houses.
There’s certainly a prejudice against multifamily housing, if not by the people in demand of housing, in the local development industry. Kate Leyden, the executive director of the Builder’s Association, said six months after the Camp Fire that she doesn’t believe Chico offers much besides schools, land ownership, and “suburban living.” If people here want to live in “metropolitan-style rental complexes,” she suggests they will move to Sacramento or beyond.
Both the Builder’s Association and the Chamber of Commerce prefer instead to focus on drawing people from those metropolitan areas who can pay more for a house than locals. The Chamber, in their 2021 state of the city report which they presented with Mayor Coolidge, encouraged further housing development of specifically single-family houses. Although noting in their own stats that single-family had already been dominating housing construction, they wished to reinforce that trend because employers like Enloe and Chico State have a need for employers who will not live in apartments or townhomes.
I consider this to be at least somewhat true. And if Kate Leyden is to be believed, saying elsewhere that in spite of the shortage (and presumably on top of the cultural aversion) people cannot pay enough in rent to justify apartment construction costs, then there’s very little promise of the market ever resolving these trends: New housing will be for the affluent (who primarily desire large tract housing) and for anyone else to be housed affordably they’ll have to rely on the fixed supply of old housing that has deteriorated not so much as to be unlivable or warrant a remodel, but enough to be offered at a discount. The only other help is subsidized affordable housing or improving the conditions of those getting by without housing.
Catering to the people who bring cash in hand over those already working here is an economic strategy, but is it the only option? Carl Henker, a realtor with Coldwell Banker, disagrees. He says there is at least as much demand locally as there is among emigres from wealthier metropolitan regions. Phil Strawn, who works with Modern Building, notes in the same article that skilled construction workers could only feasibly afford to live in new multifamily projects.
It’s probably relevant that Modern Building is one of the only local developers to tackle complex multi-story projects. While Kate Leyden laments “higher density is more expensive to build because you need different engineering and materials;” Modern Building makes that their specialty.
Almost certainty an element of the prejudice of most local builders is that they simply lack the technology and expertise to carry out more intense developments. Stick-built single-family homes pose less difficulty in the short term and require less investment per acre to subdivide and sell off. Front yards and parking lots are very inexpensive to provide. The union labor sourced for large multifamily projects in Sacramento or the Bay Area is very scarce around Chico. Many of the career tradespeople left during the Great Recession and we’ve yet to reestablish a workforce to meet the demand.
So while the city can demonstrate to the state government that local regulations are sufficiently loose to allow for needed low-income housing, we mostly get oversized housing designed for metropolitan emigres looking to upsize. It’s a trend reinforced by local prejudice and regulations, but there are some organizations and policies working against it with the alternative goal of smart growth and affordable housing. Next week we’ll begin to look at those.
