December 4, 2020

House Sacramento added our name to a letter from the National Low Income Housing Coalition demanding an extension to the Center for Disease Control’s national eviction moratorium beyond its current expiration date of December 31, 2020. Read the letter here.

June 2, 2020

Statement on the Death of George Floyd and Police Violence Against Black Americans

House Sacramento is an organization formed to advocate for building inclusively affordable communities in the Sacramento area. We formed to represent renters, young people, and other communities disproportionately harmed by NIMBYism and California’s long standing culture of opposition to developing adequafollow this linkte housing supply.

Right now, in Sacramento and other cities across the country, communities are understandably expressing, through meaningful and largely peaceful protests, the pain and struggle that comes from systemic racism in law enforcement and white supremacy in our civic institutions. It is critical that House Sacramento expresses our support for justice for George Floyd and his family today. Black lives matter. The officers who murdered Mr. Floyd need to be prosecuted under the law.

As we mourn Mr. Floyd’s death with our community, House Sacramento also calls for broader policy reforms that prevent the needless abuse and death of more black and non-white Americans at the hands of law enforcement, such as Stephon Clark here in Sacramento, along with countless others. We request the Sacramento City Council, and surrounding jurisdictions, take this time to reflect on current policies and opportunities to proactively address the structural racism present within our police departments and sheriff’s offices. This could include zero tolerance for unethical or racist conduct by on- or off-duty officers, active measurement and reporting of police use of force incidents, or inherent bias training.

Finally, we recognize that anti-racist work takes place amidst a continuous process of learning. We commit to listening to, and lifting up, black and brown voices on housing in the Sacramento region. House Sacramento and the YIMBY movement more broadly must not be silent––we implore YIMBY groups to join us in being affirmatively anti-racist.

We will leave you with an excerpt from an opinion piece by two of our co-chairs published last fall:

The ugly, racist origins of zoning explicitly prohibited non-whites from purchasing property in certain neighborhoods. Even after explicitly-racial zoning was made illegal in 1917, public lending institutions refused to back loans to non-whites in exclusive neighborhoods through redlining. While some of those more overtly racist restrictions are gone, the same neighborhoods remain exclusive today through exclusionary single-family zoning, which ensures that Sacramentans cannot live in them unless they can afford a $600,000, or more, house. This means that high-opportunity, single-family neighborhoods like Land Park and East Sacramento remain concentrations of affluence, perpetuating racial and class inequalities. If Sacramento is serious about being an equitable, inclusive, and just City, it’s time it opens up its most exclusive neighborhoods to more housing options.

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