Community fights Placer County rush to rezone agricultural, residential land for new affordable housing
PLACER COUNTY -- Neighbors in the Dry Creek community of unincorporated Placer County are pushing back on a rush to rezone residential and agricultural land west of Roseville to build new high-density affordable housing units.
At a meeting of the West Placer Municipal Advisory Council (MAC), no seat was left empty Wednesday night as the council listened to dozens of concerned community members speak.
MAC is a group of community members appointed by Placer County's Board of Supervisors to serve as a middle point between the community and the board.
"We don't care whether it's high-income apartments or low-income. Apartments are not the correct transition on our beautiful strawberry patch," Laura Bullard said.
Bullard has lived in Dry Creek her whole life. One of the proposed parcels Placer County is seeking to rezone for new affordable housing is currently home to a local strawberry patch in her rural neighborhood at Baseline Road.
"This is our community. This is our home," Bullard said. "You can't have this hodge-podge where all the sudden you go from one- to two-acre homes then to high-rise apartments."
Of a final list of 16 parcels Placer County identified as having potential for rezone sites, four are in the Dry Creek community. One site is the strawberry patch that backs up to farmland on all sides. Another is adjacent to farmland on Vineyard Road. The two remaining sites sit directly across the street from Creekview Ranch School on Cook Riolo Road.
"This was a very poor process," said one neighbor in public comment at Wednesday's meeting.
"Why is it that the unincorporated portion of the county bears the brunt?" another neighbor asked.
Placer County is behind on its affordable housing quota mandated by the state. Part of fixing the problem turned the attention of county planning staff to empty parcels — some zoned as commercial and some zoned as residential or agricultural — to find places to satisfy the need for more low-income housing under new residential multifamily zoning.
"This state was born on agriculture. To squeeze it out on all these little farms is a travesty," said neighbor James Wallace. "The next thing you know, the complaints start and we are the nuisance and we have to stop what we are doing and change our lifestyle."
Neighbors argue this is a rural community, and it needs to stay that way.
Many Dry Creek neighbors say they are not against new high-rise affordable housing apartments but oppose it in the backyards of their homes, school and farmland.
"We have allowed a ton of development here. Five times more people live here now than 30 years ago," said George Brown, a neighbor who also served on the West Placer MAC for 11 years. "That's all growth we have approved, but it has to be compatible with the surrounding area. This is so incompatible that it is ludicrous."
The hope of the community, which in less than a month of being made aware of the possible rezoning has created a Facebook page and an online petition fighting it, is that the county leaves land currently zoned as residential and agricultural alone.
"It's going to affect us forever. It's going to change this community forever," Wallace said.
District 1 County Supervisor Bonnie Gore attended Wednesday's meeting and addressed the community, reassuring neighbors she has similar concerns about the proposal.
"I understand you want to keep the feel of this community," Gore said in the meeting.
Gore said she plans to urge her colleagues on the board of supervisors to focus on commercially zoned properties to be rezoned for the new housing. She said that she does not believe residential and agricultural lands are suitable places for high-density apartments.
Her comments were met with a roar of applause from the packed meeting Wednesday night that started at 6:30 p.m. and didn't wrap until around 9:00 p.m.
The state is reviewing the proposal and will send it back to the Placer County Planning Commission, which will recommend how to move forward to the board of supervisors.
The board will vote on May 7.