ELK GROVE, Calif. — Nearly 400-units of affordable housing is due in Elk Grove around fall of 2024.
The Poppy Grove apartments broke ground mid-January, marking construction for the city's largest affordable housing development so far. It's 387 units with 14 buildings across 16 acres.
"It may be the largest apartment development in the city of Elk Grove," said Reese Jarrett, president of E. Smith and Company.
Jarrett has been working alongside his business partner Michael Johnson in getting the project to this point. It's a family-oriented project, with the majority of the units being two to three bedrooms.
The project is a big deal in every sense of word. Jarrett said it was one of the largest single fundings through the state allocation of tax credits and bonds, one of the single largest tax-credit investments by Goldman Sachs in their urban investment division, $125 million in tax credit investments, $150 million in construction financing and $45 million in permanent financing
"It's a huge, huge magnitude in size and scope, and we're (he and Johnson) very proud of the fact that we were able to pull this together," said Jarrett.
It's a meaningful dent for Elk Grove as it tries to bring more affordable housing to the area. According to the city, they need more than 4,000 affordable units by 2028.
According to the city, recent affordable apartment projects generated a lot of attention and applicants. A recent affordable housing project in 2021 had 28,000 unique applicants as compared to the 1,400 applicants a similar size project garnered only a few years before.
For Jarrett, Poppy Grove will be game changer for families once it's built. It means people earning 30% to 60% of the average median income in the city get the ability to rent a home and not spend more than 25% of their income on rent.
"For us to have the ability to bring this affordable housing development to this high resource community is important. It's important that it impacts the lives of the people that live there, and their kids can go to quality schools and that they can have access to quality shopping and to be able to effectively dispose of their income in an affordable way and not have to pay exorbitant prices for goods and services or be in a food desert," said Jarrett.
"I just think that it's probably the most pressing need that we have in our society... to be able to deliver quality housing to all people who are in need of housing," he added.
While the need for housing isn't unique to Elk Grove, what is distinct, to at least Jarrett, is the support for affordable housing in Elk Grove.
"There's not always communities like the city of Elk Grove, and the mayor, Bobbi Singh Allen, who's been just a real champion and supporter of the development, they want to see affordable housing in their communities," he said.
The first phase of the project is expected to finished in spring 2024 with the hope that all the affordable homes will be fully leased up and operational by the fall of 2024.
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