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October 28, 2020: California local governments are caught in a vise, squeezed between the need to house future residents as required by state law and having to answer to residents who don’t want more housing on a site in their neighborhood. As Elk Grove’s Director of Strategic Planning and Innovation Christopher Jordan put it in a recent SACOG housing series webinar, “We’re not seeing the forest for the trees because people tend to focus on sites they know.” 

The solution hit upon by the City of Elk Grove is to transform residents into housing planners. “We wanted our residents involved in the sites we will use to count towards RHNA in a more dynamic way than we usually do,” said Jordan. The tool that helped them achieve that is an online budgeting simulation called Balancing Act, which has mostly been used by cities in public engagement around city budgets. Elk Grove was the first city to adapt the tool for housing elements, said Brenda Morrison, a partner at Engaged Public, the firm behind Balancing Act, who joined Jordan’s webinar demonstration of the tool. The city “pushed us to use the platform in different ways,” she said, and that required some custom coding. She said the innovation was driven by ”Covid and the strain on city governments having staff thinking of new ways to communicate changes to the public.”