Amid uproar, Placer County board votes to approve controversial housing project
The Placer County Board of Supervisors faced a dilemma Tuesday: reject a plan for an apartment complex and draw the ire of the state’s housing enforcer or approve it and disappoint scores of unhappy residents.
The board, after an all day meeting, chose to tentatively allow the development by a 3-2 margin and avoid, for now, state penalties.
“I feel the same way as the community does, but it doesn’t mean that I’m going to put us — the county — in that position,” said Supervisor Suzanne Jones, who cast the deciding vote in favor of the approval. “I can see a better use of your taxpayer dollars than paying millions of dollars in fines.”
The development at the heart of the debate is known as Hope Way Apartments, a 240-unit affordable housing project planned for Penryn, a small unincorporated community between Rocklin and Auburn. The board’s vote Tuesday reverses a decision by the planning commission in October to reject the project, which has become a showcase for the debate over California laws meant to increase home building.
The stakes around the board’s decision were clear before Tuesday’s meeting began.
Last week, the chief of a California Department of Housing and Community Development enforcement unit wrote a letter to the board warning supervisors would violate state law if they denied the project without documenting significant health and safety issues with the development. The county also risked being forced to approve future projects that it might not want and losing its honor as a pro-housing community, the letter said.
The threats were not just from the state.
Ryan Patterson, a land use attorney representing YIMBY Law, which stands for “Yes in my backyard,” told the board during the hearing the organization had sued cities and counties over what it sees as violations of state law.
“I don’t want to take Placer County to court,” he said.
Brian Myers, chair of Placer Citizens for Neighborhood Rights, an organization founded to oppose the project, argued public safety concerns about the development were significant enough for the board to deny it and still comply with state law.
The project will dramatically increase the number of people in Penryn, which currently has about 1,050 residents. Myers argued the increase, along with a proposed roundabout intersection, would compromise safety in the area, particularly during evacuations.
“The odds are definitely stacked against the community,” he said, “and we’re here to try and refute those odds.”
Those odds are long by design. State legislators have passed many laws to make it harder for local governments to reject affordable housing projects, which had often been delayed or derailed by strong community pushback.
“You have to identify a health or safety impact, it cannot be mitigable and it has to be based on written public health or safety standards,” Clayton Cook, an assistant county attorney, told the board.
Supervisor Bonnie Gore, the board’s chair, said she did not see enough evidence that the county could meet that high standard. She voted to approve the project.
“I don’t love having to do this,” Gore said, “but it’s really the card that we’ve been dealt.”
Several people in the audience supported the development, saying it would bring much needed affordable housing for people who work or want to work in the community. Milo Terzich, a vice president of development for USA Properties Fund, which is behind the project, added it would be an attractive place for people to live: It is next to Interstate 80, and close to job centers, shopping and dining.
But most who attended Tuesday’s meeting were against it. That included Supervisor Shanti Landon, who criticized the state Legislature for putting the county in what she views as an untenable position.
“My concern is not really so much with the applicant. It’s really with Sacramento, as we’ve heard, forcing a 240-unit high-density project into a small rural community like Penryn,” she said. “Overriding our local plans and brushing aside legitimate worries about evacuation, traffic, schools, emergency response and the permanent erosion of a rural community and the way of life.”
Tuesday’s decision was not the final word on the project. Even if it is approved with a final vote next year, the threat of legal action doesn’t completely go away.
Placer Citizens for Neighborhood Rights could file its own lawsuit, continuing the debate well into 2026.
This story was originally published December 17, 2025 at 10:25 AM with the headline "Amid uproar, Placer County board votes to approve controversial housing project."
