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Especially for those passionate about Sacramento with their heart and soul in the place, after covid, gov't lockdowns, massive gov't spending, 50-100 small business forever closed in the downtown/midtown what is your vision for Sacramento?
Were you happier with the downtown/midtown in 2019? Do you even remember what it was like compared to 2024?
How many small businesses have opened in downtown/midtown in the past 4-5 years? Some closed and reopened in new, larger locations, like Beers Books and Kicksville Vinyl & Vintage, while in other places a business closed and another opened in the same location. At the same time, there are thousands of units of housing, ranging from fancy & expensive town homes to extremely low income studio apartments, where people can live, and thousands more in the planning and construction pipeline. The American Community Survey results for the city show an increase in several thousand residents, paralleling the construction of new housing, because the demand for downtown living has outstripped supply since the city's business interests and chamber of commerce destroyed nearly half of downtown's homes back in the 1950s-60s to create the tepid, streets-roll-up-at-5PM downtown many Sacramentans grew up seeing, and often barely ever experiencing.
I recently took another stroll from Downtown to Midtown last Saturday night around 10 PM, and saw a whole lot of activity and energy, from the historic 700 block of K Street, past 10th & K and the nightclubs around the Crest Theatre, the Convention Center (which was pretty quiet) and Lavender Heights (which was hopping, as a result of it being the weekend of the Pride Parade). The residential areas in between were still dark and quiet, and more illuminated safe walking paths might be nice, but generally it was a comfortable level of social activity for me, a guy rapidly approaching retirement age.
We also got some relatively good news from the latest homeless count--looks like, at least according to the January street count, like there has been a significant drop in the number of people on the street, possibly as high as 30%; possible in no small part because of the creation and opening of multiple very affordable units via Project Homekey like the hotel turned apartment building at 12th & H, rehab of historic SROs like the Capitol Park at 10th & L, and new construction like Sonrisa at 14th & O Street, as well as new shelters and safe-parking sites. Sadly, the homeless count is still above what it was in 2019, but we're moving in the right direction at least; providing more permanent housing and services to go with them is essential, but what we also need are better renter protections and policies to keep people from ending up on the streets in the first place, because one of the results of the latest count is that a lot of people on the street nowadays only recently became unhoused. And it's easier (and cheaper) to keep people housed than to try to get them off the street after they've been there a while.
I won't say it's "back to normal" because the state of the central city has always been at the forefront of change. It's a new world, and we're building for the downtown we want (with lots of housing, and downtown residents patronizing downtown businesses) instead of the downtown we had (with commuters driving downtown, maybe getting lunch, and driving back at 5 PM, while other people drive in for special events and then drive home after they get all drunk.)
My vision for Sacramento is more focused on the other 95% of the city, though. The City Council recently approved the 2040 General Plan, which allows for construction of up to 6 apartments (plus 2 ADUs) on the two-thirds of the city previously limited to single-family homes only (none of which were in the central city!) which will facilitate the construction and conversion of neighborhoods and buildings in the rest of the city, allowing them to become more Midtown-like; denser, more walkable, easier to serve by transit and get around by bike. Imagine a Sacramento with lots more small apartments in places like South Land Park or East Sacramento, bus routes through North Natomas and Curtis Park, bike lanes down Broadway and Stockton and Truxel and Del Paso, and adaptive reuse of historic buildings throughout the city, from 19th century Victorians to Mid-century Modern landmarks (the city recently listed its first Mid-century Modern district in South Land Park Hills, and the first city landmark in North Sacramento off Del Paso Boulevard.)
This is what was promised and or implied by our mayor by 2024:
I walked down K Street and J street from 16th to Old Sacramento one day and counted at least 25 small business and restaurants that closed since 2020, most still boarded-up, I stopped counting it was too depressing to continue.
1. A new Waterfront with new walkways to the waters edge, new grassy park areas, new lighting and shading, and walkways, extensions into the river, etc., nothing happened except a sidewalk/boardwalk was repaved, and a boxcar and billboard were painted in bright blue and white, titled "Waterfront".
2. The rail yards would have multiple housing structures of all levels not just "affordable housing" instead only two new residential buildings were built, still not open, this has been 20+ in the planning stages. Upon completion, one of the largest residential buildings was massively vandalized with massive water damage. Someone or a group of folks broke into the building and began living inside and apparently they left the water on....this is what I was told.
3. Much more housing downtown/midtown, some still got built, during the early part of construction one of the new residential structures was the victim of arson, you can still see the burnt out hull/skeleon, all construction has stopped.
4. A new pedestrian/bikeway Bridge to West Sacramento on the southwest end of downtown. Crickets, nothing happened.
5. A new auto/pedestian Bridge to West Sacramento on the northwest end of downtown connecting the Railyards with West Sacramento, nothing happened, crickets.
6. A new hospital in the Railyards, nothing happened.
7. A new soccer arena in the Railyards, nothing happened.
A have some ideas/visions for the downtown, but waiting to hear what other think.
If you only walk around J and K Street, you miss a whole lot of downtown, including its latest success stories along the R Street corridor, where the community based plan to build more housing and reuse historic buildings has resulted in a densely populated, walkable and lively district that connects well to the surrounding neighborhood, instead of the K Street business model based on restaurants that close at 3 PM to serve lunch to state workers, and nightclubs that are principally marketed to people who don't live downtown and are expected to drive in & pay for parking, then drive home drunk. Many places are sitting vacant because they were approved for projects by developers without the ability to pay for the building they got approved, and have just been allowed to sit for years or decades without consequences. But there are also new businesses and, more importantly, new residences downtown, and in the end, residences will make the difference, if downtown commercial real estate developers are flexible enough to change their business model.
The "Old Sacramento Waterfront" plan was always kind of dumb and poorly thought out, but it didn't proceed as planned because it was intended to be funded by hotel taxes, which of course dropped to zero in 2020-2021. In the interim, while the arena was closed, people rediscovered Old Sacramento as it is, and when the arena reopened, they remembered Old Sacramento was there, which seems to have reversed the trend of 2016-2019 when Old Sacramento businesses were suffering because of everyone's attention on the new arena while ignoring the other side of I-5. Instead of demolishing the freight depot and removing most of the tracks, the city rented out spaces in the freight depot for artists and art groups, who turned the building into a lively and interesting collection of creative spaces, at little to no cost. The "rebranding" boxcar and sign are still around, but so are a couple of somewhat cheesy but very well received things--a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round, both temporary installations, which people seem to ride a lot and enjoy. Personally I think we'd be well served by building a much larger Ferris wheel south of Embassy Suites in the Docks--like, large enough to be visible from all directions for people approaching Sacramento via highways. But generally, Old Sacramento is holding steady; for every business that closes, another opens, and I have also noticed that Old Sac now has two locally owned coffee shops to replace things like the Subway sandwich shop that closed.
The Railyards has multiple housing projects underway--one, The AJ, is affordable housing that got vandalized undergoing repair, the other is the Wong Center, senior affordable housing that is currently either just about to open or already open, and the first market rate building, Telegrapher, has broken ground. The 4000 person capacity concert venue inside the historic Paint Shop is under construction, and the county courthouse is topped out and appearing completion. Ground was broken for the Kaiser hospital.
Downtown and Midtown saw thousands of units built, keeping up the area's rapid pace of new housing construction. There was a fire at a building on X Street on the edge between Midtown and Land Park, consisting of two 100% affordable midrise towers on concrete podiums. Yesterday I rode past the site and saw that they are clearing the debris from the burned tower, while the other tower is intact and they're going to resume construction, then rebuild the burned tower. Work has also started on a residential midrise on Broadway directly across from the Tower Theatre; the first-floor concrete podium walls are up.
The planned Broadway bridge is going through engineering & planning stages, but it's the next in line behind one planned for north of the I Street bridge; that one's plan is completed, they're lining up funding to start construction.
One of the big challenges right now is money: with interest rates bouncing up, getting construction loans got a lot more challenging, but it certainly has not stopped construction in the central city by any means.
No New Ideas, No New thought, no Bold Vision so that private funded business endeavors can flourish and in-turn provide the needed tax base to fund all these endless tax supported gov't generated projects that the above posts BANK on.
All the housing and other projects posted above should have already been completed decades ago. Such a small-minded, small-town frame work, take note of what 1/2 dozen or so other medium sized American cities with less attributes that Sacramento have accomplished in the last 15-20 years.
Yes, Sacramento's hidebound commercial real estate moguls, and business organizations like the Metro Chamber, have demonstrated an astounding lack of new thought, new ideas, or bold visions over the past 70 years. Their plan in the 1950s was based on endless suburban expansion to the north and east into the foothills, creating homes for a white-collar (and white-complected) workforce that would drive from the suburbs to downtown every day, drive to suburban malls for shopping, and drive back downtown to engage in inoffensive recreation in a sterilized entertainment zone, scurrying back to the suburbs before it got too late. They're still clinging to that ancient vision, despite the fact that we live in a radically different place than the California of the 1950s, because they're too afraid to change their business model to match reality.
All of this required enormous tax-supported, government-generated projects, including public-funded superhighways, federally-backed home loan programs that were only usable in the new suburbs (and thus mostly unavailable to people of color as almost all of those suburbs had racial covenants), and federal redevelopment programs that removed half the population of the central city to make way for all those highways, office buildings, and a small zone dedicated to a sanitized version of Sacramento's history that resembled what Sacramentans saw on TV westerns more closely than the legacy of the people recently forcibly vacated from downtown. And, of course, the Cold War meant more government spending that benefited suburban expansion, around our two regional Air Force bases, an Army base, and Aerojet, whose rockets were fueled with taxpayer dollars to support the space program and America's nuclear deterrent. This proved to be an effective business model in the 1950s and 60s, when the top income tax rate was 91%, environmental laws were so lax that American rivers frequently caught fire and the sun obscured with smog in sunny California cities, and civil rights protections so weak that communities of color could be pushed aside with minimal political resistance, while still excluding them from almost all of this new suburban dream. Paying for a shiny new shopping mall downtown, simulating the shiny new shopping malls in the suburbs, and a pedestrian mall next door to stop young "cruisers" from enjoying downtown while rudely failing to lease commercial property or patronize downtown department stores and restaurants that closed several hours before the cruisers arrived, since there were so few downtown residents left to patronize them after urban renewal.
As a result, when young people started moving into the central city in the 1970s, rejecting the suburban/autocentric vision of the real estate moguls, they were angrily told they were doing it wrong. Nobody should try to fix up those old buildings, they said, they should just demolish them and build much more profitable office buildings for the endless flow of office workers, as long as they also demolished enough of the old homes to provide plenty of parking lots. Fortunately, one of those idealistic young people who didn't want to commute from the suburbs was Governor Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr., who hired more people with new ideas to try and reverse the damage recently inflicted on the urban core. These thinkers, like Sim van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe, based their concepts on the work of Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, whose work fighting highway construction and redevelopment got her labeled an enemy of progress and change in New York City in the 1950s, but her work became one of the fundamental works of 21st century urban development and urban repair. It was based on dense, walkable neighborhoods where people generally lived in the same vicinity as their workplaces and most of the stores and services they patronized for everyday life, with safety increased by "eyes on the street" and strong informal bonds of neighborhood residents, with public transit enhancing residents' abilities to get around without destroying neighborhoods like broad, expensive highways that made downtown easy to visit, but even easier to leave. Jacobs also emphasized the power of neighborhood activists like herself and their communities to tell city leaders and business leaders what their neighborhood needed, instead of a top-down approach that took no notice of people living downtown, focused on the fiscal bottom line (as noted above, generally government subsidized.) Rather than tear down old buildings, Jacobs focused on their potential creative uses; "Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings, but new ideas require old buildings" was one of her most famous quotes--and the young people of Midtown turned old buildings to new uses, creating the beginning of the urban culture of the city Midtown is famous for today, in the form of coffee shops, record stores and bookstores, theaters and music venues, creative local businesses, neighborhood-serving retail stores, and, of course, homes aplenty, including new housing.
Of course, Sacramento's business leaders, most of whom didn't live in Sacramento anymore (preferring their safe enclaves in unincorporated Arden-Arcade, and later farther out in places like Rancho Murieta, El Dorado Hills and Granite Bay) decided that all of this was just nonsense, and no sensible person would ever want to live downtown, or fix up an old building when they could demolish it and build new instead! That mindset held fast in the 1980s and 90s, when an office-construction boom tripled rents downtown, forcing out some of the surviving SRO hotels and many downtown art galleries (who decamped to Midtown, Oak Park and North Sacramento), stimulated by further infusions of public cash, including a light rail system designed to facilitate office commuters (supplemental to the highways) and a revamped K Street; instead of the 1960s open-air mall, a 1990s semi-enclosed mall featuring America Live! multi-story music venue, and destroying much of the adjacent pedestrian mall for light rail but keeping traffic on the street because they assumed that the downtown pedestrian mall, which by then had already proven to be a fairly tepid urban response, must work eventually as long as they kept pouring public money into it. The revamp of K Street lost its sheen before the decade was out; America Live closed after only 3 years, and the mall was purchased by Westfield, who, having recently opened a mall in Roseville and was not eager to compete with its own customer base, turned the downtown mall into the unwanted stepchild of regional shopping centers.
At about the same time, community residents were demanding that the city not allow developers to repeat this exact tepid and uninspired pattern on R Street, where the big builders wanted to build office towers and parking lots like the ones they did on Capitol Mall in the 60s. Of course, they had been hugely profitable for commercial landlords, especially due to their use of tax increment financing to artificially lower property taxes, and private landlords eagerly leasing space for state agencies, which often allowed those landlords to avoid paying state property taxes. After a battle of more than a decade, the city was finally convinced to move forward with the community's vision for R Street, but part of why Sacramento sometimes seems to be decades behind other cities is because its citizens have a vision for the 21st century walkable city, but the powerful developers and the elected official whose reelection campaigns they fund prefer a 1950s vision of eternal automobility, even if Proposition 13 and lower income tax rates mean finding ways to subsidize their eternal suburban projects requires ever more complex funding schemes. The latest example was of course the funding scheme for Golden 1 Center, which, when it became apparent that the public was unwilling to support a bond via popular vote, and no private parking company was willing to pay the amount needed to subsidize a new arena, Sacramento secured by getting a loan from the vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, to be paid back from the city's general fund based on projected dramatic increases in--what else--parking revenue from all those anticipated downtown visitors. Within a few years, even before the dramatic shifts of the COVID-19 closures, the weaknesses of that funding mechanism became apparent, especially when local business leaders complained about their customers having to pay for parking until 10 PM in Midtown. The city caved on shorter meter hours, in effect sabotaging their own efforts to repay the Goldman Sachs loan to continue subsidizing business associations' pet projects at the expense of neighbors.
So, yes, the vision of a repopulated Sacramento central city, put forth by community activists inspired by big-city ideas, could have been accomplished decades earlier, if our wealthiest and most powerful regional leaders, obsessed with their vision of Sacramento as a quaint farm town (coded to mean "whiteness") had agreed with a forward-thinking vision of transit, walkability, and urban vitality, instead of an endless stream of taxpayer-subsidized outward suburban sprawl. Their opposition to an urban, walkable city (with urbanity still coded to mean diversity) held this city back, and we're still paying the price, in the form of the arena payments that outstrip arena revenues, even as private developers reap enormous profits thanks to the city's "wealthfare" subsidies.
If Starbucks is a barometer of the economic health of a place, take note:
Just off the top of my head, I'm counting 10 Starbucks that have closed in the last 3-4 years in downtown/midtown/east Sac!
Meanwhile, Starbucks are opening new stores in Folsom, Roseville, and other suburban cities in the Sac Metro. In some ways, Folsom and Roseville are more "city-like" than Sacramento these days. Roseville and Folsom have all the higher-end retail stores, and way more chain, and more importantly, non-chain restaurants.
I'm not even counting Peets Coffee and Tea, nor other independently owned small business coffee places. The few independently owned new coffee places that opened-up in the central city got huge money grants and/or loans (your tax dollars) to open-up.
Living in the past and making policy based on what the gov't did 75 years ago in the 1950's is just plain unhealthy, worse, basing that policy on politics, distorted truths, and revisionist history is sad and 21st century racism.
It was gov't policy that, literally, torn down whole neighborhoods in downtown Sacramento, and now they are doing the same thing, figuratively, by their so called "progressive" policies, at your tax dollar expense.
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