Building Our Future
Full Speed Ahead
This year’s State of Downtown Breakfast was a modest affair. With no high-profile project or plan to unveil, the event featured mostly small steps unlikely to generate much excitement.
But there’s no shortage of cool stuff happening to shake the central city out of the doldrums.
Let’s start with safety. Downtown Partnership Executive Director Michael Ault says nothing’s more important than keeping people safe. That’s why the partnership is hiring private security patrols to augment police.
“Safety is the foundation that our city needs to be built on and without it nothing else will succeed,” Ault told the breakfast audience.
All Aboard
Slick marketing materials for development in the Downtown Railyards are circulating, and if the finished product lives up to the public relations excitement, Sacramento will take a big leap forward on the cool city front.
When I was a reporter for the Bee long ago, I traveled to a half-dozen cities that turned abandoned railyards into attractive places to live and gather. I wrote about our city’s interest in doing the same.
Developers Phil Angelides and Angelo Tsakopoulos were poised to buy the acreage behind the Sacramento Valley Station at Fourth and I streets. The deal fell through. Not much happened in the railyards over the next several decades.
How Clever
Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts are creative ways to promote redevelopment in California without citywide tax increases or raids on municipal budgets. These special districts are popular in Sacramento.
From Aggie Square on Stockton Boulevard to the Downtown railyards and soccer stadium and a potential Capitol Mall campus for Sac State, the city has embraced special district financing schemes that were once the domain of redevelopment agencies.
Challenges with these plans can get messy. It will be years before their overall efficacy is known. But the idea is straight forward.
Capitol Idea
With state employees working remotely, Downtown needs a boost. Our business district always depended on state workers for daytime vitality. Despite recent progress, Downtown continues to suffer.
Like any big idea, it’s hard to say if this one will ever happen. But Sacramento State University’s compelling proposal for a mixed-use campus on Capitol Mall excites some smart, influential people.
“Downtown is flat on its back,” West Sac developer Mark Friedman tells me. “The daytime population is 40% less than what it was pre-COVID.”
California is the only U.S. location where state employees haven’t been sent back to the office, he notes.
For Land’s Sake
Not long ago, there was a short list of local developers who could pull off big projects. Their names were Lukenbill, Benvenuti, Tsakopoulos, Petrovich and a few others. Successful people with deep community roots, they had big ideas and access to money. They got things done.
Today, major new players have much deeper roots.
Two Native American tribes, Wilton Rancheria and Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, are investing heavily Downtown, bringing excitement and cash.
“These tribes are making a lot of money and they are investing a lot of money in the core. That is a great thing for the city,” developer Sotiris Kolokotronis tells me. “We should be grateful for that.”
Dense Thinking
It doesn’t happen often in politics, but sometimes we get the right outcome despite long odds and low expectations. Senate Bill 79, which encourages high-density housing near major transit hubs in Sacramento and other California cities, is a prime example.
In an interview with Inside, state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), sponsor of several impactful housing bills in recent years, admits he was lukewarm about SB 79 earlier this year.
“We have done a lot of different housing work over the years, and it’s been fantastic,” Wiener says. “But the idea of rezoning around transit is a very tough one politically because so many cities have zoned for single-family homes around the highest quality transit. And that’s just not sustainable for housing or for these (transit) systems.”
