Building Our Future
From The Wreckage
What a difference a pandemic makes. In spring 2019, a buoyant Mayor Darrell Steinberg, doing his best Daniel Burnham imitation to “make no little plans,” unveiled his big vision for Old Sacramento and Downtown.
Sacramento would leverage more than $40 million in hotel taxes left from the Convention Center and Community Center Theatre renovation and jazz up the waterfront. New attractions would include an outdoor concert venue, rooftop bars and a barge docked so people could swim safely near the Tower Bridge in our namesake river.
The central city had arrived. Downtown would finally get its must-see family attraction. Construction cranes were everywhere. The future looked bright. Steinberg would have a legacy other than heartache over the growing homeless and housing crises.
Mild Wild West
For the first time in several years, some business owners in Old Sacramento—battered by COVID-19, civil unrest and crime—feel hopeful.
The historic district has long suffered an image problem. It had attractions and history, but never the critical mass and appeal to become a must-see attraction.
Excitement was high before the pandemic. An inviting embarcadero was installed. More family-friendly events were planned. The future looked bright in April 2019, after the City Council agreed to invest $47 million to upgrade the Old Sac waterfront, with money leveraged to lure private investment.
Power Up
Just when scientific literacy seems more needed than ever, there’s good news in a tidy space along the riverfront near Old Sacramento.
Adults will love the recently opened SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity, MOSAC for short, at 400 Jibboom St. But this place is really about kids and teaching them that science matters—it’s formidable and we ignore or scorn it at our peril.
Here’s the most important fact if you are a kid: The museum aims to show youngsters that science is cool because, well, it is.
Daring Greatly
It’s a refrain I hear a lot these days, especially when I’m cycling along the American River or through the center of our troubled city.
“Steinberg ran on a promise to fix the homeless problem and it’s only gotten worse. He’s wasted time, money and energy, and there’s more garbage and encampments everywhere. What a failure.”
Now Mayor Darrell Steinberg has put forward his latest plan to attack our chronic homelessness problem—his “Housing Right and Obligation Act.” It’s generating even more heat.
People Power Suburb
There’s an old academic exercise among urban planners where they ask something like this: If a revolution comes to your town, will you instinctively know where to gather to find out what’s happening?
Identify a park or square where people would naturally flock, and it means your town has some appreciation for civic space and a sense of community fostered by planners and architects.
My family and I enjoyed living in Carmichael for 20 years. If that question were asked of residents there, what would they answer? Spoiler alert: They can’t say a strip mall or Starbucks.
Housing Solutions
It would have been easy to overlook with everything else happening, but two days after defeating the ill-conceived attempt to recall him, Gov. Gavin Newsom made news by signing three bills to chip away at California’s affordable housing crisis.
Newsom, who three years ago promised to deliver 3.5 million new homes by 2025, is taking a more incremental—and practical—approach to the problem.
None of the bills will come close to solving the state’s monumental housing problems, but if harsh reaction to at least one of the measures tells us anything, the governor has indeed shaken things up.
