Gary Delsohn

Not long ago, I read a Washington Post commentary on how to get more housing built. The author was Howard Husock, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

Husock has written several books on housing and is one of the country’s leading thinkers on the issue. I wondered how his ideas could apply to Sacramento. He was happy to talk.

My first question was, what’s right and wrong about California’s approach to solving its affordable housing crisis?

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.

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.

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.