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Okay, just saw them tonight and they are kind of subdued. And Estelle's Patisserie has extended their operating hours to 8 PM, at least on weekdays--there seems to be a lot more foot traffic in the early evening.
Glad to see Estelle's doing well! I thought it was more of a pure bakery concept, but they're staying super busy at lunch time and serving some tasty dishes.
Wburg has been arguing "blight" was invented term with most important factor in determining whether a neighborhood was "blighted" was race arguing that the housing quality of these neighborhoods was comparable to the rest of the city, the census data simply doesn't support this argument. Who wants to live in housing without running hot and cold water, without flush toilets and without a shower or a bathtub? This really was slum abatement. A lot of this housing stock really did need to go.
Right, because we lacked the technology to install new bathrooms and plumbing in preexisting housing.
Come on Shelato, they torn these buildings down so they could build freeways and state office buildings; pure and simple. Many blocks are still parking lots to this day. That's 60 years as a surface parking lot in the heart of a downtown.
Wburg's point is that all these people are the street because we destroyed their housing, which seems like a pretty good argument. Last I checked there isn't hot running water and toilets on the street either but maybe that's changed.
Not having a private bathroom doesn't mean you don't have access to a bathroom at all--many of these units were residential hotels or boarding houses which had shared bath and water facilities down the hall. So a group of ten men living on a hotel room floor didn't necessarily have to go without water, or go without a toilet--it meant they had to share it. Which is a little inconvenient, but it's also cheaper than an individual apartment with all the amenities.
Ever live with a few roommates? It means you have to share the bathroom, the kitchen, etcetera. But it isn't the same as not having running water at all, or not having a bathroom at all. It just means shared facilities. The excuse that somehow having to share a bathroom was the same as not having a bathroom at all was another excuse used to destroy inexpensive housing where poor people lived, and then never replace it.
It also seems a little silly to destroy the housing where 30,000 people lived because less than 10% have shared bathroom facilities, and a couple hundred didn't have individual access to running water. Installing plumbing in that 10% or so of the units seems like a lot less bother than knocking down thousands of homes!
Shelato is choosing not to address the fact that this housing was destroyed and never replaced, exactly as the business interests who supported redevelopment in its mid-century form. It was an act of willful ignorance, based on the idea that if you just ignored poor people hard enough, they would simply vanish. But that isn't what happened, and today's epidemic of homelessness is a direct result. Continuing to ignore it does not solve the problem either, but some people really, really fervently hope that it will if they just ignore it hard enough.
ryuns: It was a surprise to me too--I picked up my wife after a salon visit and noted that they were open and had a handwritten card with their new hours on the door. So I knew where we were having dinner!
I also noted that downtown Sacramento was very parked up--normally after 6 PM it's easy to find street parking because all the commuters go home at 5 and street parking is free after 6. Seeing it so parked up at 7:00 on a Thursday is an encouraging sign that more people are coming downtown--even though people complain about it, lousy parking in a business district is a sign of that districts economic health--the demand for parking has outstripped the supply, which used to be abundant when K Street was in worse shape!
Right, because we lacked the technology to install new bathrooms and plumbing in preexisting housing.
Yes, when the dilapidated buildings consisted of single dilapidated rooms with a dilapidated bathroom at the end of the dilapidated hallway to be used by all the transient residents. Sometimes it's easier to demolish.
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Originally Posted by Mr. Ozo
Come on Shelato, they torn these buildings down so they could build freeways and state office buildings; pure and simple.
Because a downtown of office buildings is worse than a "skid row" downtown?
Wburg is correct in that we do have to have a "skid row" *somewhere* as a place to house what otherwise become wandering homeless vagrants, but he and you need to stop kidding yourselves that such a downtown would have somehow become a "New Urbanist" neighborhood of educated hipsters. It would have remained skid row, and quite dangerous at that. What is now "Old Sacramento" was decidedly not a tourist destination in those days.
Last edited by NewToCA; 11-07-2012 at 10:50 AM..
Reason: edited reference to poster name
Sure, it's easier to demolish--it's always simpler and faster to destroy than to create--but demolition doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it somewhere else. The 30,000 people displaced by redevelopment didn't vanish, they moved to other neighborhoods if they could, or ended up on the street if they couldn't. The point isn't simply the demolition, but the conscious decision to demolish tens of thousands of housing units, the overwhelming majority of which did have plumbing, without replacing them with other housing anywhere.
Keep in mind that we're not just talking about what is now Old Sacramento--we're also talking about the area currently occupied by Capitol Mall, the O Street Mall, the K Street Mall and the Chinatown Mall. The "skid row" area along the waterfront was known as the Labor Market, and it was the hiring hall for about 25% of California's agricultural labor. It wasn't a tourist destination because it was a heavy industrial area and a job center, and a functioning railyard.
There were brief plans to create a new "Labor Market" dormitory area for the thousands of workers who lived alongside the drifters and winos of that part of the West End, but it never got built--there was a lack of political will for building that much low-income housing. Not that this sort of relocation and human warehousing generally went well either--it sometimes worked, but the end result was more often a place like Cabrini-Green or Pruitt-Igoe.
Neighborhoods that turn into New Urbanist neighborhoods of educated hipsters generally do start out as Skid Row neighborhoods, or at least ones that fit the redeveloper's playbook for "blight" (nonwhites, old buildings, scruffy in appearance, working class)--look at the Lower East Side in New York (cheap and burnt out in the 1970s), Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, or really any hipster district from Seattle to San Francisco to Chicago to Midtown Sacramento. They all started out as much scruffier neighborhoods, and the hipsters of the era (from the 1960s to the present) moved there because there was housing and the rent was cheap. The housing was often not in good shape, but it was present, so the first wave moved in, cafes and record stores followed, and eventually the areas get boutiqued out and the yuppies move in. There are plenty of criticisms of gentrification, but it never happens in neighborhoods that are leveled and turned into offices! It invariably happens in neighborhoods of run-down buildings, and generally ends with them being considered a beautiful "historic district" later on, once the yuppies have fixed them up. It's not as easy or as fast as just knocking things down, but then, real work worth doing seldom is.
That didn't happen in downtown Sacramento because there was no housing to move into--it had been destroyed. Although NickB1967's statements seem to assume that there are no longer wandering homeless vagrants downtown anymore--a point which seems to be the main complaint about present-day K Street. NickB, like the Chamber of Commerce/redevelopment types of the 1950s, seem to believe that street people spring spontaneously from old buildings, and if you get rid of the old buildings, the poor people just magically disappear. This is yet another delusion.
Neighborhoods that turn into New Urbanist neighborhoods of educated hipsters generally do start out as Skid Row neighborhoods, or at least ones that fit the redeveloper's playbook for "blight" (nonwhites, old buildings, scruffy in appearance, working class)--look at the Lower East Side in New York (cheap and burnt out in the 1970s), Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, or really any hipster district from Seattle to San Francisco to Chicago to Midtown Sacramento.
Uh, no. Midtown was never the Skid Row that the waterfront area of Sacramento was, just as Haight-Ashbury was never the Tenderloin. There is something run down, that you can gentrify, and then there is full-blown skid row, which will stubbornly remain.
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Originally Posted by wburg
Although NickB1967's statements seem to assume that there are no longer wandering homeless vagrants downtown anymore--a point which seems to be the main complaint about present-day K Street. NickB, like the Chamber of Commerce/redevelopment types of the 1950s, seem to believe that street people spring spontaneously from old buildings, and if you get rid of the old buildings, the poor people just magically disappear. This is yet another delusion.
Uh, no. Like I said, they have to go *someplace*. At this point Sacramento's skid row has become what is euphemistically called "The River District", if only everyone would just admit that. Since there are no tenements and no desire to build Pruitt-Igos and Cabrini Greens, a "safe ground" of campsites will have to do.
Uh, no. Midtown was never the Skid Row that the waterfront area of Sacramento was, just as Haight-Ashbury was never the Tenderloin. There is something run down, that you can gentrify, and then there is full-blown skid row, which will stubbornly remain.
The waterfront area of Sacramento you're talking about is the only part of the West End that wasn't entirely demolished, and is now Old Sacramento, which has somehow become a major tourist destination and even has a couple hundred residents. The area along what is now Capitol Mall and the O Street Mall office area was not part of the "Skid Row" you're talking about--it was a residential neighborhood with a lot of businesses, physically very similar to Midtown in all but racial makeup of its residents.
Take a look at the historic "skid row" of many cities and you'll see that no, they don't necessarily remain skid row even when not entirely demolished. The Bowery in New York wasn't gentrified when CBGB's opened, and the presence of a few winos and junkies didn't stop it from becoming a hipster epicenter. The original "Skid Road" in Seattle (the origin of the term Skid Row) is today the epicenter of the city's nightlife, with the sort of cafes, Internet companies, art galleries and other retail associated with the hippest of hipsterism. So, no.
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Uh, no. Like I said, they have to go *someplace*. At this point Sacramento's skid row has become what is euphemistically called "The River District", if only everyone would just admit that. Since there are no tenements and no desire to build Pruitt-Igos and Cabrini Greens, a "safe ground" of campsites will have to do.
And there you have it--the free-market response to homelessness is that homelessness is okay! I'm pretty sure people are aware that the Richards/River District area is a large homeless hangout, because of a combination of the shelters there (which used to be in what is now Old Sac, btw) and the plentiful semi-abandoned places where people can set up camp until rousted by the cops.
You're defending the destruction of neighborhoods on the basis that destroying them and putting people out on the street, where there are no toilets and hot water, is better than a small percentage of people in a poor neighborhood having no toilets or hot water (although, if a city was of a mind to do so, both could be provided) and you don't even have the excuse that what you're condoning will solve the problem!
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