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If you don't like being called a liar, Chimerique, my advice is, don't lie. Making obviously false claims about what I think, and about downtown Sacramento, is no way to win friends. The central city is not primarily or even predominantly low-income; according to a survey of low-income housing done by the city around 2007, about 17% of the central city's housing stock is low-income, meaning the other 83% are accessible to median or above-average incomes. That number has almost certainly gone down since 2007. Your claim that I only want low-income housing in the central city is a flat-out lie, and it calls into question any other statement you make here--if you're willing to fabricate so willingly, what else are you lying about? Do you consider yourself at all obligated to tell the truth?
See how you are stretching the truth, not only calling me a liar (more name-calling), but making the case that everything I say is a lie. Sort of like retelling history from your point-of-view.
So, if you are saying that you don't only want low-income housing in downtown, I can only accept that as your belief and I apologize for any misunderstanding.
But the larger question is what ratio of low-income to middle-income and high-income housing is acceptable to you?
And how much do you want mandated by law for low-income housing? And would you encourage or discourage a developer who wants to build predominately high-income housing downtown if it met all your historical and intricate conditions on what is acceptable downtown?
Meanwhile, the whole 3rd/4th/L/Capitol block sits fenced off. I will believe it when the luxury condo towers get finished *there*.
Well, that and empty hole at 7th and K. For that matter, there's a bunch of nearly empty buildings all along J, K, and L, and there have been murmurings about redeveloping a lot of them, like 700 K St, which still has its conceptual drawings in the windows and 1000 J, which seems like an easier sell, since it's already in a more established area with more amenities nearby. All of those would have more civic good than bulldozing some occupied low-rise apartments and building up. But I guess there are a lot more factors to real estate development than where the searching out the crappiest building to tear down or the biggest empty lot to build on. In any case, adding 1000 units to that area will bring in more people spending money in that area (including non-game nights.)
If you don't like being called a liar, Chimerique, my advice is, don't lie. Making obviously false claims about what I think, and about downtown Sacramento, is no way to win friends. The central city is not primarily or even predominantly low-income; according to a survey of low-income housing done by the city around 2007, about 17% of the central city's housing stock is low-income, meaning the other 83% are accessible to median or above-average incomes. That number has almost certainly gone down since 2007. Your claim that I only want low-income housing in the central city is a flat-out lie, and it calls into question any other statement you make here--if you're willing to fabricate so willingly, what else are you lying about? Do you consider yourself at all obligated to tell the truth?
Good post/rant! Not as a contention, but just a curiosity: what's the rough bounds of that 17% number? I'm assuming the entire grid? Because though I agree with your greater point, I also agree with the points you've made other places that the perception of safety would be hugely improved by more people in the area. It does seem that, aside from the obvious fact that the homeless with ties to the social services in the River District and American River camps tend to congregate downtown, downtown does seem to sport a high concentration of SRO's and other strictly affordable housing relative to other areas. Some of this seems due to it being attractive for redevelopment and affordable housing funds, some seems due to the fact that there just aren't as many people (particularly homeowners) to complain about it. This is mostly based on perception, but, in any case, additional housing for other income levels in that area would be beneficial.
So I can deduce from this explanation that the answer is NO, you don't live in Sacramento.
In fact, California tax-supported funds will eventually be going into the economy of another State instead of being circulated back into the economy of California in your situation and we wonder why California sometimes has financial challenges.
This is not a judgement against you by the way; you are free to live where you want obviously. But you do know that PERS retirement checks from the State of California after 7 years on average is 100% government backed PERs generated funds. Again, this is not a negative judgement; PERS retirees earned their retirement and paid into it, but on average after 7 years, the funds that pay a state employees retirement is no longer strickly the funds they paid into, rather it becomes PERS generated funds which comes from PERS investing that money wisely on the open market, but is still backed partially by California tax-supported government funds.
While this has become totally off-topic, obviously I don't live in Sacramento any longer. Big deal! I do know it rather well and am still interested in what occurs there, or doesn't. According to your approach, which I question after 25 years of pouring money into PERS which has continued to accrue with interest, I still have a year to go on my own funding but in terms of the discussion at hand, that is neither here nor there. But don't let that stop you from cherry picking non sequitur issues.
Since you clearly know nothing substantive about me you don't have the first idea about what portion of our retirements find their way back to Sacramento, how or why, nor should you. And for the record, I very much doubt that those of us state retirees who have moved elsewhere are responsible for California's fiscal issues. As retired political and legislative analysts my wife and I could tell you what is but I'm not going to waste the time. That would be fodder for a separate thread anyway and as you have already done, would be dismissed out-of-hand due to my change of residence regardless of the approximately 50 of my 68 years I spent in the state.
Now it occurs to me that the OP was about thugs and minorities. Being as diverse as its population has become, Sacramento is full of "minorities" which are actually now, collectively, the majority and "thugs" of all persuasions are still, thankfully, the real minority. As wburg so correctly pointed out, for which I thank him, and I didn't initially consider, many of those who help make the city what it is are hard working, honest people earning borderline wages and not the chronically unemployed. They have every right to expect and have access to homes where or near where they work. Otherwise they wouldn't be there at all and the city would suffer accordingly.
None of that changes the fact that the city's concentration has, for years, been overly focused on a place for a relative handful of people to play a kids game watched by a minority of the populace to the detriment and lack of focus on such minor considerations as the city's infrastructure and the fact that its police force is woefully under-funded and under-manned for the size of its population.
The central city is not primarily or even predominantly low-income; according to a survey of low-income housing done by the city around 2007, about 17% of the central city's housing stock is low-income, meaning the other 83% are accessible to median or above-average incomes. That number has almost certainly gone down since 2007.
Your 2007 stats doesn't account for the severe recession we've been through nor does it account for the reduction in population you've mentioned in previous posts that downtown as supposedly experienced.
Nor does your stats point to the K Street Mall area/downtown plaza targeted for new housing, I bet those numbers have a higher percentage of low income.
Of the 83% (2007 stats) how much exactly is the upper income level, what exactly is the median income downtown. More importantly what are the percentages now in 2014.
Your stats are selective and ambiguous. Give us real disposal income levels for different parts of the Grid, you can prove me wrong I don't care. Because if you prove me wrong it just adds to the case that downtown can support upper income housing in the form of 25 story towers. But give us numbers that matter.
If you don't like being called a liar, Chimerique, my advice is, don't lie.
Well, to paraphrase, if you don't like being called obtuse, Burg, then my advice is, don't be obtuse, and if you don't like being called deluded, then my advice is, don't delude yourself. To wit:
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Originally Posted by wburg
Why should the central city, a bulwark of art and creativity, be the exclusive domain of boring suits and buttoned-down finance types? A healthy urban neighborhood is a mixed-income neighborhood, where bankers and businesspeople live alongside waiters and students and artists and retired seniors and elementary school kids. Midtown's success is based on this vigorous mixture of incomes and uses--in a word, diversity.
I hear and read this assertion again and again, but it simply *isn't* bourne out by evidence. Obviously, those areas that price out their working class into the far hinterlands are a bad idea, but all too often that pricing out is caused by actions taken in the name of "environmentalism" that Mr. Burg all too often *supports*--no growth, permanent open space, precious wetlands, precious hillsides, greenbelts, and I could go on and on.
Moreover, if the waiters and students and elementary school kids are the young adult and teenage and child offspring of the bankers and businesspeople, and the retired seniors are the parents of the bankers and businesspeople, hey, that neighborhood model of bankers and businesspeople actually actually works fairly well!
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Originally Posted by wburg
I also don't believe in the kind of "ethnic cleansing" or "cordon sanitaire" some people seem to support regarding homeless people. The solution to homelessness starts with housing, and it has to be somewhere.
Again, if you don't want to be called dishonest, Burg, don't be dishonest. These homeless people simply aren't just homeless because of the cost of housing, although that cost certainly doesn't help. They are mentally ill, in and out of the joint, or slaves to addictions. Sure they need help--but halfway houses, shelters, parole offices and suppport services mixed in among the attempts to gentrify downtown only *bring down* any attempts to gentrify downtown. So what to do? Put them around where Loaves and Fishes and the Salvation Army and the Union Gospel Mission already are--namely, north of downtown. So much for dreams of "The River District", but it is what it is.
Last edited by NickB1967; 03-27-2014 at 03:42 PM..
Kevin Johnson is pushing heavily for this.. In my opinion, its fine with him because hes not going to be around the arena after dark. Hes no different than a liberal at all. He would rather push diversity increasing things down the normal peoples throat but not want to live in that reality. People like him and all the other white liberals should be forced to live in or experience the mess they want to create for regular citizens and that kind of racism needs to be exposed.
What makes you think liberals want this? Do you have to label so nastily? You know, for once, libs and conservatives may be on the same side. It's not a republican vs dem thing, ya know. And Kevin? He's a DINO, anyways.
I certainly think it's a financial fiasco and puts Sacramento taxpayers on the hook and will be a traffic nightmare. I work in that area and I would never be in that area after dark. Have you been in the area by 5:30? Not a safe place to be. Putting in Hard Rock Cafe and a dive bar didn't make it safe; what makes them think this will make the area safer?
To the person who started this thread...you're not equating minorities with thugs, are you? No? Good. I didn't think you were racist.
Good post/rant! Not as a contention, but just a curiosity: what's the rough bounds of that 17% number? I'm assuming the entire grid? Because though I agree with your greater point, I also agree with the points you've made other places that the perception of safety would be hugely improved by more people in the area. It does seem that, aside from the obvious fact that the homeless with ties to the social services in the River District and American River camps tend to congregate downtown, downtown does seem to sport a high concentration of SRO's and other strictly affordable housing relative to other areas. Some of this seems due to it being attractive for redevelopment and affordable housing funds, some seems due to the fact that there just aren't as many people (particularly homeowners) to complain about it. This is mostly based on perception, but, in any case, additional housing for other income levels in that area would be beneficial.
Homeless people hang out downtown because there is a lot of foot traffic, due to the 100,000 or so people who work there during the day. They spare-change the people walking on foot--the pedestrian is the customer. The River District and American River are a couple of miles from downtown Sacramento, but why do they walk to downtown Sacramento as opposed to, say, the business parks of South Natomas, which aren't any farther away? Because nobody is going to walk by and hand spare change to someone there, there's no pedestrian traffic. If they walk into Del Paso Heights, the people there don't have much money, and again, not much foot traffic. Arden/Watt? Sure, you see a few guys with "homeless vet" signs in street medians, but they are spread out a lot more--the carrying capacity is lower.
Spare-changers go where the customer is. If we relocated social services to Roseville, they'd ride buses downtown to spare change during the day.
That's also why you see them in places like Union Square, Market Street, or really any part of San Francisco's business or shopping districts during the day. You get spare-changed once on every streetcorner, on each side of the street, because there's a lot of foot traffic to give spare-changers change. But people don't notice it as much because San Francisco's population density is high even in commercial neighborhoods, which means only rarely are the street people the majority of the people you see on the street.
Downtown Sacramento has about half a dozen SRO buildings, holding a total of about 600 people. They aren't building any more. Many are not any sort of public housing project--they're just residential hotels who charge cheap rents, not the result of some past government effort to house poor people downtown. In fact, the only reason why there are SRO hotels in the part of downtown from 7th-10th Street is because the city demolished the older SRO hotels west of 7th Street during the redevelopment era. Some of the guys who lived there just decamped to hotels a few blocks away, and since low-level office and retail workers (who used to live in downtown's SROs) preferred new apartments in Midtown, the owners rented to the West End guys instead. They weren't subsidized by the government, they just owned the buildings and rent them to pay the bills. Today, a couple of the SRO units and replacements are public-owned/public-subsidized, but some still aren't, like the Capitol Park, the Marshall, the Sequoia, Congress and the Golden, which add up to about half of that 600 figure. Now, there wasn't room for all of them--there used to be close to 3500 SRO rooms in downtown Sacramento. Oddly enough, we now have about 3000 homeless.
The SRO population is actually outnumbered by the senior housing/public housing towers in Midtown, but you don't notice them in Midtown because it's a mixed-use residential neighborhood with a lot of people of other income levels.
I hear and read this assertion again and again, but it simply *isn't* bourne out by evidence. Obviously, those areas that price out their working class into the far hinterlands are a bad idea, but all too often that pricing out is caused by actions taken in the name of "environmentalism" that Mr. Burg all too often *supports*--no growth, permanent open space, precious wetlands, precious hillsides, greenbelts, and I could go on and on.
Oh, you do go on and on, as we all know. I think you're substituting things that you think "leftists" support with things that I actually support--and calling me "deluded" because you can't tell the difference between my actual opinions and what you think my opinions should be, based on the Standard Book of Marxist Opinions that you think everyone to the left of Charles Lincoln Rockwell follows slavishly. We're talking about the central city here, and aside from city parks, there isn't much open space, wetlands, hillsides, greenbelts etcetera. I'm a downright grumpy advocate of building new infill on the many vacant lots we have around the central city, although it's hard to stay grumpy these days because there is new housing going into many of our vacant lots, as their owners finally get it into their thick heads that their vacant lots are worth money.
Sure, I think things like clean water, breathable air, and not letting industry defecate wherever and whenever it wants are good ideas, as unpopular as those ideas are in some circles, but I have this radical idea that we can find places to live and find ways to not poison ourselves in the process. And the "greenest" thing you can do, more than living in a "green building" or driving a Prius, is having a short commute to work. More people living in smart, mixed-use cities is better for the planet than dropping a buck in the "Save the Whales" can at the Co-Op. No growth? I'm the one who wants to double the population of the central city--but knows we can do it without demolishing a single building (or at least a building that not even the most ardent preservationist will mind losing.)
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Moreover, if the waiters and students and elementary school kids are the young adult and teenage and child offspring of the bankers and businesspeople, and the retired seniors are the parents of the bankers and businesspeople, hey, that neighborhood model of bankers and businesspeople actually actually works fairly well!
It's awful nice if you can live with your banker daddy in his downtown condo, but for the most part that isn't what happens, and plenty of those folks are independent adults whose parents (or kids) can't afford a large multi-generational household, or maybe they're dead, or they never had kids. There is plenty of room for bankers and businesspeople in the central city, I even know a few of 'em. What galls me is the assumption that the central city must be the exclusive domain of the wealthy, and that's where I think you and Chimerique agree, but I don't.
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Again, if you don't want to be called dishonest, Burg, don't be dishonest. These homeless people simply aren't just homeless because of the cost of housing, although that cost certainly doesn't help. They are mentally ill, in and out of the joint, or slaves to addictions. Sure they need help--but halfway houses, shelters, parole offices and suppport services mixed in among the attempts to gentrify downtown only *bring down* any attempts to gentrify downtown. So what to do? Put them around where Loaves and Fishes and the Salvation Army and the Union Gospel Mission already are--namely, north of downtown. So much for dreams of "The River District", but it is what it is.
Sweets, you're the one being dishonest here--or maybe just "misinformed" is a better term. Lack of affordable housing is the primary cause of homelessness, but it's not the only cause. The problem is, the other problems you cite, like mental illness and addiction and physical disabilities, are all made worse by homelessness. If you sometimes drink a bit much, if you end up on the street you'll probably become a drunk. If you tend to get a bit moody or excitable, on the street you're more likely to go into full-blown major depression or have a psychotic episode. If you have some trouble with your legs, the rigors of the street may put you in a wheelchair. A criminal record becomes harder to avoid if your very existence constitutes a crime and you are surrounded by danger. What had once been relatively minor problems turn into major ones, and efforts to deal with them get pushed into the background by the one single overriding consideration of TRY NOT TO DIE OF EXPOSURE OR STARVATION ON THE STREETS!
There actually aren't very many halfway houses, no shelters and relatively few support services in the central city anymore--there were a lot more 20 years ago, but over the years they have decamped (often to North Sacramento and other old suburbs, and to the L&F/Richards area) as the central city has changed. And a lot of programs that were available 20 years ago simply don't exist anymore, there are far fewer resources available for folks on the street, and thus fewer paths off the street. There are a couple of parole offices, but guess what, we're a central city and administrative center, and that's just the sort of thing you're going to find downtown.
Your 2007 stats doesn't account for the severe recession we've been through nor does it account for the reduction in population you've mentioned in previous posts that downtown as supposedly experienced.
Your assertion that downtown is predominantly low-income came, apparently, from no source whatsoever other than where the sun don't shine. Please back up your statements with some sort of facts, because I think you're just making stuff up again. Since 2007, the central city may have lost a few hundred people at most--population per US Census dropped from 31,000 in 2000 to 30,000 in 2010--and at least some of that was due to the loss of low-income housing, like the Wendell Hotel SRO (taken out of SRO stock and not replaced, still vacant) and closure of a couple of the older board & care homes like Tremblay's and G Street House on H Street, and some short-term vacancy in low-income housing, like the Berry Hotel, which was vacated in 2009, vacant in 2010 and since repopulated. But since 2010, about 1000 new housing units have been built or opened. Some were low-income, but the majority were market-rate. That's a good thing--the more the better--but I figure that if we're holding steady at 17% or even 16% it's a best-case scenario. My ballpark guess is that Midtown is up to 32,000 or higher now--if we play our cards right, we could hit 40,000 by 2020.
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Nor does your stats point to the K Street Mall area/downtown plaza targeted for new housing, I bet those numbers have a higher percentage of low income.
There is almost no housing there, in part because, in my opinion, a lot of the downtown power brokers really don't like the idea of ANY housing downtown, high-end or otherwise. The most visible poor people downtown are homeless people, who, by definition, don't live in "low-income housing," they live on the street in no housing. And of course a lot of downtown sits vacant because it is owned by speculators who don't give a damn about how much their property decays, or SHRA, who is pretty much as bad as the speculators in terms of letting their buildings fall to pieces. One could just as easily draw small circles around the small pockets of single-family homes in Boulevard Park or Poverty Ridge, where income levels and property values are really high, and paint a different picture. If you are making claims about the entire central city, you have to include the whole thing, not exclude the parts that don't match your imaginings--which is most of it. Again, maybe you just haven't seen the good parts of the central city?
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Of the 83% (2007 stats) how much exactly is the upper income level, what exactly is the median income downtown. More importantly what are the percentages now in 2014.
Your stats are selective and ambiguous. Give us real disposal income levels for different parts of the Grid, you can prove me wrong I don't care. Because if you prove me wrong it just adds to the case that downtown can support upper income housing in the form of 25 story towers. But give us numbers that matter.
I don't have to prove you wrong because you haven't provided anything to disprove but random guesses. And if you're asking me to prove that downtown can't support 25 story residential towers, sorry, I won't do that--because I think we can support 25 story residential towers, and we will probably have some in the near future, as long as we can convince those naysayers at Downtown Partnership and the Metro Chamber (and their suburban developer, Joel Kotkin fan buddies) that people should be living right in the central business district, in large numbers.
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