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A significant project, just to the north of the massive Railyards Project, has finally gotten underway in downtown Sacramento. We really need to get a much larger population base living in the downtown area, it would significantly help things such as K St, Downtown Plaza and the Railyards proposed retail plans:
A groundbreaking with speeches and a ceremonial blasting down of a wall Thursday kicked off construction of Township 9, a development expected to place 2,900 residences, offices and stores on 65 acres just north of downtown Sacramento..."This is one of the largest infill, largest mixed-use projects in the country," said Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.
Let's just hope it's better planned than was North Natomas where all the low-income housing the city demanded was condensed into apartrment complexes which overnight became bastions of drug use, trafficing and other criminality.
In the 19 years I've lived in Sacramento I've yet to see very many properly planned and executed infill porojects. If ever a city lacked vision, this is it. And if I'm wrong then what vision exists is, at best, myopic.
The area is only 65 acres, so I don't see how you can decentralize much of anything in the development. My understanding is that the state has a requirement for the set aside of a certain % of units for low income housing, so I would anticipate this will be included in the nearly 3,000 units.
Regarding poorly executed infill projects, what would you give as specific examples? North Natomas doesn't seem like an infill to me, just a substantial northerly expansion of development into open land.
Regarding poorly executed infill projects, what would you give as specific examples? North Natomas doesn't seem like an infill to me, just a substantial northerly expansion of development into open land.
K Street Mall and environs, not to mention years wasted on the rail yard, new arena, et al!
The Railyards project is moving forward, they are finishing the toxic cleanup and starting on the infrastructure. K Street has always been a failure because it was always based on the foolish idea that you can convince suburbanites to come downtown if you make downtown look like a suburban mall. Of course, suburbs already have suburban malls, closer to their homes and with free parking, so it never works...
The Railyards project is moving forward, they are finishing the toxic cleanup and starting on the infrastructure. K Street has always been a failure because it was always based on the foolish idea that you can convince suburbanites to come downtown if you make downtown look like a suburban mall. Of course, suburbs already have suburban malls, closer to their homes and with free parking, so it never works...
Well, 16th St in Denver works pretty well as an equivalent to K St in Sacramento. However, I assume Denver has more housing downdown than Sacramento provides. If this is true, it might help explain the success of 16th St in Denver, and provide ideas as to how K St may benefit here.
Not every downtown-mall project was a failure, but most of them were. The ones that succeeded did so because they created a place that was unlike a suburban mall, the ones that failed did so because they tried to replicate a suburban mall in an urban setting. It *is* possible to get suburbanites to come downtown, if you offer them something they want to see--namely, something they can't get in the suburbs. That's why they come out in droves to Concert in the Park and Second Saturday and other big public gatherings (along with many people who live in the central city.) But they have been offered little to tempt them to K Street and downtown, and there aren't enough people living downtown to join them, or even to attract many who live in midtown to walk the few extra blocks.
Got an email about the Railyards: they are grading for the first streets (Railyards Boulevard) and making prep for the pilings that will be needed for the 5th and 6th Street armature bridges that will go over the relocated railroad tracks. So they're not exactly dead in the water yet.
Not every downtown-mall project was a failure, but most of them were. The ones that succeeded did so because they created a place that was unlike a suburban mall, the ones that failed did so because they tried to replicate a suburban mall in an urban setting. It *is* possible to get suburbanites to come downtown, if you offer them something they want to see--namely, something they can't get in the suburbs. That's why they come out in droves to Concert in the Park and Second Saturday and other big public gatherings (along with many people who live in the central city.) But they have been offered little to tempt them to K Street and downtown, and there aren't enough people living downtown to join them, or even to attract many who live in midtown to walk the few extra blocks.
Got an email about the Railyards: they are grading for the first streets (Railyards Boulevard) and making prep for the pilings that will be needed for the 5th and 6th Street armature bridges that will go over the relocated railroad tracks. So they're not exactly dead in the water yet.
Speaking of the Railyards development, wasn't Bass Pro supposed to be open by the end of this year?
The K Street Mall has been a missed opportunity. There have been repeated efforts to fix K Street and none of them have really succeeded.
Urban shopping malls can work even if the local demographics aren't that hot if they appeal to tourists. Ghirardelli Sq and Pier 39 functionally are both malls that survive almost entirely from tourists. For those malls, local demographics are essentially irrelevant because the locals aren't really shopping much there. These are great for SF, because the sales tax they collect is essentially all new money to the city being collected from non-residents who aren't demanding much in the way of services for this tax money. Urban Malls can also be configured to appeal to both tourists and locals. Horton Plaza in San Diego, the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and Union Square in San Francisco both rely on that model. When Horton Plaza opened, the area around that neighborhood was much worse than K Street is today. Horton Plaza helped draw people to the region and the traffic to the mall was the seed of the gas lamp district in San Diego.
But the tenant mix on the K Street Mall needs to change. It probabaly needs more theaters to draw people there at night as well as additional nightclubs besides the Hard Rock Cafe and maybe something like a Hooters or something like C-Webb's sports bar/restaurant. The top story of the K Street Mall is mostly empty but that could be a good place for Comedy Club in the region. Chains of this sort can succeed with tourists because they have heard of them. This region could be a tourist draw for people from Fairfield, Chico, Modesto or Stockton, but the region has to provide enough things for the tourists to do to justify coming out here for a visit. A revitalized K Street isn't the complete solution to that problem, but its part of the solution.
The K Street mall is close to Old town, close to the Capitol and pretty close to the convention center, which itself has several hotels. In this region, those are some of the major tourists traps. If the mall gave the tourists more stuff to do, it could be a lot more successful. Tourism in this area is very undeveloped.
When Curmudgeon says the area lacks vision, the K Street Mall is an area where I really agree with him.
As for Bass Pro Shops, I think that is something that probably should be going out in Natomas or maybe West Sac. Big box retail isn't something you want in an area that is supposed to be an extention of the downtown core. I will wait to see how it comes out in the end, but so far my hunch is that too is part of the lack of vision thing that Curmudgeon was talking about.
The tenant mix on K Street has changed: there are now several nightclubs and restaurants within a block of 10th & K (Cosmo/Social at 10th & K, Parlare at 10th & J, Scandal/Grange in the Citizen Hotel at 10th & J, McCormick & Schmick's at 11th & J, Marilyn's at 9th and K, Pyramid at 11th & K, plus the Crest Theatre (which features a lot of evening film festivals and live shows) and Temple (arguably Sacramento's best coffee shop.) We need a few more to hit critical mass--although the proposed "mermaid bar/cougar den" project planned for the 1000 block of K has received more than its share of criticism. But there is a lot of potential there--more than 10,000 people turned out for New Year's Eve at that corner, with only a couple weeks' planning.
Some of the lack of vision on K Street is the city's fault, and some of it isn't. In between Old Sacramento and this interesting potentially tourist-drawing corner at 10th & K are three obstacles: Interstate 5, Westfield Downtown Plaza and the perennial cluster-intercourse that is the 700/800 block.
Interstate 5 slices Old Sacramento off from the rest of the city like a Berlin Wall. Crossing that mental divide is so hard that many people are pretty much unaware that there is a city on the other side--their knowledge of Sacramento is limited entirely to Old Sacramento. Getting people to cross it is very difficult. It took an earthquake to free San Francisco from the Embarcadero Freeway that allowed Fisherman's Wharf to rejoin the rest of the city. In Sacramento we don't get earthquakes, but at some point we'll probably have to deal with I-5.
Westfield's Downtown Plaza is disappointing because Westfield has no interest in creating competition for their golden child, the Roseville Galleria. One of their recent brainstorms was to put a Wal-Mart into the center of the mall, stopped by the city council. Westfield's counter was a Target. They basically use Downtown Plaza as a write-off. They have no interest in being anything but a suburban mall, because the suburban mall business is all they know. And in this market, they don't seem to be doing very well in a lot of places. Westfield also owns San Francisco's much-vaunted "Metreon" shopping plaza--the high-end, high-tech center now features many shuttered stores, and the most recent new tenant is a farmer's market.
The 700 block is a gigantic hassle. Chosen from the least impractical of three proposals for downtown revitalization, it has ended up costing the city millions as one property owner dragged things out for years with litigation, including the total destruction of a quarter-block of buildings after a suspicious fire, and ended when the other property owner who was supposed to take on the project declared bankruptcy. The end result was that the city spent millions to buy the properties, kick out the local business that were located there, and now has utterly no idea what to do with it. The 800 block begins with two depressing things--the aforementioned vacant quarter-block, and the iconic "Darth Vader" building with its huge, gaping, vacant retail storefront. The high point of the block is a Rite-Aid and a couple of beautiful but vacant buildings.
As to Bass Pro: Well into the "not the city's idea" category. The Railyards developer is best known for shopping centers with big parking lots, and their investors apparently wanted a familiar big-box customer involved with the project. We'll see if that part even happens.
If we can solve the problem of how to get people from Old Sacramento to K Street, we can show off the sides of Sacramento that most tourists never get to see, thanks to those three obstacles. One potential solution is the proposed downtown/riverfront streetcar. Its proposed route would run over the Tower Bridge right past Old Sacramento, curve around the mall onto K Street right past that 10th & K epicenter, and end up at the edge of Midtown. The turn-around point is within a few blocks of a gaggle of nightclubs, restaurants, live music venues and shops, in the part of town that gets very lively already, primarily by people coming into town from the eastern suburbs: the unincorporated county, Citrus Heights, Roseville, Folsom, Elk Grove etcetera--who can drive in without having to travel through the aforementioned no man's land. They are joined by those of us who walk from home to these places, but for whom walking to Old Sac or downtown is often a bit too much shoe leather.
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