(page 3 of 4)

It became clear, Ault says, that the Thursday night farmers market and the seasonal downtown ice-skating rink&emdash;two development ideas from the '90s&emdash;weren't going to prime downtown's economic pump. What downtown needed was feet on the street&emdash;people actually living there.

The city for a long time has had a planning commitment to the revitalization of downtown, says Michael
McKeever, executive director of SACOG, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. Like many cities, it concluded a while ago that the go-to engine for vitalizing downtown was downtown housing. And that's not something people understood 20 years ago, or even 10. It's a relatively new understanding. But it was an understanding that arrived with crystal clarity.

In 2002, SACOG officials began a planning venture called the Blueprint Project. The goal? Find ways to improve transportation, travel patterns and air quality. In a series of community workshops, they looked at what probably was going to happen if the region's sprawling growth kept eating up surrounding land.
People were horrified to see what would happen, McKeever says. In this country and beyond, we've gone through a half-century of growth that has pulled us farther and farther outward. Twenty-minute commutes came to a screeching halt; 45 minutes was more like it. Most people can find better ways to enjoy life than sitting in a car in a parking lot on a freeway, McKeever wryly points out. 

More Eyes Turn Toward Downtown

So while some people were looking downtown with new eyes, others already were at work there on what they knew had to happen. The (SACOG) blueprint reflects what our dreams for downtown Sacramento were and are in terms of really building the core and bringing residents downtown and establishing an urban-lifestyle option for people in the region, Fargo says. A lot of us have wanted more intensive residential development near the core, in both Sacramento and West Sacramento. And now, she says, we're starting to get it. It just makes more sense to bring people back downtown and give them the experience of being able to walk to work, at least walk to activities after work, and enjoy their weekends by walking a block and sitting at an outside cafe.

They Did It in San Diego

Remember when you first heard about John Saca's plan to build two 54-story condo towers? Did you ever think it would really happen? Visit the site at 301 Capitol Mall today and you can see for yourself. I went to college in San Diego in the mid-1980s, says the Sacramento-born developer. Then, San Diego's downtown was dead. In 1986, Horton Plaza (shopping mall) was built, and that made a little change, but in '86, '87, '88, it was no better than downtown Sacramento, and I would argue it was worse. In the early '90s, developers from Vancouver came in and built the first residential high-rise structure in San Diego, and everyone thought they were crazy. Just like everyone thought I was crazy two years ago, when every major developer in downtown was saying [The Towers on Capitol Mall] would never work, people won't want to live there, it wasn't economical, I wouldn't find financing . . . I've proved them all wrong. Saca notes that San Diego's first downtown high-rise created a wave of residential construction that continues today.

« Previous 1 2 3 4 Next »