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With the approval of the Railyards late last year, Sacramento is awash with opportunities to create new urban neighborhoods! I’m just wondering where it will happen first. It seems as if all the big redevelopment plans will be competing with each other for state grants and infrastructure funding and there is only so much to go around at a time. It also seems like we should concentrate the development in one area so a critical mass can be reached and really transform the neighborhood – although its tough to tell approved projects to wait! I think the downtown and midtown infill projects will continue to fill in those areas. And our Washington neighborhood projects in West Sacramento are well positioned since they already have streets and infrastructure.
So let’s see, we have Raley’s Landing, the Triangle, and Stone Locke in West Sac. There is also a ton of opportunity on West Capitol Ave. Then there are the Railyards, Township 9 and all of the Richards Blvd area, the Docks, and Setzer Project at Broadway and 3rd. With well over 30,000 residential units possible in all these it’s going to take a long time to fill it all up with urban livers(unless we can get the suburbs to stop growing…big IF only).
So here are my forecasts… but not all for 2008! And they are guesswork!
When the market comes back I think a few more large buildings will go up in Raley’s Landing since it has momentum with STRS and has the Fairfield Condo tower approved already. Hopefully the spots on West Capitol by Tower Bridge will get filled in too. Township 9 will kick off but won’t fill out too fast until it can grow with the Railyards underway. The City of Sacramento will focus on the Railyards, but it will be difficult to get much built in the next 5 years while plans continue to be refined. The Triangle needs to beat the Railyards timeline to get attention and traction. Stone Locke is a different kind of project that can probably go forward as an attraction for the whole downtown – maybe the Setzer project can build off that. It sounds like the Docks may be later on from the problems I have heard about.
Then throw an arena into Cal Expo and I bet it all changes too!
Anyone else been playing with this in your head (or on a map)?
Steve
2 responses so far ↓
1 wburg // Jan 9, 2008 at 3:12 pm
My big emphasis in all this fun is (as most who know me know already) preservation of historic neighborhoods, which I consider an important part of the whole city process: building dense and tall in the big infill areas you mentioned, building small and smart infill on vacant lots in the central city, and finding ways to preserve the built environment of the city.
How this ties into new development: Unless the city can find a way to incentivize building in those big infill areas, and disincentivize building in places like midtown, a lot of energy that should be going into building up the Docks and the Railyards will be bled off. The way things stand now, it will be cheaper to buy up a cluster of single family homes, let them rot until one can get the thumbs-up to demolish, and then build a new project on the land than it is to build a large infill project in the Railyards.
If this happens, it means that we’ll lose out on the opportunity for smart, dense growth in the central business district, and we’ll lose a lot of what gives midtown its character–not to mention the artistic value, historic value, and resource value (in old-growth lumber from the wreckage) of the homes demolished. It also means that those new units won’t go into places like the Triangle or the Railyards, where higher initial costs will deter developers and send them looking for greener pastures and lower land costs in nearby neighborhoods–like midtown.
2 Steve // Jan 11, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Good points wburg. Small and smart development in existing neighborhoods is a huge challenge and probably the most difficult because it breeds the most conflict. It is needed to fill in the empty lots, which makes design challenges to avoid the existing historic buildings
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