Sacramento leaders contemplate the next decade of downtown. ‘A city on the rise’
Local leaders took stock of downtown Sacramento on Tuesday and pledged to make the city’s urban core more walkable, safe and vibrant over the next decade.
At the Downtown Sacramento Partnership’s breakfast — where government and business leaders take account, each year, of the city’s urban center — civic leaders praised a series of development and infrastructure projects that have gained momentum, which they view as transformational.
Construction quietly broke ground, Mayor Kevin McCarty said, on the historic paint shops in the largely-vacant Railyards district that borders downtown. The shops are slated for a mixed-use conversion. And the city has secured a tenant, and is in final negotiations with another, to fill the former Rio City Cafe space in Old Sacramento.
Kaiser Permanente’s planned, 310-bed hospital and Sacramento Republic FC’s 12,000-seat stadium broke ground in the Railyards.
On the other side of the Tower Bridge, the Athletics played their first season in the River Cats’ home ballpark last year following the team’s departure from Oakland, bringing visitors to the region and stoking local officials’ dreams of securing a permanent MLB presence here.
In his remarks, McCarty doubled down on plans to pursue Major League Baseball, and said he and West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero would launch a campaign for an expansion team in the spring.
“We are 100% in the mix,” he told the crowd.
Following the event, McCarty told reporters that there would be “a lot to announce in the coming weeks.” West Sacramento, he said, “is the likely and the preferred location” for a potential MLB team.
Over the past year, the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians acquired the vacant Macy’s building in DoCo, and tribe leaders hinted that the tribe would likely pursue a project that includes the department store and the vacant city block at 301 Capitol Mall, which it also owns.
Sacramento State secured a $50 million commitment from Meta to abate and demolish three large, state-owned buildings on Capitol Mall, where the university hopes to build a downtown campus.
The Terra Madre Americas food festival made its full-scale debut in Sacramento last fall, packing an estimated 160,000 people into the central city.
“We’re moving in the right direction,” McCarty said. “We are unequivocally a city on the rise.”
A walkable downtown
Leaders also called out some of the most significant challenges facing the district, like pedestrian safety and a relative lack of housing downtown.
Keynote speaker Jeff Speck, a city planner and author of “Walkable City,” said capitals like Sacramento and Boise struggle with traffic because of the Legislature’s desire to “zip in and out.”
Speck in his keynote address called for Sacramento to convert one-way streets to two-way streets, which are associated with slower driving, he said, and made the case for four-way stop signs, instead of traffic signals, as another means of improving safety.
Sacramento’s track record on pedestrian deaths, Speck said, represents “a mandate for dramatic change.”
Business group expands territory
Officials also marked a few smaller — but significant — changes from the past year, like improvements on the Capitol Mall median.
Michael Ault, executive director of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, told attendees that the business group is poised to sign a contract with a new private security firm.
The partnership, which is funded by downtown property tax revenues, recently secured its 10-year renewal, which saw its territory expand to 102 blocks, up from 66. As a result, Ault said, the security contract will cover a larger territory.
“The problems we face in Sacramento absolutely have solutions,” Ault said. “I am confident that in 10 years, Sacramento can be the model for cities.”
