UC Board of Regents approves controversial $1.1B Aggie Square project in Sacramento
The University of California Board of Regents on Thursday approved UC Davis’ controversial Aggie Square project near Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood.
The approval clears the way for the long-discussed $1.1 billion project to start construction next year at UC Davis Medical Center.
The project will help Sacramento “shed its old image as just a government town,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg told the regents Wednesday. “This is my No. 1 economic development project and priority in my city and in my region.”
The first phase of the project includes four new buildings — three for lab, classroom and research space and one for retail and student housing. The project is expected to bring 3,600 new jobs to the site at Stockton Boulevard and Second Avenue, and up to 5,000 construction jobs.
But activists said more needs to be done to ensure current Oak Park residents are not displaced and air pollution is not worsened.
Members of a group of community advocates called Sacramento Investment Without Displacement said the a report the university released in July did not provide a plan to adequately address both of those concerns. The group’s members urged the regents to delay approval of the project.
“The impact of Aggie Square without significant housing will be devastating to people of color,” Kendra Lewis, executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance and a member of SIWD, told regents Wednesday. “The UC regents have a moral and legal duty to do no harm to the neighborhoods surrounding the UC Davis Medical Center.”
According to the July report, the university plans to build 285 units of student housing, which will rent for $1,900 a month per unit. The board approved an amendment Thursday to ensure at least 200 beds of affordable housing for students be included in the development.
The Sacramento City Council plans to approve a $30 million tax break to fill a funding gap for the project, along with an additional $37 million tax break intended to spark new affordable housing in the area.
Under the mechanism, called an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, a portion of the new property tax revenue that would normally go to the city’s coffers will be redirected toward helping the developer fund the project — paying for infrastructure such as roadways, stormwater and sewer improvements — through 2069.
“I think it’s very clear if your city hadn’t made the commitments it made, we wouldn’t be in this place,” board chairman and former Assembly Speaker John A. Perez told Steinberg during the meeting.
The efforts to spark affordable housing with the $37 million could include grants to affordable housing developers to help them build on vacant lots along Stockton Boulevard, rental assistance to current residents in the area and other initiatives, city officials have said.
SIWD leaders have said they worried those efforts will not be enough.
Fifty-nine percent of residents in the campus’ 95817 ZIP code are renters, according to U.S. Census data. The typical apartment rent in Sacramento has increased 45% in the last seven years following the Great Recession.
“We have spent a lot of time continuing to work on the (community benefits agreement) ... to make sure that G word, gentrification, is not the outcome,” Steinberg told the regents.
Aggie Square is scheduled to open in 2023 or 2024.
This story was originally published November 19, 2020 at 6:47 PM.
