Downtown Sacramento’s historic Schaber courthouse up for sale for $13.6M
Sacramento’s historic Gordon D. Schaber Courthouse is for sale for $13.6 million, a potential “blank canvas” in the middle of the city’s downtown, said brokers, as a new courthouse prepares to open near the city’s Railyards.
The Sacramento County courthouse building at 720 Ninth St. has occupied a city block in Sacramento’s downtown for 60 years. With a gleaming new Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye Sacramento Courthouse ready to open at 500 G St., later this month, the Schaber site is on the block.
The listing for the building’s owner, the Judicial Council of California, was posted Tuesday, and commercial brokerage CBRE is handling the sale.
What will become of the historic downtown block isn’t immediately clear.
Costs to convert the building to potential residential use including replacing its decades-old heating and cooling system — presently fed by chilled and heated water from the county administration building at nearby Eighth and H streets — would be “prohibitively expensive,” said CBRE executive vice president Randy Getz, who is handling the sale with CBRE senior vice president Jim King.
Considering its historic status, developers may have to navigate other obstacles.
But developers could opt to tear down the courthouse property, Getz said.
“It’s a 2½-acre blank canvas to develop something of a signature property in Sacramento,” Getz said. “It’s big enough, it’s close to the Railyards, which is burgeoning, and it’s close to private and public transportation. Ultimately, we’ll find out what should go there.”
Sacramento County built the Schaber courthouse — named for the late longtime McGeorge School of Law dean and Sacramento Superior Court judge — in 1965. The courthouse was also home to the county’s district attorney and public defender, but the need for more courtrooms forced the offices to move in the 1970s and 1980s.
The six-story, 470,000-square-foot building, bordered by Eighth, Ninth, G and H streets, had long been derided by Sacramento Superior Court and city leaders as too obsolete, undersized, and unsafe to conduct court business.
Calls for a new courthouse grew louder in the last 10 years as local leaders appealed for answers.
“The Schaber courthouse served ably the community for decades, but we simply outgrew it,” Presiding Sacramento Superior Court Judge Lawrence G. Brown told The Sacramento Bee earlier this year. “What had been office space for the district attorney’s office, probation, public defender, all of that, was ultimately consumed by the need to create more courtrooms. Even then, we were busting at the seams.”
Superior Court employees and functions are in the middle of their move to G Street. The new Sakauye courthouse is expected to be fully operational by April 27.
.JPG)