Downtown Sacramento has failed more than the Kings. I hope for a revival before I die

When Andrea Lepore opened Solomon’s near the corner of 8th and K streets in the summer of 2019, it seemed like a turning point for downtown Sacramento. Lepore was betting her business fortunes on the 700 block of K Street, a decaying symbol of urban blight that Sacramento leaders and builders had tried and failed to revitalize for decades.

Lepore and her partners opened a Jewish deli named for Russ Solomon, the late founder of Tower Records. Even cooler, the deli is in what used to be the downtown location of the legendary Sacramento-based record store chain, which went global before digital technology superseded vinyl and CDs.

Two doors down from Solomon’s, Ruhstaller brewery created the perfect watering hole to enjoy before and after events at Golden 1 Center, one block away.

“(K Street) was becoming a great regional place where the region came together to do things,” J-E Paino of Ruhstaller said of the brief interlude of K Street success in 2018 and 2019. “It was great to be down here. We felt honored. We were carrying the torch of what Sacramento was back in the day and what it could be in the future.”

By January 2020, the annual State of the Downtown breakfast held by business leaders at the Hyatt Regency was triumphant.

A block away from the 700 block of K Street, Golden 1 Center and Downtown Commons were a huge success. The city had just celebrated what it thought was a Major League Soccer berth for Sacramento Republic FC and a green light for a soccer stadium to be built nearby.

Could it be real this time for K Street? I wondered. The answer came six weeks later, when COVID-19 stopped everything.

When I talked to Lepore recently, she said she feared eviction because there aren’t enough customers downtown for her to make her current or back rent. Two of her neighbors on K Street, including Ruhstaller, are equally worried and seeking rent relief.

“These businesses are locally owned, minority-owned,” Lepore said. “We represent what the city economic development plan wanted.”

As I listened to Lepore, I flashed back to City Council meetings that stretched late into the night in 2008. The city wanted to fix K Street so badly that it spent $18.6 million in city redevelopment funds that year to pry nine properties from one owner, Moe Mohanna.

In 2010, the council voted to partner with two developers, giving them 19 properties on K Street that the city had spent $42 million acquiring. The first sentence of the Bee story announcing the deal read: “Could it be real this time?”

“If all goes as planned, by the summer of 2012, the blighted 700 and 800 blocks of K Street will be transformed into a lively stretch of restaurants, shops, a music venue, and more than 250 units of housing,” The Bee reported on July 15, 2010.

Well, Lepore didn’t move into her building on the 700 block until 2019. The 800 block is still as barren as ever.

Many barriers have kept the K Street revival from ever becoming real.

There aren’t enough people living downtown to support businesses. Sacramento is still paying for the population flight to the suburbs in the 1960s, the terrible decision to choke off car traffic on the K Street Mall, the lack of political leadership that squandered the economic boom of the early 2000s, the bad landlords and the bad luck of COVID emerging when it appeared a breakthrough was at hand.

“It worked,” Paino said of that period just before the pandemic. “It was safe, and it was fun. The little guys, the big guys, everybody’s efforts downtown; all the (city) study missions, all the meetings — it really worked.”

Bay Miry, one of the developers who partnered with the city to transform K Street back in 2010, owns properties on the 700 block. He is not unsympathetic to tenants like Lepore and Paino and Danny Wang, the owner of MidiCi Neapolitan Pizza. He will probably be in mediation with all three.

“We’re doing all we can to keep them alive and thriving,” Miry said of all his tenants “That said, there is obviously financial responsibility and math involved in these things.”

Miry said two of his tenants have gone out of business since the pandemic started.

“Sometimes failure becomes a huge opportunity in other ways,” he said. “Now we’re talking about using those spaces in other ways.”

COVID has scrambled the downtown that Miry envisioned back in 2010. Businesses that depend on breakfast and lunch in a city emptied of state workers are going to struggle, he said. That’s the spot Lepore is in.

But Miry is bullish about an evolving downtown that’s different from the one he imagined in 2010. Only 40 years old himself, he sees downtown as a nightspot for young people and tourists.

“I went out recently for a friend’s birthday,” he said. “We went to a new Hyatt Centric (at 7th and L). The food was amazing; the restaurant was busy. It felt like a booming city.”

Miry predicts that the downtown that Sacramento has wanted for generations will come true eventually. It would be sad if Lepore and Paino are casualties in that quest. There have been so many casualties already, so many millions spent, so many city plans tried and failed.

Rebuilding Sacramento’s urban core has been like waiting for the Kings to be successful at basketball: It has taken decades, with flickers of hope teasing generations of Sacramentans into believing its civic hopes were realized, when they really weren’t.

This story was originally published November 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.