Downtown Plaza in Sac- What on earth is happening??

[cityx]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

The idea of anchoring the mall with a bunch of theaters wasn't a bad idea, but it seems like if you do that, you will probably kill off the tower theater and now that they have let new theaters be built in Natomas and elsewhere that idea may no longer be feasible.

I certainly think Sacramento could support an additional independent movie house. Tower is an art film leader in Sacramento and generally offers a good selection of films but their screens are limited. And as far as the Crest theatre, it pales in comparison. The Crest's showtimes are extremely unpredictable and many of their films are only offered for a very short engagement time. Over the past three years, I believe I've driven to San Francsico over a dozen times to see an indi flick that either is never shown in Sacramento or ends up arriving months later. This whole nonsense about another movie house putting Tower out of businesses is ridiculous.

[NewToCA]

You guys bring up some valid points for the pro's and con's of downtown direction. Let me explain how I see the "big picture" unfolding, and how these projects fit.

Sacramento is a very unique in that development and growth isn't symmetrical at all. Due to environmental challenges and requirements, very large areas fairly close to downtown are exceptionally underdeveloped, and likely will remain so for a long time (and in some cases permanently). As a result, much of the most significant development is taking place far from the urban core, and moving yet further away.

As a result, I see a few problems and opportunities as the metro area grows from about 2 million folks today to about 2.8 million within the next 13-15 years.

The problems I see are a very poor interstate system for transporting a metro area the size of Sacramento. Traffic during rush hour is awful and bound to get worse with the lack of significant new road expansions. In addition, the further out expansion of the sprawl, especially in regions such as Elk Grove and south, Folsom and El Dorado to the east, and the Lincoln/Rocklin area to the north east make commuting time to downtown even greater.

To meet this need, pockets of significant office and retail development are taking place. The office clusters I see outside of downtown are in Rancho Cordova/Folsom, Roseville (Douglas) and Natomas. The retail centers appear to be Roseville/Rocklin, Folsom, Elk Grove and Natomas. As a result, I see each of these areas becoming mini-regional units, pretty much self contained with a few hundred thousand to half a million folks per region. Some older commercial areas are significant in size too, but I see both the Sunrise and the Arden Fair areas basically too far from downtown to have much impact if it were desirable to live and shop in downtown. To me, they more "fill in the blanks" on the areas somewhat south and west of Roseville/Rocklin.

Now for the opportunity. To me, this still leaves a very large area that can be dedicated to support downtown/midtown retail development. As I see it, the area west of 59th st, east to Harbor Blvd, south of the river, and north of Fruitridge is territory that can be retained by downtown retail. Adding in the long term potential higher density development that should come to downtown when the next real estate boom hits (and you don't grow from 2 million to almost 3 million without some type of boom), and I can see good support for a somewhat upscale and unique K St along with a standard type of mall (nicely done) at Downtown Plaza. Also, with the greater hotel capacity downtown, the visitor opportunities should increase too, providing a supplemental base for restaurant support.

Eventually add in the attractions and residential density of the Railyards and Township9, and the future looks fairly bright and sustainable to me.


http://www.hcd.ca.gov/hpd/hrc/rtr/ex5.pdf

[zen_klown]

I think the Sacramento region could support a couple of more art theaters, but I am not sure that downtown can support any more art theaters. As it is right now neither the Tower nor the Crest is doing that well and when the Sacramento Inn theater tried to make a go of it as an art theater it failed. I think an art house might work in Davis, Woodland, in the historic Tower theater in Roseville or perhaps out in one of the old fruit packing houses in Loomis. But I think downtown/midtown is near saturation for art house theaters. But adding a couple of 20 plexes downtown showing first run theaters might work. On the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, they have several different first run theaters serving as anchors. They drive traffic to the region at night and help to support the restaurants in the area. Moreover you don't need to look at schedule to find a movie because you know in that area that one of the theaters is going to be running the movie you are interested in.

Governments are zoning for tax dollars. Probably one of the best greenfield sites for transit oriented development is on former Aerojet property in Folsom, but rather than zoning the property for transit oriented development, Folsom decided to expand the Folsom automall instead because the automall would bring in a lot more tax revenue. Elk Grove buit the Elk Grove automall and pushed to built a mall on the edge of urban boundary because it wanted more sales tax revenue. If that created blight on Florin Road, that was a problem for the City of Sacramento to work out. The county is giving up parkland to expand Mel Rapton Honda. These were all planning failures but all had an internal logic of trying to capture more sales tax dollars for the local government.

The zoning here isn't being done because there is a specfic need for all of this retail, its being done because new retail centers bring in a lot of tax money for local jurisdiction.

Most of the area around downtown Sacramento is built out. Its tough to significantly increase the density of the areas around downtown because the existing residents like there neighborhoods they way they are now. Moreover there are some serious limitations on how much infill development you can do. If you increase the density too much, then you have to redue the sewage systems, the electrical grids, etc and that is really expensive to retrofit. You can probably get some infill in neighborhoods with lots of abandoned homes like Oak Park and Del Paso Heights but new development there creates tension because existing residents fear they will be gentrified out of there communities. Loaves and Fishes has been buying up the buildings they provide there services in because they figured that new development in the Railyards and township 9 would be used as a pretext for driving them out of the area. If they own the buildings, then at least they can use the proceeds from an eminent domain proceedings to start over somewhere else.

My guess is when all is said and done the majority of new growth in Sacramento over the next 20 years will be in Natomas, West Sac, Anatolia, Rancho Cordova, Elk Grove, western placer county, and near El Dorado Hills. There will be infill projects on Florin Road and Fulton Avenue and in the rail yards but in terms of substantial population growth, I imagine the infill growth in the region will probably be substantially less than the new growth in Anatolia.

Look at how successful Land Park was in killing the bridge across broadway. If they can kill that, they can kill new plans to increase density in the area. They desire to protect on street parking tends to kill efforts at increasing density. There are a lot of historic homes in Alkali Flat and midtown. The locals don't want to the historic victorians or craftsman homes torn down for higher density projects. So there is a finite number of locations were you can build significantly higher densities downtown. Most of the existing victorians that could be split into multifamily homes already have been.

LPCA (http://www.landpark.org/doc.asp?id=21 - broken link)

As it is right now there is too much retail in the area for current population in the region. Moreover there is red queen dilemna, the governments are running to stand still. If you add more people to the area, you need more tax revenue to pay for the government services for these new residents. Prop 13 constrains the ability to local governments to pay for these services via property taxes. So the governments will continue to add more retail than any given level of population will adequately support.