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I'm still crossing my fingers for a university campus--turn the shops into classrooms, the food court into a dining hall, the open plazas into a university quad. The ground floor could probably remain mostly retail and have a built-in population to serve, plus being an attractor for tourists and visitors of programmed right. Dormitories on-site would provide downtown population in a demographic that spends a lot of money at restaurants and nightclubs but doesn't mind tiny places to live as long as they are cheap, and there is a good supply of moderately-priced houses nearby for faculty. Keeping the middle of the plaza open allows the campus to become part of the city's pedestrian experience and vice versa.
Oh, and Santa Monica's 3rd Street Promenade isn't a major city center--Santa Monica is a suburb 1/50th the size of Los Angeles, almost 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles (about as far from Pavilions Roseville is from downtown Sacramento.) I get what you're getting at, just being nitpicky. When people point at Santa Monica as an example of a successful urban mall, they generally forget that it's actually a suburban mall.
Sacramento really isn't a major city center either. If I was to highlight Sacramento's shortcomings vs Chicago, New York, Tokyo or London, you rightfully would argue that it isn't fair to compare Sacramento with an actual major city center. Functionally Sacramento is more of a streetcar suburb if we were to get nitpicky. In terms of functionality, both downtown Sacramento and Santa Monica function pretty similarly in that they have similar walk scores for instance, they were constructed in areas that were laid out in mixed use grids and they areas occupied by their grid is about the same size and scale. The big differences is that Santa Monica is part of a much bigger urban agglomeration and its next to a beach which is a definite help in drawing tourists. On the other hand, what are the other tourist draws in the Sacramento area does downtown Sacramento have to compete with, while we have the State Fair, its no Disneyland. We don't have the Hollywood Walk of Stars or Venice Beach.
Tourism in Sacramento is a field that is totally underdeveloped and its an industry for which downtown Sacramento is probably uniquely positioned in this area to excel at. For a suburban area of Sacramento to become a tourist attraction its going to have to become the home of theme park, which I would also favor, but doesn't yet seem on the horizon. Think about all of the money in this area that bleeds out to San Francisco, Napa, Tahoe and Monterrey and a lot of it is spent at places like Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco or the Cannery District in Monterey. Instead of just buying I escaped from Alcatraz t-shirts in San Francico why aren't we also selling I escaped from Sutter's Fort t-shirts in Sacramento to tourists from Vacaville, Fairflied, Chico, Lodi and Modesto? For this type of trade the trading radius isn't just halfway between Downtown Plaza and the Roseville Galleria or halfway between the Folsom Palladio and Downtown Plaza. The trading radius is probably halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento, downtown plaza wouldn't be competing at all with the Galleria or the Palladio. This is the type of retail that thrives in downtown areas. But to succeed in it, you need to offer a big enough scale of options so that if a tourist were to come here from some place like Vacaville or Modesto for the day or the weekend, that a tourist would know that they have enough things to keep them occupied while they are here to justify the drive.
Pier 39, The Cannery and Ghirardelli Square were deliberate efforts to expand and grow the size and scope of an existing tourist attraction in that case the actual wharf in San Francisco where fisherman at one time really did still dock their boats. Now the tourist attraction in that area is now probably as much the spectacle created by all of the tourists shopping at Pier 39, the Cannery and Ghiradelli Square,the street performers surviving off that foot traffic as much as anything else. Why don't we use Downtown Plaza to expand the tourist related retail in Old Sac and link Old Sac with the other large tourist attraction in the area the State Capitol?
I don't think the idea of bringing a university is a bad one. But they cost money. Sacramento really doesn't have enough super wealthy plutocrats to donate the money to fund one, look at all the problems Sac State has had in just trying to build a new stadium let alone build an entire university. If the area is to bring in a new private university it will probably end up in a suburban edge city because those areas can give the university a large swath of land some of which can then later be developed and the money from that development can pay for building and expanding the university. The best chance for Sacramento to pull something off like that would be to close and sell of the land under the executive airport and use that to fund building a university. But I suspect that right now if someone was to suggest selling off that land, there are more pressing current needs for that cash like more police and firefighters than building a university downtown.
So has anyone posting here stepped foot in the Downmall in say..the last year? The mall was packed lasted weekend, the mall is packed always full of people every weekend. It's not even close to a ghost town. It's not full of "thugs" it's 90 percent families. Regarding the tunnel on K street, it's always crowed in there, so I'm pretty sure most people know that there is a downtown there.
My only point is, I think the mall is lot more successful that some might believe reading Sacbee articles.
So has anyone posting here stepped foot in the Downmall in say..the last year? The mall was packed lasted weekend, the mall is packed always full of people every weekend. It's not even close to a ghost town. It's not full of "thugs" it's 90 percent families. Regarding the tunnel on K street, it's always crowed in there, so I'm pretty sure most people know that there is a downtown there.
My only point is, I think the mall is lot more successful that some might believe reading Sacbee articles.
Great perspective. When I first moved here, it surprised me. I had only heard about it and really expected something quite sad and it's not that at all. A ton of room for improvement though (weekend days are pleasant, but evenings after the worker bees depart, not so much, etc).
It's amazing what expectations will do. I never set foot in Old Sac until I lived in the area about a year and half (a year of which was in Davis though) and never thought I had any reason to. Still pretty kitschy, but pretty well-executed, with some nice stuff for locals and tourists alike. (The Railroad Museum, for instance, is fantastic.)
I'm still crossing my fingers for a university campus--turn the shops into classrooms, the food court into a dining hall, the open plazas into a university quad. The ground floor could probably remain mostly retail and have a built-in population to serve, plus being an attractor for tourists and visitors of programmed right. Dormitories on-site would provide downtown population in a demographic that spends a lot of money at restaurants and nightclubs but doesn't mind tiny places to live as long as they are cheap, and there is a good supply of moderately-priced houses nearby for faculty. Keeping the middle of the plaza open allows the campus to become part of the city's pedestrian experience and vice versa.
If we could go back in time, UC Sacramento instead of UC Merced would have been a great idea. The Railyards is about the only place in the state you could build a university mostly from the ground up and still have it be near the things students actually want to do, all while rehabbing a massive brownfield. Would have been impossible that close to Davis (and Sac State), but would have been cool. We'll probably have to aim a little smaller, but I agree that a university downtown is a good concept.
If the UC campus wasn't built in Merced it probably would have been built in Fresno. Generally the University of California doesn't like to put its schools to close together if it can avoid it. Davis is considered the UC campus for our region. The San Joaquin Valley region has one of th lower rates of educational attainment in the state and Fresno is one of the largest metro areas in the state without a UC Campus so at the time the general assumption was that what later turned out to be UC Merced was going to be UC Fresno.
While the region is getting big enough to support a second CSU in the area, that is looking to end up in Roseville.
If a university was to be built downtown its probably going to need to be a private university. But again who in this area really has the money to fund it? Probably developers and they are going to build it in area just outside the urban growth boundaries and use the lure of a university to get some jurisdiction to violate its own planning guidelines. That has generally been the Tsakopoulos past pattern.
So has anyone stepped foot in the Downmall in say, the last year? The mall was packed last weekend... full of people every weekend. It's not even close to a ghost town. It's not full of "thugs" it's 90 percent families. Regarding the tunnel on K street, it's always crowed, so I'm pretty sure most people know that there is a downtown there. My only point is, I think the mall is more successful than some might believe, reading Sacbee articles.
When I moved here in Dec. 2003, I was surprised and impressed to see Old Sac so busy and how full of eager smiling faces the Downtown Mall was. Oh, I'm sure it was 'tis the season' and all. But as the years went by, I started to wonder if it was also because Midtown didnt appear to be a regular folks part of town, K Street was panhandler paradise, minimal public transportation and other things to see and do seemed so far away? So by the time you hit the Mall, it was a welcoming gateway to what I think should be happening more around Downtown: Attractive, fun places for regular folks [not just hoodrats or uber yuppies] to just hang out and enjoy our hometown.
Last edited by Mr. Opinionated; 09-06-2012 at 02:55 PM..
I have to wonder how much of an impact moving state offices to the East End project and closer to R and S Streets had on the "emptying" of downtown during the lunch hour(s) and after work during the week. Looking at restaurant closures and down-sizings during our last few years in Sacramento and the Plaza closures over the course of years they somehow seem related.
If the UC campus wasn't built in Merced it probably would have been built in Fresno. Generally the University of California doesn't like to put its schools to close together if it can avoid it. Davis is considered the UC campus for our region. The San Joaquin Valley region has one of th lower rates of educational attainment in the state and Fresno is one of the largest metro areas in the state without a UC Campus so at the time the general assumption was that what later turned out to be UC Merced was going to be UC Fresno.
Right, which is why I said it wouldn't happen with Davis right here. Fresno still would have been a better idea than Merced if they'd have used as a catalyst for redevelopment of the downtown.
I have to wonder how much of an impact moving state offices to the East End project and closer to R and S Streets had on the "emptying" of downtown during the lunch hour(s) and after work during the week. Looking at restaurant closures and down-sizings during our last few years in Sacramento and the Plaza closures over the course of years they somehow seem related.
Moving the state offices further from downtown plaza definitely didn't help it. But during that same time frame when Downtown Plaza was losing tenants, Country Club Center was also bleeding tenants, so too has the Town and Country Village Center. My own hunch is the opening of the Roseville Galleria in 2000 as well as the expansion of the Roseville Galleria in 2004 that the Galleria was basically capturing most of the retail dollars in Placer County as well as a large chunk of the retail dollars in Eastern Sacramento County. As those shopping dollars went to Roseville instead of Arden and Downtown, their were no longer enough retail dollars in either the Arden area or Downtown to support all of the existing retail in that area. Granted the recession made things much worse. When you are upside down on your house, you probably aren't feeling wealthy and are going to cut back on expenses, furlows and the threat of furlows or layoffs in the strongest local industry also probably didn't help.
But going forward, I suspect that the Pallidio in Folsom is probably going to grab most of the retail in Folsom and El Dorado Hills and I think it will probably capture a lot of the retail in Fair Oaks, Orangevale, Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova, especially the new growth areas that is planned for that area. So as the region pulls out of the recession I think a lot of the retail dollars that disappeared during the recession in Arden and downtown are now permanently gone.
The future for downtown is as an entertainment district. The more bars, clubs and restaurants downtown, the stronger downtown will be. As the region gets bigger, the single population 18 to 30 looking for somewhere to meet and get laid will expand roughly with regional population growth, but they will disproportionately seek each other out in downtown. Anything that interferes with that is probably bad for property values and bad for downtown.
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