Wow, denial isn't just a river in Egypt! That's twice now that innov8 has failed to acknowledge the new buildings I mentioned (the totally 1980s office building and parking lot from 4th-6th, and the SoCap lofts from 6th-7th.)
As to Q and S Street, the boundaries of the R Street Special Planning district run from the south side of Q Street to the north side of S Street between I-5 and Business 80. From
http://rstreet.info: "The R Street Corridor is a 27-block long,
two block wide special planning district within Sacramento’s Central City Community." Everything I mentioned is within the R Street SPD, I didn't bother mentioning anything north of Q or south of S.
Take a stroll via actually leaving the house, note what's there and what isn't. I see what's going on down there because I actually walk around downtown a lot. What do I dream about? Reuse and infill. More housing. Homely old buildings as incubators for artistic talent and creativity, new buildings for the things we don't have enough of (like housing) or places where old buildings won't fill the bill (like hospitals.) Fewer parking lots. Lately I'm seeing those dreams coming to life in Midtown and on R Street, so I'm enjoying what I see for the most part. Sorry if the past few decades have been so disappointing for you, lamenting for stodgy office towers that never got built.
Also, it wasn't the State that bulldozed the blocks west of 7th Street, that was the city of Sacramento's redevelopment agency, working at the behest of the city of Sacramento and the Chamber of Commerce (and of course the federal highway administration.) The state was responsible for the cleared blocks between 7th-17th from Capitol Park south to the R Street special planning district, which is where CADA operates now. Brown Senior wanted to build a massive state office building campus, Reagan decided that he'd rather lease office space from his friends with suburban office parks, but kept demolishing blocks to provide plenty of parking for state offices that were still downtown.
And yes, plenty of blocks cleared by both parties are still parking lots. Which just demonstrates the short-sightedness of destroying existing neighborhoods in the hope that skyscrapers will automatically launch out of the ground...