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Originally Posted by ThatDarnSacramentan
I think what truly needs to be said is that there is an entire generation of Sacramentans, of which I'm a part of, that came of age everywhere from Elk Grove to East Sac and all over the city.
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There are several generations of Sacramentans who grew up in the slurbs. I'm one of them too, but of the previous generation--the so-called "Generation X" in between the Millennials and the Boomers (mid-30s to about 50.) You don't hear about us much, but some of us moved downtown 20-30 years ago, and plenty of us never left, despite reports that we all moved to the slurbs to raise kids.
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We remember being passengers in our parents' cars driving around downtown and seeing, well, nothing.
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You should have gotten out of the car, because you missed a rather nice city. I took the bus downtown, walked around, and saw all sorts of things: beautiful buildings, sidewalks where people actually walked, grown adults riding bikes. Record stores and bookstores that sold totally different stuff than you found at the mall, restaurants that served food that wasn't anything like the fast food in a suburban strip mall, coffee shops that stayed open until midnight where crazy-looking people hung out until well after midnight, and flyers everywhere for punk shows, poetry readings, dance clubs and plays, midnight movies and street festivals. I didn't get to much of the late-night stuff because I had to take the bus back home and the bus line in my slurb stopped running by like 8 PM (unless I didn't mind getting stranded and walking around all night.) I decided that I wanted to live in a place like that when I grew up.
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Now we've gone off to school, to cities like Portland, San Diego, and Seattle, right as all the other cities are booming. What we want (and I use we loosely since I know I can't wait to return home) is Sacramento to be just as good, if not better, than all those cities. The whole point of going to architecture school is so that I can return home to be a part of that change to my city.
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I went off to school in a small college town, which had its own charms but by the end of the school year I couldn't wait to get back to Sacramento, which had big-city charms I liked. At least once I seriously considered missing the first week of school because there was some great show happening in downtown Sacramento that would never come to my little college town. After school I came back to the slurbs, but moved to Midtown once I got a chance. I still didn't have a car, and I wanted to be part of the vibrant music and art scene that I saw in the neighborhood--and be part of the change I saw going on. That was when people were moving from cities like Portland to Sacramento to be part of the music scene, and San Francisco was still recovering from the big quake--the dot-com boom hadn't kicked in yet. I spent a lot of time in other cities too, and tried to bring back ideas that I saw there if I liked them. Some stuck, some haven't.
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At the very least, I'm sick of a lot of the "no we can't," Boomer-era Sacramento thinking, and at the worst, it's sickening. We have the opportunity to be a better city than Portland; we already have a better climate, better access to our (much cleaner) rivers, and more great local food options.
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I used to be down on Boomers too, until I got to know a few of them, and discovered that many of them moved to Midtown (before anyone called it Midtown) in order to live a more urban life in a more walkable place. They were the ones calling for transit, bike lanes, and increased residential/mixed use of downtown, legalized street life, opening art galleries and stores, all that Jane Jacobs stuff, back in the 1970s when the Metro Chamber and downtown developers were still pushing the line that nobody should ever live downtown, they should just drive from the suburbs to enjoy their fancy new K Street Mall and Downtown Plaza (instead of visiting the mall in their suburb that sold the same stuff.) Some of the first experiments in what we now call "new urbanism" took place in Sacramento, in the wake of a redevelopment era where the Boomers' parents (and grandparents) had the bright idea that if they kicked out everyone who lived downtown and destroyed all the buildings, they could solve the problems of the city (by leaving the city.) The Boomers who moved downtown were the ones who turned the tide and the mass demolitions that cut the central city's population in half. And, like GenXers like me, a lot of them never bothered moving to the slurbs either.
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Sacramento needs to grow up, and now's the best opportunity we have, burning bright like a phoenix coming out of the recession, because I don't know about everyone else, but I remember driving through Tent City every other weekend and I refuse to let that happen to my city again.
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We are in an interesting time with a lot of opportunity. What is your plan to resolve the Tent City issue, which, so far as I know, hasn't actually been solved, just shifted to other areas of town and mostly out of public view?
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Bring on the wrecking balls; there isn't a single two-story condo downtown that doesn't need demolishing.
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The only two-story condos I'm familiar with in the central city are the profusion of 2-3 story "skinny house" condos and row houses, like Tapestri Square, 2500 R, 5th & V, Washington Square, Metro Square etcetera, all built within the past 10-20 years with a lot more on the way on infill sites throughout the central city, along with the many midsize apartment buildings recently completed, under construction or on the drawing board. Much of this represents the culmination of those Boomers that received so much flak from the city back in the 1970s.
Those 2-3 story condos also represent ownership housing, which is seriously lacking in the central city (90% of the Grid is rental.) Do you seriously want to destroy these brand-new and recently built buildings? Why?
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