Smart Growth
A college town in the Capital City
A “new” neighborhood is sprouting around the
Sac State campus—a University District that will
make the University the center of a go-to destination
for students, employees, visitors and area businesses.
The plan
Is it possible to create a “college town” in the middle of a
large metropolitan city?
A wide-ranging group of city officials, smart growth advocates,
President Alexander Gonzalez and other University reps,
students, faculty, retailers, developers and public transportation
fans thinks so. They are imagining a lively, transit-friendly neighborhood,
where people come and go from housing, restaurants,
shops and the campus via tram, bus, light rail, bikes and walking.
And, even better, one where the heavy traffic congestion that
occurs when the University is in session would be mitigated.
The history
Hopes for a “transit village” around the University—an area
that is friendly to residents, pedestrians and cyclists, as well as
automobile drivers—has been on the minds of city officials
for years. But it got a jump start five years ago when the Sacramento
Housing and Redevelopment Agency, SHRA, declared
the area a redevelopment district, allowing the agency and the
City to begin to upgrade a section of Sacramento that had seen
better days to a neighborhood/University district that takes
advantage of its proximity to the 65th Street light-rail station.
And its proximity to Sac State.
“The University is very important to the project,” says City
Councilmember Steve Cohn, “not just for students and University
employees but for folks who want to live near the University.”
Cohn sees the area as a district within the city but connected to
the University—a mini-downtown centered around the campus
but also SMUD and other employment centers with a mix of uses:
housing, retail, offices or a hotel/conference center.
“It’s an amenity for both the University and the
surrounding neighborhood,” says Vice Mayor Kevin
McCarty. “Students bring an energy, a life, a vibrancy
to an area. Go to any college–you see lots of bookstores,
coffee houses and restaurants.”
And campus officials see the district as key to one
of the goals of the University’s Destination 2010 intiative: turning
Sac State into more of a residential campus. “It’s one of the
big steps on the way to transforming the University into a destination
campus,” says Phil Garcia, executive director of Governmental
and Civic Affairs for the University. “It will open up the campus to the
Sacramento community and broader regional community.”
The District is a neighborhood and then some, stretching from
the University to the north, west to 65th Street and Elvas Avenue,
east to Power Inn Road and all the way to 21st Avenue on the south.
It encompasses dozens of city blocks, a freeway, a railroad track, a
light-rail line and the largest bus terminal in the area. Its population
ebbs and flows by more than 30,000 people during peak months.
And the neighborhood feels it. The increase in cars on both Highway
50 and surface streets goes up markedly when the fall semester
begins in August.
Despite that influx of traffic, both Cohn and McCarty say the University
can feel cut off from the community. Cohn says that when
he would talk to people about the University in terms of the 65th
Street District, “They would see the levee but they wouldn’t see the
campus. It was hard getting people to think about the connection.”
That changed when, with plenty of urging from Cohn, the Hornet
Crossing tunnel was put in beneath the Union Pacific Railroad trestle,
providing a direct route to the interior of the campus for people coming from the 65th Street bus and light-rail station. “Hornet Crossing opened people’s eyes to how close things really were,” Cohn says.
Some of the transit-friendly components of the District are already in place. A contract with Regional Transit provides light-rail and bus service for free to students and at a greatly reduced rate to faculty and staff.
Other steps are in progress, such as new off-campus student housing a five-minute walk from campus and a faculty-staff housing development. Tying it all together will be the Sac State Tram, a bus-tram system that will link the area with light rail and the campus. Fifty-three percent of faculty, staff and students surveyed said they would ride light rail to or from campus if there was a convenient streetcar option.
But a lot still has to happen. The kind of housing density imagined requires substantial increases in sewage lines, power upgrades and drainage as well as street improvements to make the area easier to negotiate.
The push
In 2003, the Sacramento City Council, which also serves as the
governing authority for the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment
Agency, established the 65th Street redevelopment area as a
funding mechanism, rezoning properties for new uses. Any increase
in assessed value is reinvested back into the area, says Chris Pahule,
assistant director for community development at SHRA.
Much of the reinvestment is expected to come in the form of
infrastructure improvements.
Celia Yniguez, SHRA’s redevelopment manager for community
development, says, “Infrastructure will make it more pedestrianfriendly
and bicycle-friendly. The other challenge is to make sure the
water, sewer and drainage are adequate.”
As the area’s previous tenants—warehouses and a youth correctional
facility— moved on, new developments such as the shopping
and retail project F65 at the corner of 65th Street and Folsom
Boulevard, The Verge apartment complex and Upper Eastside Lofts
on 65th Street, and a planned urban-look pedestrian-friendly Target
department store on 4th Avenue, have resulted in new revenues. A
bond in 2006 netted an additional $6 million.
Now decisions have to be made on how to spend those revenues.
“What we need to do as government is make it more attractive to develop economically and timewise,” Cohn says. “With the redevelopment
district, money goes back into the district, rather than to the
city or state, toward public infrastructure that allows more intense
development to occur.”
Ideas that have been tossed around range from the relatively
minor—curbs and gutters on Elvas Avenue—to the grand—punching
65th Street through to the campus, creating a new “signature”
southern entrance at Hornet Crossing.
The present
Much of the guidance will come in the form of a major 65th Street
Station Area study the City of Sacramento launched in May.
The goal is to bring together all the many adopted plans and previous
studies to make the area “multi-modal,” says assistant city planner
Tara Goddard. “It really has the opportunity to be an interesting
destination area for Sacramento and also a place where people live
and work,” Goddard says. “But how can we make it work for automobiles,
for buses, for people who bike and walk? How do we make it
so people are not stuck in their cars in traffic?”
Potential changes could include reconfiguring the bus transfer
station to make it more pedestrian-friendly, and to better use the
land, Goddard says. Or it could call for increasing the grid system
with shorter traffic blocks, so a person walking and biking doesn’t
have to go three miles to get somewhere that is a quarter of a mile
away as the crow flies.
The study will also look at balancing ways to improve conditions
for one mode of transit without negatively affecting another.
There is also a great deal of interest in what is known as the Station
Block, the land around the light-rail and bus station which is owned by several different parties. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to
bring really vibrant development,” Pahule says, and future development
could go out in concentric circles from there.
This idea of putting housing and retail where people live and
work is a tenet of the Sacramento Regional Blueprint for smart
growth. And Sac State public policy professor and smart growth
researcher Rob Wassmer says it makes sense that the University is
playing a major role.
This idea of putting housing and retail where people live and
work is a tenet of the Sacramento Regional Blueprint for smart
growth. And Sac State public policy professor and smart growth
researcher Rob Wassmer says it makes sense that the University is
playing a major role.
“Single people, students, people who don’t have children are the
urban pioneers who have been known to transform neighborhoods
throughout central cities in the United States. That’s exactly what happened
with Midtown Sacramento. Such people have already created a
cultural and economic resurgence there. The same thing is happening
in and around the Folsom and 65th Street Redevelopment Area.”
The campus will play a large part in the housing portion of the
smart growth puzzle that is being put together in the District, both
as a landlord and as a source of residents.
A faculty and staff housing development is being built to the
east of 65th Street on the site of a former California Youth Authority
facility. A campus advisory committee is considering a mix of singlefamily
homes, townhouses and condos, says Matthew Altier, vice
president for University Planning and executive director of University
Enterprises.
In a survey of faculty, staff and administrators nearly 70 percent
expressed interest in the project, and 75 percent cited its closeness
to campus as the reason.
In the more immediate future, this fall about 450 students will
move into the brand new Upper Eastside Lofts
complex at the corner of Folsom and 65th
Streets. The area already has a bustling retail
sector with several restaurants on the lower
levels.
Associate Vice President for Campus Life Ed
Jones says the Lofts project reflects the new
trend in student housing—a developer builds
and manages the facility with resident assistants
living on site. University Enterprises has a longterm
lease on the entire complex.
“A lot of students want to live close to campus
but don’t want to live in traditional student housing,”
Jones says. “They like freedom but also like to
have an affiliation with the University.”
Jones adds that living close to campus enhances
the college experience. “Spending more time on
campus creates more bonds. If you come and go
it’s harder to get a sense of community.”
Easy access to light rail—supplemented by the future Sac State
Tram—is expected to be the big draw, especially now that light rail
has been expanded to Folsom on the east end and to the Amtrak
station to the west. In addition to reducing traffic congestion, it
expands the entertainment, travel and work possibilities.
“You don’t need a car to live in Eastside,” Altier says. “You can take
light rail to the Folsom outlets, to movies downtown, all the way to Old
Sacramento. We estimate students could save $300 to $600 a month.”
To assist University District residents and riders of light rail in getting
back and forth from campus, a bus-tram combo, the Sac State
Tram, will loop through the University with stops at the Upper Eastside
Lofts, the 65th Street light-rail station and the faculty and staff
housing. It will resemble a sleek subway car on wheels, but it doesn’t
need a special track, so it can also operate on public roads.
Plans for the University District have been driven by a partnership
that includes the City of Sacramento, the Sacramento Housing and
Redevelopment Agency (a joint city-county authority), Sac State,
Regional Transit, SMUD, and area developers including Target Corporation
and Ravel-Rassmussen, which developed the F65-Upper Eastside
Lofts project. The Sacramento Area Council of Governments,
which determines how transportation funds are spent, provided
$904,000 and $800,000 grants for the Sac State Tram and $885,000
toward the 65th Street Station Area study. It has also submitted a
proposal for $2.3 million in federal funds for the tram project.
The future
If you build it, will they come? So far, the housing and retail options
are attracting their intended clientele. But whether the transit-friendly
effort succeeds will depend in large part on what incentives the area
offers to users, says Wassmer, the public policy professor. That includes
making sure the mass transit options are convenient and reliable. For
people used to relying on their automobiles, it can be inconvenient
to take mass transit. “If they ride buses and light
rail they need to get some other convenience
in return,” he says. “Proximity to campus, restaurants
and retail are exactly that.”
Wassmer believes the University should do whatever
it can to help the project along, such as keeping
the housing it offers affordable. “For truly ‘smart’
growth, it is necessary for this new neighborhood to
have a mixed-income and diverse population that is
less reliant on autos for transportation.”
As a bonus, the restaurants and shops these
residents will attract will go a long way toward
building that “college town” feeling.
“I think it will be something the University can
be proud of, that the community can be proud
of,” says McCarty. “As an alumnus and a councilmember
representing the area, and someone
who lives in the area, that’s what I’m looking for.”
