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By Joan Waters
Heading downtown? Better take a map. Navigating by familiar old sights could be tricky.

People are moving downtown—and they’re not just refurbishing Victorians and bungalows anymore. They’re leasing lofts, settling into apartments and signing up to buy brand-new condos.

Take the corner of 15th and L streets, for instance. It used to be the site of a small brown-brick building. Now, a $35 million hotel with condos on the top three floors is nearing completion. At 12th and K, the circa-1929 Sears, Roebuck and Co. store has been reconstructed into a four-story building slated for offices, shops, 23 apartments and a bistro run by one of the city’s hottest restaurateurs. And just a few blocks away, at 800 J (which you may recall as a big hole in the ground), the first tenants recently took up digs in 225 swanky loft-style residences.
  
Those projects, and a slew of others either under way or in the planning stages, are among the first waves of a fundamental change sweeping through the city’s core.
 
“In the next five years, we’re probably looking at having 10,000 new residents downtown,” says Mayor Heather Fargo. “We are in the middle of an incredible transition.”

Ready for more new sights? At 926 J, one of the city’s most elegant early-20th-century skyscrapers is being readied for a new life as one of the West Coast’s hippest hotels. On I Street, right next to the historic Southern Pacific Depot, the REA Building has been beautifully restored for use as offices, with a Starbucks on the ground floor and an eatery on the way.

So don’t get too used to your map. In six months, you’re going to need a new one, and revised editions at regular intervals for a long time to come. “We have about $2.3 billion in the pipeline going through the central business district so far this year—and that doesn’t include the railyard,” says City Manager Ray Kerridge, referring to downtown’s Union Pacific Railroad property, which also is scheduled for redevelopment. “When that gets going, that’s going to be a $4 billion project.”

If all those projects go through as expected, Sacramento may well have the hottest downtown real estate market in the western United States. “We’re not quite like Las Vegas yet, but we’re getting there,” Kerridge says. “There’s a potential for about $10 billion worth of development in the downtown area in the next three to four years. And that’s just the big stuff.” 

The Cranes Are Coming

“We’re no longer going to be the place that’s close to another place,” says Garrick Brown, research director of Colliers International, a commercial real estate firm. “It used to be that 50 percent of the work force here was dependent on local, state and federal government. Now, we’re seeing economic diversity. Our growth has made it possible for us to come into our own.”
 
New housing, new offices and new stores are dotting the streetscape from 16th Street to the waterfront in Old Sacramento and all along the area known as the J-K-L corridor. As of early summer, the city had approved 1,072 new housing units, and 1,561 more were in the planning stages. Also approved were some 600,000 square feet of office space, with 778,000 more in the planning stage. In 2005, 15 new restaurants opened. By June of this year, six more were up and running and nine were on line to open in 2007. “In the last four years, we’ve opened up more than three dozen restaurants in the central city,” Fargo says.

“The market has discovered Sacramento,” Kerridge explains, referring to the developers, hoteliers, retailers, restaurateurs and others who are transforming Sacramento’s downtown. How did we become so attractive? A number of reasons. “San Francisco is a great city, but you know what?  It’s congested . . . and Los Angeles and San Diego, too. It’s our time now,” notes Kerridge. “We are probably one of the few cities in California where land is available. It’s our time. It probably was just a matter of time, but the time is now.”