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Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Hotel Berry renovation to start next month
by Brandon Darnell, published on September 21, 2010 at 9:34 PM
Storyline: Local Government
Community Tags
affordable housing
business
city council
hotel berry
politics
single room occupancy
sro
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Work to renovate the historic Hotel Berry, 729 L St., will commence next month, after the City Council held its final public hearing on the issue Tuesday night.
“This is a project we’ve been working on for some time,” said Christine Weichert, assistant director of Housing and Community Development. “This is the very last step in a long process.”
The public hearing was required before the financing could be undertaken for the $24.5 million project.
According to Weichert, Jamboree Housing of Irvine, Calif., will be working on the renovation project. The funding comes from a mixture of tax credits, federal stimulus funding and redevelopment housing agency funds.
“We did take a thorough look at this because it involves debt, and we have no issues or concerns,” City Treasurer Russ Fehr told the council in response to a question from Councilwoman Sandy Sheedy. “The money is already there. It’s in essence being reclassified.”
No members of the public spoke at the hearing.
The renovation is scheduled to be completed within a year and a half, Weichert said.
The historic hotel was built in 1929 and is located adjacent to the Greyhound station downtown. According to a previous Sacramento Press article, it was purchased in 2007 by AF Evans and Trinity Housing for restoration.
“That was just the time when the market started collapsing,” Weichert said. “They couldn’t get all their financing ... so we ended up owning it.”
Since the 1970s, the hotel had been used for affordable housing, referred to as a single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel.
“It’s affordable housing for people who are earning 45 percent or less of the area’s median income,” Weichert said. “It’s got 104 units.”
Many of those units were inhabited until about six months ago, when tenants were moved to other residences. The last tenant left in June, according to Weichert, who added that the tenants received moving assistance and will have the option to return when the renovation is complete.
“This hotel desperately needs renovation,” Weichert said. “Very little reinvestment has occurred since (it was built).”
Currently, the hotel is plagued by pockets of mold and other issues related to deterioration, said Jeree Glasser-Hedrick, housing finance program manager for Housing and Community Development.
During the renovation, each room will be outfitted with a kitchenette so it will be a self-contained living space, and the ground floor will be remodeled. A Mexican restaurant that formerly occupied a portion of the ground floor will be used as community space.
“It’s going to be exciting to get this thing rehabbed,” Weichert said.
“This is a terrific project,” said City Councilman Ray Tretheway.
Brandon Darnell is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.
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see last years article http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/3831/City_To_Close_Historic_Berry_Hotel
The classy chicks with money to shop and their entourages are NEVER going to come downtown if you keep up this insanity. Let me guess this short sightedness was a DEMOCRATS idea. First violence on Second Saturday and now this. Who's in charge?
It's an UGLY Building!!!1 Just bulldozz the thing.
REally, you'd rather have this instead of something like The Guggenheim Museum?
I'd love to know who makes these decisions and what their major was in college, if they even went to college. I think our City Planners went to Yuba City College or something.
Cowtown.
The project is funded through the redevelopment "slush fund" run by an agency that operates almost entirely without public scrutiny (i.e. not one person showed up to testify on the matter). This kind of irresponsible SHRA spending starves the city and local schools of large sums of property tax revenue that should be going to hire more police officers, keeping our browned-out fire stations open and restoring maintenance of our neglected city parks, as well as shoring up depleted classroom spending.
The redevelopment industrial complex in Sacramento depends upon the public not understanding how redevelopment works and how it's paid for. Redevelopment spending should have to compete head-to-head with all of the city's other spending priorities during the city council's budget hearings.
You would think someone at SHRA would have asked, gee, that sounds like a boat load of money to redevelop this building when only last year it was going to cost only 13 millio. Then come to the same conclusion as last year’s decision and drop the project from consideration.
KJ where is this new brand of leadership driven? Why doesn't the mayor hire a second grader to his staff. Even a second grader could see how plain dumb this is.
But it is consistent with the Council's plan to move downtown from the K street to somewhere else. This is just one more of a string of decisions relegating the K Street corridor to second class status.
But on the bright side all those drunks and homeless will have somewhere close by to live where they can easily beg and harass folks on K Street