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Friday, February 10, 2012
STORYLINE Downtown Sacramento Proposals & Construction
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K Street Subsidies
by Michael Zwahlen, published on April 26, 2009 at 11:21 PM
Storyline: Downtown Sacramento Proposals & Construction
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With a 45% ground floor vacancy rate, K Street’s health is currently struggling. In an effort to help the street improve the blocks between 7th and 13th streets, the city has been pumping million upon millions of dollars into projects to then watch little to no improvements in foot traffic, empty store fronts and public safety. The list of subsidized projects is getting longer every year and I am beginning to wonder if spending all this money to clean up J or L streets might give us more to be proud of.
Right now the city has loaned Crest Theater $413,839 for capital improvements but the loan won't have to be repaid if the theater makes structural, safety, and aesthetic improvements as part of scenic easement to the Crest Theater marquee by 2019. The IMAX theater is getting subsidized at the rate of $425,000 since 2006 to help pay the rent till 2010.*Correction: The IMAX theater has a reduced rent. The city subsidy is $75,000 a year until 2010.* When the theater was first built in 1999 the city gave $6 million to the Esquire Plaza's previous owners - led by developer David Taylor.
In the last 5 years the city has gave out millions in an effort to revitalize K Street Mall. To name a few, the Cosmopolitan received a $9.8 million subsidy, The Cathedral Building received a $3 million subsidy, Ella Restaurant received a $750,000 subsidy, Pyramid Alehouse received $650,000 subsidy, and 717 K Street with retail and a restaurant (3 Monkeys) that has gone out of business $594,000. Last month the city approved another subsidy of $5.4 million to rehab buildings at 1012–1022 K Street in a partnership between David S. Taylor Interests Inc. and CIM Group to bring a vintage Dive Bar, pizza restaurant and upscale night club to three building that have been vacant more than eight years.
With the K Street Streetscape improvement project just kicking off at $4 million and Westfield Mall expecting to begin renovations at $40 million, as well as a proposal to open up K Street to vehicle traffic again, you might think things are on the up swing. But if you look back at the history of the street over the last 40 years, expensive improvements to upgrade the street have done little to make it an achievement.
If the goal is to get more foot traffic downtown then the city should only subsidize projects that add housing downtown. It now seems like nothing can be built downtown unless subsidies are part of the deal while at the same time city staff are waiving fees... the call for subsidies has become more rapid and will only falsely create a market that can't support it's self.
Editor's Note: The Sacramento Press editorial department found an error regarding the amount of subsidy received by the IMAX theater on K street and has corrected this article.
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Your figures are a bit light Michael by about 250 million over the last 25 years.
David Taylor and the other big campaign contributors own the City Council. In return for their campaign contributions, they get all of their projects paid for by the taxpayer.
This quid pro quo, or pay to play corruption in our City is effen criminal.
If your interested in delving into this story more, I have many public documents and I plan on devoting a lot of time and articles to expose the corruption on K Street; which also explains how Sacramento's entire political scheme works.
I'm curious to see what information John Galt has about City corruption. Downtown revitalization happens all over the United States, and it is in no way controversial. My gut tells me that there has been some rent seeking from people like David Taylor who, one imagines, chuckled mirthlessly when he realized that he was going to take these Sacramento City rubes for all they are worth. But my head tells me that the reality is probably much more mundane than that.
I also suspect you support using eminent domain to take private property, using tax dollars, and give it to campaign contributors for free? (with "no-bid" projects) This is what has been happening in Sacramento for over 30 years.
Also, unlike you apparently, many do not consider corruption of public officials mundane.
For the record, I'm suspicious of eminent domain, but quite honestly I don't know enough about it to weigh its pros and cons. It's my day off from work, so I'm too lazy to even read the wiki on Kelo v. City of New London: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
I wonder if we are really as diametrically opposed on this issue as you assume. If you have information that there was corruption re: k street redevelopment, I'm willing to hear it. (And do you mean prosecutable corruption or just generally bad government?)
But won't you concede that most bad public policy doesn't require smoky back rooms or a mustache-twisting villain?
But there's the rub. One wishes city planning were more like Sim City, where moving a slider bar one way or the other resulted in more or less predictable outcomes. But in life the tools the city has to work with are much more blunt, and outcomes are very much more unpredictable. The city can zone. It can use the honey of subsidies to attract developers. And it can use or threaten to use the coercive means of eminent domain.
I'm not aware of any zoning problems with K Street, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this. The City has slathered K Street with enough honey to bring the grizzly bear back from its exile. And it chased Moe Mohanna out of K street with a threat of eminent domain. The result? The City now owns a bunch of commercial property nobody wants, and K Street still has a big blighted hole in the middle of it.
At the end of the day, I don't begrudge the City for trying to bring K Street back to life, but I also think it is time for the City to just walk away. Leave K Street alone for five years and see what becomes of it.
Where I come from, when you hit a dry well, you stop drilling.
The problems for K street are many, and almost insurmountable, at some point we need to say enough is enough...and we have long since passed that point.
The money for development projects on K street is free money..well at least for the developers and politicians, we the People have been footing the bill to "REBUILD" or REVITALIZE" or "REDEVELOP," whatever you want to call it, on K Street for over THIRTY YEARS! And almost all of the money has gone to a few insider developers who have become very very wealthy off the tax payers.
These Insider Developers give massive campaign contributions to City, County and State office candidates- you see, our local City Council members are eager to climb up the political ladder to Supervisor, Assembly and Senate...so they give hundreds of millions of dollars in Taxpayers money away to developers like Taylor and the Greek Tsakopoulos Mob, who in turn finance their political careers. Just take a look at who these dirtbags have been funding over the last thirty years...they all have gone up the political ladder and they now control the State Senate and heavily influence the Assembly.
The other problem is that all of these candidates are DEMOCRATS! - Tax and spend liberals, who increase our taxes so they can give more projects to these same developers. This is also why you hear very little dissent over this blatant corruption, the Liberals love being in power and are willing to overlook political corruption if it's by their team. They also believe that Government can solve every problem by taxing citizens and throwing money at a problem, well the K Street fiasco is rather clear example that simply throwing money at a problem will not solve it....
The hole at 8th & K was the McLean Building, a vibrant mixed use building. A concentrated effort to build housing in a variety of price ranges will restart K Street. But people will only live downtown if there is stuff to do after work. I hope this latest effort works but we have well-founded reasons to be skeptical.