Portrait by Gabby Fredericks In August, the Downtown Sacramento Partnership (DSP) released its Downtown Sacramento Livability Strategy to provide a roadmap for reinventing the central city as it slowly recovers from the effects of the pandemic. DSP’s deputy director Scott Ford, who co-authored the document with renowned urban planner Brent Toderian, talks about why urban housing is more critical than ever, how to build a more walkable and bike-friendly environment, and how it’s time to be “strategically impatient” about moving forward. To start with, most people in the region don’t work or live in downtown Sacramento. You and Brent make the case that a vibrant downtown impacts everybody in the region, from the central city to the suburbs. Can you talk about why someone in, say, Roseville, should care about downtown Sacramento? Downtown Sacramento shapes people’s perception of the greater Sacramento region in many respects. As Jeff Speck teaches us in his book Walkable City [How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time], people make decisions about where they live, in part, on the perceptions of and the experience of the downtown area. Whether it’s young talent coming out of UC Davis or Sacramento State choosing where they want to start careers and grow families, or whether it’s a company determining what region they’re going to invest in and bring new job opportunities. So we want to make sure that downtown is a positive reflection of the great region that Sacramento is. Also, a robust urban residential population reduces car reliance, so it reduces congestion for everyone and in turn, it improves air quality and improves the sustainability of this region. We simply cannot grow the way that we have the past 60 years for the foreseeable future. The population is getting too big. The old practices of sprawl-model growth are not sustainable, so we need to take this issue very seriously and embrace these principles and grow in a smarter and more sustainable manner. What other ways can urban density benefit a city? It creates more social collisions. The most important interactions that you have in a city are oftentimes the ones that you didn’t expect, where you run into somebody just walking down the street and you hopefully have a positive interaction with them. That spurs the kind of social excitement that cities are known for. It’s also what spurs innovation. So it’s important to create ecosystems where companies are growing big ideas together, where you can interact with people not only from your own organization, but from organizations in close proximity. You might overhear something over a cup of coffee at Temple, or over a beer at happy hour on K Street, and that can spur ideas that can lead to innovation and cross-collaboration with those from outside your immediate circle of professional contacts. And that’s what a healthy, walkable, urban, mixed-use environment can bring. That’s where young talent wants to be. And that’s what ultimately creates these ecosystems that become exponentially more productive. Can you speak to why you and Brent Toderian [Vancouver’s former chief city planner who is a consultant for DSP] decided to write the Downtown Sacramento Livability Strategy and what your goals for it were? We wanted to bring attention to areas that need more consideration, more urgency. Obviously, it’s no surprise that the future of downtown Sacramento is going to need to be different than it was in 2019 or any time in the past several decades. 2020 was an inflection point and it exposed some real vulnerabilities that the market had with an overreliance on a single type of use, which was the office sector. It’s not impossible to create a robust, integrated residential population in the central city once again. It was done pre-1960, and we want to do it on an even larger scale. Cities have faced significant challenges over the past five years, so we need to evolve and adapt, and in doing so, hopefully we become more resilient. This strategy is a pathway towards that. Can you talk about some of the ideas you two are advocating for in the livability strategy? It’s not necessarily about new ideas, but smart ideas. It’s the kind of stuff we need to keep reminding ourselves and our community about how we need to be thinking. I always tell people that the idea of a downtown arena here was impossible for decades, and then eventually, they found a way to get it funded and it’s been transformative for downtown. Brent is infinitely curious and fascinated by the urban ecosystem. We were walking around downtown and midtown and I was updating him on the progress Sacramento had made as it relates to urban housing in recent years, and how a lot of that is driven by renewed interest in the central city—by projects like the Golden 1 Center—but also explaining the history of what Sacramento had been pre-freeways, back when we did have a very diversified, mixed-use central city, a wonderful streetcar system and a non-car-reliant city. A lot of what was old becomes new again. We also set up a series of conversations with developers, downtown residents, historians and some industry leaders in other markets that have had success, like Calgary in Alberta, Canada, where they’ve really transformed their downtown. So we wanted to encapsulate all of those conversations into a strategy that is not a report and not a recommendation, but a mindset shift. You recently attended the International Downtown Association’s annual conference in Seattle. Were there any takeaways in terms of big ideas that could or should relate to Sacramento? Definitely. Here in Sacramento, we’re working with Congressmember Doris Matsui to secure funding to revive the idea of decking a portion of I-5 south of Capitol Mall [to better connect downtown to the riverfront], so I’ve been following Seattle’s reclaiming of their own connection to the waterfront there—the Puget Sound. They had a double-decker freeway, a 40-foot wall that cut off downtown’s Pike Place Market area from the waterfront. It was damaged in an earthquake [in 2001]—much like the Embarcadero freeway that was torn down [after the 1989 earthquake] in San Francisco—and they had to figure out a solution. Not only did they have vehicular traffic on it, but they also had a critical part of the West Coast infrastructure for power lines all tied into the underbelly of this. So arguably, it was a much more difficult project than anything we could ever propose here as far as decking I-5—theirs was a three-plus-billion-dollar project—but they got it done. Earlier, you mentioned the need to grow the urban residential population. When I interviewed Brent last year, he said there really is no one silver bullet to reinvigorating downtown, but the closest thing to a silver bullet is probably housing. The challenge is that in order to get people to move downtown, you have to create a place they want to live, but in order to create the place they want to live—with grocery stores and other amenities—you’ve got to have people who live there first. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. I agree. The old business model was flipped upside down in 2020, and so we did see regression in many ways, with the loss of the residential-serving amenities—like the pharmacies and grocery stores [that have closed in the wake of the pandemic]. And so this is a holistic dialogue around the tension between the supply side, which is the actual housing units, but also the demand side of what Brent refers to as the “urban contract”—providing the amenities that will make prospective residents more likely to live downtown and forego a larger living space and a larger private yard. They’ll only choose to do that if we can deliver those convenient amenities that support day-to-day livability—the stores, the childcare opportunities, the schools, and the clean, safe and welcoming public realms that serve as third spaces that allow community members to share that front yard and that backyard space with their neighbors. But it’s difficult, and it’s probably a big part of why we haven’t gotten the level of housing production that we would otherwise—because we’re lacking in some of those amenities. It might take policy reform or some strategic subsidies from the public sector. READ MORE: Q&A with Consulting City Planner Brent Toderian One way that cities around the country are trying to create more downtown housing is by converting office buildings into residential properties. In 2022, Assemblymember Kevin McCarty tried to get that going by identifying state office buildings that could be converted into housing, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten very far. I think there has been some progress. DGS [California Department of General Services] released a report earlier this year analyzing the potential for some of the state-owned inventory in downtown Sacramento and other markets for those conversions. But I do think a lot of it doesn’t lend itself to residential without a significant level of public subsidy. And recognizing the budget shortfalls at the state and local levels, I think we need to be really honest about what properties are viable, and what sites may be best to tear down and rebuild on. I suspect we’re going to hear some updates in the not-too-distant future about whether or not the EDD [Employment Development Department] buildings along Capitol Mall are viable. We’re certainly inspired by where those sites are located [near the Golden 1 Center], and they could add tremendous value if we can repurpose or rebuild some of them. This really is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to look at that Capitol Mall corridor and connect it to the riverfront in a more impactful way. We need to take full advantage of this time. The past five years have given us all a moment to pause, catch our breath and reassess, but now is the time for strategic and urgent action. Another impact of the pandemic was that cities all over the world were racing to build protected bike lanes—lanes that have physical barriers from vehicular traffic—for people who suddenly couldn’t carpool or risk public transit. But Sacramento did not  excel in that area. That’s been improving recently, but I know that transportation infrastructure is one of the keys that Brent talks about all the time. As you know, there’s been a rash of injuries and deaths in Sacramento this year due to a lack of safe cycling infrastructure. How do we grow the number of people who aren’t reliant on cars to get around—whether they’re using electric bikes or bike share or regular bikes or scooters—when it’s too dangerous to ride in the street? The simple answer is, we won’t. That is a key foundational point if we want to enhance the value proposition of living in an urban center, and you can only do that if you’ve got a cohesive network of protected biking infrastructure. I always tell people that if we had a bunch of disconnected vehicular roads and streets, you probably wouldn’t see as many cars driving around either. You’ve got to make the investment for the network to connect and be convenient enough that people will choose biking, rolling, scooting, whatever that looks like. In Seattle, they’ve done a really good job of adding protected bike lanes throughout downtown. We’ve lagged far, far behind. We don’t prioritize that investment in infrastructure. [The city’s transportation planning manager] Jennifer Donlon Wyant has done a great job, and so we really want to continue to emphasize the importance of the work that she and all the other city partners are doing, but frankly, we need to encourage more direct city investment in this type of infrastructure. [Currently, most funding for bikeway projects comes from regional, state and federal grants, not from the city, so Wyant and her colleagues do as much as they can with limited resources.] Most people, like myself, aren’t necessarily confident biking in shared lanes with cars in an urban environment without some level of protection. We have such a crisis on our streets, and we can  engineer improvement there—it’s just a matter of political will and priorities. One great point Brent made in our interview last year was about how one-way streets become “traffic sewers” where people are just trying to get through downtown as quickly as possible. These cars go so fast, it sometimes feels like a drag race downtown, which isn’t exactly conducive to a walkable, bike-friendly environment.  Brent is exactly right. When you create three-lane-wide, one-way traffic sewers that were designed to support the most congested moments of pre-2020, it’s time to update those designs. And guess what? That wasn’t the best thing for the central city pre-2020 either. It wasn’t like we wanted to open the floodgates and get everybody out at 5 p.m. A healthy city keeps  people downtown, and as [the late legendary urbanist writer] Jane Jacobs taught us, you can’t rely on bringing everybody downtown—you need that healthy population that chooses to live there. So again, these are not new ideas, they’re smart, sensible and fundamental ideas, but they’re also probably somewhat radical and shocking to a lot of people because it’s different from what many of us are accustomed to. I grew up in the south part of the city, in the Pocket neighborhood. I was fortunate enough to be able to walk to school and to ride my bike and take the bus downtown for my internships in high school, but I grew up in a very car-centric part of the city. It wasn’t until I got older and started going to New York and other cities that I started to realign my thinking. You can walk to the grocery store and carry your groceries home. You don’t have to go to Costco in your SUV. When you walk more, you’re healthier, and you’re more socially connected to your neighbors. For me, it was really eye-opening, and it’s part of what we want this strategy to deliver—the ability for Sacramento to provide that level of urban amenity comfort, and give people the choice to live a more transit-oriented and smaller-carbon-footprint type of lifestyle. Is there any progress being made on that traffic sewer front? Are any of the one-way streets being converted to two-way streets? There is some progress. As we speak, 5th Street is being converted, from Broadway to H Street, from a one-way to a two-way, traffic-calmed, neighborhood connector street that better supports all modes of transportation. My big selling point has been the new residential population that’s been developing along the 5th Street corridor [thanks to housing projects that have been popping up there in recent years], from Sacramento Commons all the way down to the Mill at Broadway. The redesigned two-way street is becoming a natural connector between this new residential base—this new base of customers—and areas like DoCo, the Golden 1 Center and Capitol Mall. And the city, to their credit, is doing their best to leverage some of the Capitol Annex construction to build some buffered bikeways [lanes with more separation from vehicular traffic] along L Street and N Street, on the north and south sides of Capitol Park, and to connect them to 5th Street. And I’m glad that we are calling this what it is—which is a crisis as far as the number of lives that are lost due to preventable vehicle-involved accidents. Speed kills, as we know, and that’s part of the benefit of getting more infill housing production, so that more people live close to where there are job opportunities and hopefully more grocery and retail opportunities, and drive less. Even with all of these important ideas, you and Brent and your team at the Downtown Sacramento Partnership aren’t elected officials, so you can’t make budget decisions or make these dreams a reality on your own. Aside from working to influence the decision makers at City Hall, what are the types of things DSP can do to realize the new strategy’s vision? We don’t have the political power that officials at City Hall have, but we also have a nimbleness that allows us to use pilot programs, if you will. We try to do things that send very clear market signals, like the colorful chairs and events to activate Cesar Chavez Plaza [such as DSP’s summer Concerts in the Park program]. We want to do more of those types of projects to make the public realm more inviting and more livable. We’re working on a short-term implementation of enhancing some of the Capitol Mall center median early next year, by replacing the irrigation to support additional beautification, like flowers and planters to improve the aesthetics, and hopefully set the stage for a bigger investment in the future. Yes, it’s been a challenging four or five years here in downtown Sacramento, but I believe that the future can be something better if we’re working with intention—and if we’re strategically impatient about getting there. This interview has been edited for length, flow and clarity. More Conversations You Might Like Q&A with Sean de Courcy, City of Sacramento’s Preservation Director Q&A with Jessica Sanders, Executive Director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation Q&A with Susan Handy, Director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at UC Davis