Uneasy Rhetoric

There’s an excellent discussion going on over at heckasac about the proposed changes to K Street, as outlined at LivingInUrbanSac’s post. Living’s post suggests something that I wondered about earlier - is Sacramento depending too much on restaurants to turn things around? How about a little cultural diversity? And I don’t mean Luigi’s Steak and Sushi.

A lot of good ideas going around in the heckasac post.

I seem to be in the dwindling minority of people who still believes that cars on K Street between 7th and 13th would be a bad idea. Personally, I like the fact that Sacramento has an area where cars don’t go. I also think that it would require relocating the light rail tracks and that would be so expensive that I think it would be easy to make the argument that the money would be better spent elsewhere. Finally, I’m not convinced that closing K Street to traffic was the reason the area became abandoned. The rapid suburbanization of Sacramento from the 1960s to the present would have seen to that regardless (it was already happening - closing K Street in 1969 was an attempt to stall it).

Oh, and Living points out that the cars on J Street haven’t done much for it.

Downtown was primarily a work destination - few people lived there. The fact that housing is now part of downtown’s revitalization plans I think bodes well for K Street (even if it’s high-end “loft” - aka apartment - housing).