Residents go NIMBY on proposed high-rise, hotel makeover at downtown Sacramento’s Capitol Towers

An ambitious plan to erect more than a thousand high- and mid-rise apartment units in the heart of downtown is meeting opposition from existing residents who think their modest environs are fine as is.

The 13-member Sacramento Planning and Design Commission is in for an impassioned debate on Thursday evening, when it convenes to hear the pitch for Sacramento Commons, four blocks of proposed high-rises, condominiums, retail shops and possibly even a hotel.

For this vision to be realized, however, developers say they need to facelift the 15-story Capitol Towers, demolish 206 nearby garden apartments occupied by older residents and chop down at least eight trees.

At the crux is the familiar tug of war between a city’s romanticized past and its aspirational future.

“We’re saying what they proposed is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Gretchen Steinberg, president of Sacramento Modern, an architectural preservation nonprofit that opposes the project.

If it gets built, that is.

Sacramento Commons is the brainchild of Kennedy Wilson, a global real-estate investment firm that’s made its billions by managing real-estate assets, not creating them.

Back when the company plunked down $64 million for Capitol Towers, in May 2012, plans were modest. In a release announcing the purchase, the company said it would install new kitchen cabinetry and renovate the fitness center, leasing office and retail amenities.

That was before the project site—bordered by N and P streets and Fifth and Seventh streets—was to be within spitting distance of a new arena for the Sacramento Kings. Now, Kennedy Wilson’s subsidiary, KW Captowers LLC, which shares contractor AECOM with the arena developer, plans to go big.

The revised project calls for two 24-story high-rises in the southeast section of the superblock, a couple of seven-story mid-rises on the western half, and 22 stories of hotel or condominium building in the northeast. There’s also supposed to be a 50-unit mid-rise of more affordable units. It adds up to 1,013 more living units than there are now.

Critics fear Commons will trade mellow green courtyards for a sky-blotting concrete jungle and erase one of Sacramento’s only mid-20th-century neighborhoods—one of the first urban renewal projects in California, according to opponent Carr Kunze.

“This is not rational, sustainable, transit-oriented planning,” Kunze said in a video testimonial posted to No Sacramento Commons Project’s Facebook page. “Right to the contrary. You’re displacing the young professionals. You’re displacing families. And you’re also displacing some of the seniors who live here as well.”

Earlier this month, SacMod submitted Capitol Towers for historic preservation status in an effort to slow the city’s review process. The city is also evaluating the property’s potential eligibility as a historic site, a staff report states.

Such status may be less important now. Principal planner Scot Mende said on Monday that the city planning department decided to require a full environmental-impact report, rather than the expedited assessment that was planned.

Under an EIR, the applicant must solicit and formally respond to community concerns. Not so under the assessment, a sort of planning loophole driven through the Legislature by state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. The decision to require a full EIR also pushes a likely commission vote until February 2015 at the earliest, Mende said.

Councilman Steve Hansen, who represents the downtown district, said he wants to let the public have its say before he weighs in on the project. “Generally though, we need far more housing in the core to ease our carbon foot print and the jobs-housing imbalance,” he said via text.

Kennedy Wilson is no stranger to the Sacramento-area real-estate market. In 2011, the company acquired a 315,000 square-foot property management portfolio in the city, according to a release. In 2007, the firm’s auction group unloaded 34 Elk Grove condos over the course of an hour. The company also picked up a 393-unit apartment complex near the Sacramento River for $51.5 million and a four-story office building on Howe Avenue for $16 million.

Kennedy Wilson’s most recent Northern California acquisition was of a 542-unit apartment complex in Pittsburg earlier this month. It purchased it for $96.5 million, most of which was borrowed from Fannie Mae in the form of a 10-year loan.

KW Captowers LLC’s Dave Eadie didn’t respond to an interview request before print deadline. In the release announcing Kennedy Wilson’s acquisition of Capitol Towers, KW Multifamily Management Group president Robert Hart called the purchase “an exciting play” on Sacramento’s central business district.

Capitol Towers was completed in 1965, following passage of the Housing Act of 1949. In the video, Kunze effused about the way architects mixed mid-century modernism with a Central Valley flair, calling it a “beautiful, coherent planning concept.”

“What is at that neighborhood is something that no other neighborhood in downtown or Midtown has,” Gretchen Steinberg said.