Dreams of a Hip, High-Tech Sacramento Hinge on Kings’ New Home Court
SACRAMENTO — When it opens for the Sacramento Kings’ first home basketball game, the $477 million Golden 1 Center — which will have the capacity to hold 17,500 fans and is designed with online graphic and social media interfaces — will be more than the newest and most technologically advanced arena in the N.B.A.
It will have aircraft hangar doors on its north side that open onto a public plaza anchored by a luxury hotel. There are also plans for more than one million square feet of retail, recreation, office and housing space.
The four-block, $1 billion development, previously occupied by an underperforming indoor shopping mall built in 1971, is seen by Mayor Kevin Johnson of Sacramento as the catalyst for efforts to convert California’s capital into a hot spot for jobs, housing and entertainment.
“It’s an amazing moment for Sacramento,” said Mr. Johnson during a ceremony in mid-June to announce that Golden 1 Credit Union, the Sacramento-based banking cooperative, had purchased the rights to the arena’s name for $120 million over 20 years. “We’re in a new era called Sacramento 3.0, where we do things differently and where we control our own destiny. It’s bigger than basketball. We’re revitalizing our downtown. It’s about civic pride.”
There have been disagreements among some city residents and economists, though, about the overall benefits of the new arena to all of Sacramento. A small group of residents objected to the use of public funds to subsidize construction of the arena, but they failed in 2014 to gain enough signatures to hold a public referendum, and their arguments against the project in a court case were rejected by a Sacramento Superior Court judge.
Academic studies have found that new arenas built with public financing are not likely to spread the economic benefits much beyond the neighborhoods closest to the venue. “It’s great for the businesses and for developers in area,” said Victor A. Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who studies the effects of arena development. “Whether it is good for the city — economic studies suggest they don’t add to citywide prosperity by any sort of economic variable we can identify.”
Though it’s a growing city of about 480,000 residents and the hub of a seven-county metropolitan region with 2.4 million residents, civic pride in Sacramento was rarely talked before Mr. Johnson, a three-time N.B.A. All-Star, was elected in 2008. The city’s reputation as a sensible, stable and decidedly unglamorous place to live and work rested largely on the eras and industries it served.
John Sutter (of Gold Rush fame) built a fort here near the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in 1839, which led to the city’s incorporation eleven years later. Gold miners flocked to the nearby Sierra foothills in 1849. Union Pacific established the western terminus of the intercontinental railroad in 1869 in a big rail yard on the perimeter of today’s central business core.
Much of Sacramento’s reputation is pinned to the Legislature’s decision to settle in the city in 1854. By the late 20th century, nearly 70,000 state workers called Sacramento and its neighboring suburbs home. But downtown streets emptied by dark. Just about the only storefront open for business after-hours was Rodney’s Cigar & Liquor Store, a historic newsstand at the corner of 10th and J Streets.
Rodney’s is an afterthought today in Sacramento’s busy central city. The Dreams of a Hip, High-Tech Sacramento Hinge on Kings’ New Home Court - The New York Times:
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