10th & J Street Proposal Progress?

Over 10+ years ago this corner was getting primed for development, John Saca went through all the planning process and paid for both the entitlements and EIR. Shortly after getting the green light to build the economy started to fall into a recession. Today Sotiris Kolokotronis and Saca Development have come together to develop the land.

Their proposal is still in the early stages but the vision is a 200 room hotel and 250 apartments. With entitlements still in place for the previous project, getting approval from the Planning & Design Committee and financing might be their biggest hurdles. The Sacbee’s reported that last year Saca asked the city for some assistance, so having Kolokotronis join as a partner might give the proposal assistance the city won’t be providing.

The original Metropolitan proposal had 320 condos and 190 hotel rooms with 13,000 sf ground floor retail. With fewer apartments and ten more hotel rooms, my early guess is it might reach 300’. But we won’t know anything till the end of the year when the developers submit their plans to the city. City Council member Steve Hansen is “Cautiously optimistic” that work could begin at this location, and I totally agree. There are a lot of factors that need to come together before this project can succeed, so we better wait till next year before getting to excited.

The Metropolitan Comeback?

It appears as if this former proposal that never got off the drawing board in 2007 is going to make another go at it. Sactown Magazine’s reporting that an estimated ground breaking for the tower is on the horizon in 2015. Of course, the economy has to improve further for this proposal to break ground.  The housing component is being promoted as “luxury”, does downtown have enough willing buyers make this possible? The last big project that sold units like this was the L Street lofts and it was only able to sell 22 of the 92 units in the building… now they are all rentals and the building was foreclosed on.

Scaled Down Plans

It looks like the city council is putting their foot down on the proposed Metropolitan residential tower at 10th and J Street. They have asked the developer to go back to the drawing board because it’s too big at 400 feet tall and too sleek according to the Mayor. The biggest reason it’s going back to be redesigned is because it will block the council member’s views of the Capitol and the Cathedral from their chambers of City Hall. The Mayor is now requesting that the Metropolitan also be designed to look like the Citizen or Elks Lodge buildings that are near by.

It seems crazy to me that at this final approval stage the city council has brought up all these objections and ask for a complete redesign. It almost appears like their tiring to kill the proposal. For the last year this proposal gained approval from needed committees and gaining all the needed entitlements to build, but then the city council at this late stage has now asked the developer to go back to square one and start over. If I were a developer and thinking about building something, I would have second thoughts after seeing how the city council waited till this final stage of approval to bring up their objections.

I wonder if John Saca will just withdraw his proposal altogether? Saca will have to pay all his people who worked on the original proposal again in order to redesign the tower and then shuffle it back through the committees.

http://cbs13.com/local/high.rise.too.2.657366.html

High-rise proves to be a tall order

By Lisa Heyamoto of the Sacramento Bee
Saturday, February 9, 2008

Developer John Saca is nothing if not a paragon for the "if at first you don't succeed" mantra.When his ambitious Towers project fell spectacularly concave, he vowed to push ahead with a scaled-back, 39-story project called the Metropolitan, a 320-unit piece of high-rise heaven on 10th and J.

But if he wants to get that bad boy past the City Council, he'd better start seeing things from their point of view.

For real

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/699588.html

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Basically, the story is that two city councilmember’s and the mayor want the proposed Metropolitan project to be scaled back because it will block their view of the Capitol Dome from their City Hall offices. For the last year this project has gained all the cities needed entitlements to build and doe's not sit on any blocks that are within the Capitol View Corridor, but now a few councilmember’s (Hammond, Cohn) and the Mayor are causing a stink at this last approval stage because it will block "their view" of the Capitol from their office.

It's hard to believe that our City Council wants housing downtown when at the same time they are changing the rules for developers after a project has gathered needed entitlements to build



The Metropolitan is planned for where the red box sits on the corner or J Street and 10th across from Caesar Chavez Park. It's clearly planned where no height restriction are in place for a building.

The Metropolitan

On December 19th the Design Commission will possibly approve the Metropolitan for construction giving John Saca another chance to prove he is a big time developer. The proposal will be either 320 residential condominium units or 190 residential condominium units and 190 hotel rooms.