Feb 6

Feb 6 Downtown stands out as new housing hotspot in Sacramento market

Breaking News, Building a sustainable future, Keeping people housed

Sacramento (Feb. 6, 2024) Mayor Darrell Steinberg this week helped celebrate the opening of another apartment community downtown as the Central City continues to grow its residential population.

Downtown added 635 housing units in the past 12 months. Another 860 are currently under construction – the highest number of any submarket in Sacramento, according to the CoStar Group.

“This isn’t an isolated moment,” Mayor Steinberg said at the Monday ribbon cutting for The Mod, a complex with 129 new apartments at 16th and G streets. “All over downtown and midtown, people are choosing to invest in Sacramento. People are choosing to move to Sacramento.

“The Mod represents the modern vision of what we want downtown Sacramento to be,” Mayor Steinberg said.

Developer HARC Holdings of Arizona renovated a former Holiday Inn Express to create The Mod at Midtown, which includes studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments in an amenity-rich complex that includes a fitness center and communal gathering areas. Rents are market rate, but the studio apartments — which offer expansive views — are designed to be affordable to downtown workers at about $1,500 a month.

With state workers still based at home at least part of the week, Sacramento’s downtown is quieter during the day than before the Covid pandemic. But Mayor Steinberg noted that it’s livelier than ever at night. People pack the blocks around the Golden 1 Center for Kings games and concerts. The Old Sacramento Waterfront hosted 445,800 visitors in December, the highest number since 2018.

An AC Marriott hotel will open in the next few weeks on I Street, joining several other hotels that came online in the past two years. And while 27 downtown businesses closed in 2022 and 2023, another 41 opened, and 18 more have signed leases, according to the Downtown Sacramento Partnership.

“We appreciate that the state is bringing more workers back, but we aim to evolve our downtown into a place that is far less reliant on the state workforce,” Mayor Steinberg said. “Our transformation has begun, and it won’t stop. In 2024 we’ll move forward with major new civic amenities on the waterfront and in Old Sacramento. Our new downtown will be a place people come not because they have to, but because they want to.”