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Apartments Opening Around Golden 1 Center

Golden-1 night

In advance of the Golden 1 Center‘s opening, development in the form of apartments is already taking shape around the arena.

As was noted in a recent preview by our own Jarah Wright, the Golden 1 Center is being touted in Sacramento as a potential economic development tool that would bring change to the surrounding area. Along with apartments, plans around the arena also call for retail, office space, lodging, and a sports medicine facility.

One of the first signs of this development is the opening of apartments near the arena. The M.A.Y. Building staged its grand opening this week with the opening of several units.

This project–which marked an extreme makeover for a building that dates back to 1911–has been hailed by many Sacramento officals as an important step in the turnaround for the area. However, the building’s high rent prices– one-bed room apartments are 550 to 950 square feet, with a low end rent of $1,850–are prompting a debate over whether the development around the Golden 1 Center will price out residents. More from the Sacramento Bee:

Michael Ault, head of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership business group, lauded the M.A.Y. Building developers and others for taking a chance.

“They are presenting exactly what we had hoped to see for the evolution of downtown,” Ault said this spring. “They have a creative approach to doing housing. It is not just about buying property for investment. It is about making active urban spaces.”

Darryl Rutherford, executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance, contends the city is not doing nearly enough to encourage construction of less expensive apartments that workers at nearby restaurants and the Golden 1 Center could afford.

“We are not seeing the types of things we need to make sure that workforce can afford to live where they work,” he said recently, and reiterated this week.

The city has a fund for low-income housing, paid into by housing developers. But, for now, infill developers in the central city are excused from chipping in to the fund, and that means less money available for the city to produce the variety of rental housing stock that can serve less-than-high-income workers.

From what the Bee reports, the city has no intention of changing the policy at this time and will in fact wait four years before revisiting it. Development of the area around the Golden 1 Center is expected to take place over several years.

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