Sacramento's16th & K Streets lofty ideas

The only thing going up faster than the budget deficit in Sacramento is the building of lofts. Real estate crisis? Lending crunch? We don’t need no stinkin’ C & C’s! Someone’s got serious credit and willing to gamble using downtown Sacramento’s landscape and future. Marvelous. (sigh)

Lofts aren’t apartments really. They aren’t condo really. They are some sort of hybrid upscale living approach to making getting to work downtown as easy as a ten minute walk. And from what I can see from the listings on some, they are filling up here and there. They are also mostly vacant here and there as well. The prices are lofty too. Not the sort of place a teenager will call his first apartment. And almost all of the ones I’ve seen have these HUGE windows so tenants can see their city – and their city can see them. I hope they are double dual-paned glass of the sun is gonna fry some of those people even if the air conditioners are pumping out record-breaking-electrical-usage cool air.

One of the ones seen here has a huge weight lifting set in the window and a vase (I’m sure THEY pronounce it “vaaaaaaaahce”) that stretched from end to end – probably 15 feet. I don’t know what you can put in a vaaaaaaahce that long but I’m sure it has plenty space to avoid becoming rootbound any time in the 21st Century.

The thing is, I don’t think there are that many people who want to move into The Big City with its sirens (The Historic Governor’s Mansion is a couple blocks up this busy street and had the same problem), street graffiti, and homeless people. People who can afford these places can afford to either drive their Hummers to work and pay more for parking than I do for rent ($700) or hire a driver. My fear is that this in-building, as it’s called, is gonna bust so badly sooner or later that there are nothing but a lot of broken double dual-paned glass windows and boarded up doors.

I could be wrong and I hope I am. Time will tell.