The Sacramento Business Journal has gone all ga-ga again over the prospect that the old Macy's Building and nearby parts of the mall property will be developed as a self-storage place plus apartments. In a December 16th edition of the Business Journal there is an article entitled:  "Tourbineau Real Estate Partners buys northern end of Country Club Plaza". We would love to show you that article. but it is behind a paywall - essentially it's the self-appointed guru of local business telling anyone willing to pay to listen that business would be great, "if only".

Still, they sometimes get it right, so it is always a concern to read about whatever hair-brained scheme is being promoted. This time the Business Journal is saying that a Seattle-area investment firm has bought the north end of the mall property, including the Macy's building for $8.2M - a steal at about $820K per acre (including the 160K s.f. building. The SAFE Credit Union building and the U.S. Bank building are not part of the sale. Name another major metropolitan area on the West Coast where you can get land that. heap smack in the middle of the metro area.

OK, fine. Out-of-area speculators bought the site. Did they do due diligence? Maybe. The County's Zoning Ordinance has holes in it you can drive a truck through. And (as our readers probably already know) the County, having no vision for our community, just sits around waiting for a developer to submit a proposal, any proposal. Perhaps, though, the speculators will just sit on the property, taking a tax write-off (subsidized by us) while waiting for the price to go up eventually - isn't that what Amazon is doing across the street? Or maybe the speculators just drank the Kool-Aid provided by the property owner, the property manager and the Business Journal. We don't know.

We have been previously told that Supervisor Desmond has nixed the self-storage concept. Is that still the case? You can never have enough self-storage places, can you? Kind of like how you can never have enough fast-food chicken sandwich places. No doubt the big new self-storage place a few blocks up Watt is already over-subscribed even before it is built, right? Are you happy to hear that 800 new self-storage units might be going in at Country Club Plaza?

And housing: OMG there just isn't enough of that, either! One wonders what kind of housing the Seattle people are thinking about. They say they will build 200 units at 3 to 4 stories, taking up about half of the parking lot where the Christmas tree lot is at the moment. Will it be market-rate ownership housing, like condos, maybe? Hmm...is there a market for that in that location, characterized as it is by drive-through fast food, homeless druggies, a gas station and two large shopping malls that have seen better days? Or will it be "affordable" housing (AKA cheap apartments) that rely on Section 8 subsidies and deferred maintenance like the nearby Anton Butano apartments do? Keep in mind that there is no valid transportation solution for the site other than cars. But wait, wouldn't housing there qualify the rest of the property as "mixed use"? Sure, if you buy into the baloney.

One also wonders what the CPAC would tell the Supervisors about community input - that is, if the CPAC ever met to consider the project. We can imagine people showing up to complain that developing that part of the Country Club Plaza site that way would be a massively blown opportunity and an insult to our "downtown". We can also imagine the CPAC utterly ignoring the public and fawning over the developer's B.S. That would, of course, be followed by Planning Commission approval of the project, requiring the public to raise money just to appeal to the Board of Supervisors, only to have the Supervisors also ignore the public. This is the kind of downward land-use mess we are used to dealing with here, isn't it?

No doubt, at least one of our devoted readers will dis us for being negative once again. But we would rather speak truth to power. Here's the point: we think the storage+apartment thing is a really bad idea, one typical of the dismal land-use decisions that have infested our community for far too long. It's how the County rolls. It's what happens if your General Plan is 45 years out of date.  If you think this kind of project is just ducky and a perfect fit for our community, that's your prerogative. If, instead, you agree this is an inappropriate project, now is the time to speak up, the time to join with others in moving towards a different future for our community, and the time to light up the phone lines to Supervisor Desmond's office. Ultimately, the question before our community is a choice between giving the Business Journal/developers free reign or having all of us come together as a community to decide what's best. Which choice do you prefer?