9/28/18 An Advisory Services Panel of national land use and urban planning experts representing the Urban Land Institute (ULI) spent the week in Sacramento diving into the area around the Meadowview and Florin Road light rail stations. Their aim is to provide unvarnished outside strategic recommendations of how to encourage the revitalization of a commercial corridor that has the benefit of being on a light rail line and includes multiple properties owned by Sacramento Regional Transit. The panel is one of only three in the country that ULI is hosting.

Over the week the panel interviewed over 75 stakeholders –developers, business owners, religious leaders, and community-based organizations—to inform their recommendations.
 
The panel’s challenge was to provide a roadmap for how the area can address escalating housing costs, the need for jobs and services, and ways in which vacant land around the two light rail stations could attract new economic development.  Early recommendations have focused on strategies to finance new affordable housing projects in the short term, encourage higher development densities at light rail stations, use youth arts and education programs as community engagement and development, use current job training programs to ready a local workforce to work on future development in the community, use trees and green space to create better walking conditions, and re-purpose outdated commercial properties. 

ULI will host the panel’s presentation and, once release, report on their Advisory Services webpage.