A new neighborhood rises from the empty blocks of midtown’s southern edge
By Ryan Lillis and Tony Bizjak
rlillis@sacbee.com
It is one of midtown Sacramento’s quietest corners, a world away from the hopping nightclubs, restaurants and stores of J and K streets. The industries that once occupied the blocks along Q, R and S streets east of 15th Street mostly departed long ago, leaving a legacy of weedy vacant lots and train tracks.
Now this overlooked part of the central city is about to get a major influx of development. If all goes as planned, it will emerge as one of Sacramento’s most densely populated neighborhoods.
More than 650 apartments and town homes are either under construction or in final planning stages within three blocks of 19th and Q streets. The wave of housing construction – much of it to be offered at upper-end rents and prices – represents the larges concentration of new housing injected into Sacramento’s central city in decades, and promises to turn the area surrounding the midtown Safeway into a teeming village of 1,200 or more residents within the next couple of years.