Is Sacramento's downtown rebound a dud? More than two years removed from the pandemic, only half of state workers are back downtown compared to levels in 2019, and empty state office buildings are sitting in limbo.

City Councilmember Phil Pluckebaum is calling on the state to speed up its reuse of empty and underused office buildings, which are double-trouble for a city getting no property or sales tax from them.

"Don't let those buildings sit empty," Pluckebaum said. "Sacramento has the most state properties of any city in the state because we're the capital."

The Downtown Sacramento Partnership published the two maps below, the first showing how many state properties sit in the downtown core and the second showing how many downtown core buildings are nontaxable properties. Approximately 43% of them are state-owned.

Scott Kingston is a downtown Sacramento commercial real estate agent. He is selling Downtown Sacramento with the idea that state workers will not be coming back for in-person work.

"We need to think differently about the uses that are coming into the central city," Kingston said. "Our understanding is it's not happening anytime soon for a variety of reasons, and so assuming that that's true, we need to spend our energy marketing the region and the central city in a different way."

Sacramento State recently released an AI rendering of their vision for a downtown campus near the Capitol. The university has extended talks to purchase the Capitol Mall unemployment building through October of this year. 

John Vignocchi, the CEO of Region Business, says the old state buildings should not be saved and reused, but demolished.

"Knock them all down," Vignocchi said. "It's cheaper to build from scratch than remodel it. Nothing special about those buildings at all."

"This year is going to be a tough year, the city's going to be having hard conversations about what it can do with the money that it has," Pluckebaum said. 

The state does have a website dedicated to listing excess state property for redevelopment. They have one downtown Sacramento building listed for redevelopment now at 8th and R.