Downtown Sacramento is a city reborn

Sacramento, California

HOURS before the Sacramento Kings played their NBA home opener in October, Vivek Ranadivé stood on the balcony of the team's new fourth-floor office at the US$1 billion Downtown Commons. He watched hoops fans stream into the year-old Golden 1 Center. He smiled at guests swimming in the rooftop pool of the brand-new, 250-room Kimpton Sawyer Hotel. Below him, the open-air plaza at street level bustled with life.

"Four years ago, this place was dead," said Mr Ranadivé, referring to downtown Sacramento, the capital city of the biggest state in the union. Like many cities, Sacramento's urban core needed some serious rethinking. "You could have thrown a bowling bowl," he said, "and it wouldn't have hit a soul." No longer. Three years after Mr Ranadivé, the owner of the Kings, teamed up with the city to scrape away a nearly empty downtown mall, and a year after he opened the arena and the one-million-square-foot commons, Sacramento is a city reborn.