[wburg]

The Crest, right now, is pretty multipurpose, in that they have films there, but also concerts, conventions, and speakers--what about it isn't already a "performing arts center"?

I'd sure hate to lose the Crest as a movie theater, though...it does pretty good business in that spot, and it certainly has its niche carved out. Besides, isn't there a performing arts center going in across the street?

Inclusionary housing is certainly not limited strictly to SRO residents: "low-income" in Sacramento County means anyone earning less than $36,000 a year, which is three times what folks on SSI make. This means that low-income and very-low income housing (the next category down, about $24K a year) is intended for people like service workers, office techs, restaurant employees, etcetera--the exact sort of people you want living close to their jobs downtown. It's kind of a weird irony when someone making $100K a year can live in a condo walking distance from their downtown office, but the guy shlepping lattes on the ground floor has to commute in from Orangevale because he can't pay downtown rents working minimum wage.

As to the SROs themselves, it's really easy to say they should go "somewhere else" but a lot harder to determine where that "somewhere else" should be, and what the current residents of "somewhere else" might have to say about it. There are plenty of examples of SRO-type housing, properly managed, that works well in existing urban neighborhoods: in San Francisco, the Tenderloin's SROs are very close to Union Square, and it doesn't seem to deter that neighborhood from being pretty active, day or night.