Apartments in the old jail? Artist renderings show ideas for downtown Modesto
Five days of brainstorming about the future of downtown Modesto ended with bold ideas for housing and other attractions.
How about turning the courthouse and adjacent jail into three stories of apartments? Or a new ballpark for the Modesto Nuts along a Tenth Street promenade to the Tuolumne River?
The city held the sessions at Greens on Tenth restaurant to get input for a 20-year master plan for downtown. The consultant on the project, Opticos Design of Berkeley, gathered hundreds of ideas on whiteboards and Post-It notes.
Friday, the team wrapped up the week with several computer-generated renderings of potential projects. The exact locations, designs and funding are still to be determined, but for now, fans of downtown can dream.
Among the ideas:
- A dense cluster of apartments and businesses around the depot at Ninth and J streets that will serve the expanding Altamont Corridor Express. It could have one round trip to San Jose as soon as 2021 and four by 2023.
- Transforming the Stanislaus County Courthouse and jail at 11th and H streets into three floors of apartments. The jail no longer houses inmates. A new courthouse is set to be completed by 2023 on a vacant block at Ninth and H streets. The old buildings would be gutted and get new facades. (No one suggested turning the jail cells into lofts.)
- A new home for the Nuts minor-league baseball team at Tenth and F streets. They now play at John Thurman Field, half a mile away. The rendering shows a two-story facade hugging the downtown corner. It could be a prominent part of plans to make Tenth Street more walkable and bike-friendly all the way to the river. Fans driving in for a game would likely park in garages. The downtown vision leans away from the surface lots that make up much of the district now.
- Upgrades to the part of west Modesto that is within the downtown plan boundaries. One rendering imagines a new building at Fourth and H streets for a restaurant and second-story apartments.
- Bicycles paths, sidewalk widening and other projects that make several downtown streets less dominated by motor vehicles. Some could connect across Needham Street to the Virginia Corridor, which runs to part of north Modesto. Others could link to the trails along the river and Dry Creek.
The consultant expects to release a draft plan for public comment by year’s end. It could go to the Modesto City Council in the spring.
The master plan will provide a general vision, with details to be filled in later, said Jaylen French, community and economic development director for Modesto.
“What do people envision in downtown in 2040?” he asked Friday’s audience. “It’s vibrancy. It’s more activity. It’s more amenities for the downtown. It’s a livelier space. It’s perhaps residential, where people are living.”
The district already has a large daytime and evening population, thanks to offices, restaurants, entertainment venues and specialty retail. Modesto lags behind other cities for downtown housing, which speakers said is hard to justify economically for now.
But the demand is out there, said Aaron Nousaine of BAE Urban Economics, who is helping with the master plan. Some of it is from millennials and other young people looking for a vibrant place to live. Some is from retired people downsizing from suburban homes.
“They too can take advantage of all the amenities that a denser urban environment has to offer,” Nousaine said.
This story was originally published October 5, 2019 at 7:16 PM.
