special supplement
T
he first signs of an organized
town in Elk Grove were a hotel
and stagecoach stop in 1850, of-
fering a way station for people
traveling between the San Francisco Bay
Area and Sacramento. Over the years, as
cities such as Stockton and Sacramento
became major metropolitan centers,
Elk Grove retained its rural character
and wide-open spaces. But when Elk
Grove incorporated in 2000, its popu-
lation was 60,000, and its fields were
covered with housing subdivisions. The
town’s population rapidly increased, and
Elk Grove was named the fastest-grow-
ing city in the state between 2004
and 2005.
Today, the city of nearly 174,000 is
evolving from a suburban enclave to a
self-sustaining urban center, attracting
both commercial and retail development
to create jobs and improve the quality of
life for the people who live there. “We
are clearly not the Sacramento suburb
we once were,” Mayor Steve Ly said in
his State of the City address in January.
“We envision a variety of residential, ed-
ucational, and employment choices and
amenities that create a strong sense of
place,” and he said the city is moving to-
ward opening “more new civic amenities
than anywhere else in the region.”
A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO
ATTRACT BUSINESS
The list of development projects in Elk
Grove is long, including The Ridge, the
city’s first major shopping center in
more than a decade; a potential medical
school expansion; and a civic center that
includes an aquatic park and an open
commons area, providing a place for en-
tertainment, leisure and, ultimately, en-
hancing Elk Grove’s sense of community.
Those projects and others in the pipe-
line, along with more housing, are part of
a strategic approach to economic devel-
opment the city committed to in 2015.
“The city manager, the economic devel-
opment manager and I all came to Elk
Grove at the same time three years ago,
Costco opened a 150,000-square-foot
warehouse store plus a 30-pump gas station
on 16 acres near the intersection of Elk Grove
Boulevard and Bruceville Road.
and I don’t think that was a coincidence,”
Darrell Doan, Elk Grove’s economic de-
velopment director, says. “The city need-
ed a good alignment of a city council that
wanted economic development and a
staff that could build a platform to make
it happen with permitting and developing
judicious financial incentives.”
Those efforts are beginning to pay
off. In September 2018, retail giant Cost-
co opened a 150,000-square-foot ware-
house store plus a 30-pump gas station
on 16 acres near the intersection of Elk
Grove Boulevard and Bruceville Road,
creating 200 full- and part-time jobs. Be-
sides bringing employment opportunities
and giving local shoppers more options,
the Costco store will soon give city offi-
cials a reason to toast its value to the trea-
sury. “We’re about to get the first sales
tax payment since the store opened, and
it has the potential for about $1 million a
year that we can use to fill potholes, hire
police and do the other things cities are
supposed to do,” Doan says.
Adding to the retail development,
The Ridge shopping center, a 15-build-
ing complex with 250,000 square feet of
retail space, is under construction on 24
acres adjacent to Costco. Doan expects
The Ridge to provide enough choices to
residents to keep shopping dollars in Elk
Grove that are currently being spent out-
side the city. “For a city of our size, we
are very under-retailed,” Doan says, de-
scribing the current shopping options as
“utilitarian.”
The city’s goal is to increase both the
quality and quantity of shopping with
luxury brands and stores that broaden
buyers’ choices. “Elk Grove doesn’t have
… places that sell the brands custom-
ers want,” Doan says. “We have data
that shows us that people in Elk Grove
want to shop here, but we don’t have
what they want, so they go to Folsom or
Sacramento.”
Kelly Rule, senior vice-president for
leasing at Pappas Investments agrees,
saying Costco chose to develop a new
store in Elk Grove after seeing many of
it customers at its south Sacramento
site (about 6 miles away) were from Elk
Grove. Rule says the first phase of The
Ridge is expected to open in the fall, and
approximately 80 percent of the retail
space is already leased with soft goods,
restaurants and service tenants.
MEDICAL INDUSTRY AS AN
ECONOMIC ENGINE
In 2014, a small pharmacy college, Califor-
nia Northstate University, relocated from
Rancho Cordova to Elk Grove in a building
on West Taron Drive. Within a year, after
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