Local Coworking Space Urban Hive Moves Into New Location

The coworking space Urban Hive is settling into its new digs at 730 I St., just a few blocks from its previous location at Seventh and J streets.

One of the region’s oldest coworking spots, The Urban Hive has leased 22,000 square feet of space, with an option to take part of the third floor of the 1960s office building.

The Urban Hive is not just coworking, it is also a community with mentors, and it has corporate clients, desk clients and office rental clients, said founder Brandon Weber.

The new space features large open areas for events and meetings, and it has a variety of furnished board rooms available for rent.

“It is a great space,” said Scott Kingston, a broker with Turton Commercial Real Estate who represented Urban Hive on its new lease. Ken Turton and Jon Lang with Turton Commercial represented building owner 730 I Street Investors LLC.

In addition to coworking and offices, The Urban Hive since its founding has been tied to Sacramento’s entrepreneurial and startup community. It hosts startup events and pitch competitions as well as entrepreneurship discussions hosted by groups like Startup Grind. Urban Hive has about 250 members.

The tenant improvements installed in the recent renovation of the 730 I St. building include high-end finishes, glass offices and two banks of soundproof studios, Kingston said.

The Urban Hive is awaiting more furniture, art and live plants for the space. It will have a grand opening later in March, Weber said.

The new building also has surface parking and underground parking, which The Urban Hive’s previous location did not have.

Built in 1962, 730 I St. is three stories and 72,000 square feet, and it also has both a basement garage and a 100-stall parking lot.

The building opened originally as the main Downtown Sacramento branch of Bank of America. The building has been largely empty for the past 15 years.

With its central downtown location, 730 I St. has over the years served as a temporary Sacramento City Hall and even served as the interim main office for the Sacramento Police Department.

The location most recently was set to be the new headquarters of Capital Public Radio, but that move didn’t work out after CapRadio ran into financial problems and decided to stay in its existing space on the campus of California State University Sacramento.

The Urban Hive opened originally in 2009 in what was then a nearly 100-year-old brick building at 1931 H St. in Midtown. The business moved, along with most of its tenants and members, from Midtown to a 15,000-square-foot location at The Cannery business park at the end of 2017. The Cannery location was twice as large as the Midtown spot had been.

Around the same time as that expansion, Urban Hive offshoot I/O Labs started making plans for a Downtown coworking space in a historic building at the corner of Seventh and J streets. Urban Hive moved out of The Cannery in 2021, and moved all operations to the Downtown Sacramento building, where Urban Hive eventually had the second through fifth floors of the building at 1007 Seventh St. That building is now being considered for a 107-room luxury hotel conversion by Los Angeles-based developer Roger Hume.

Hume previously completed a similar conversion of the former Order of the Eastern Star building in Midtown Sacramento, which opened as a Hyatt House hotel in 2022.