Half of State Workers Still Absent as Vacant State Buildings Weigh on Downtown Sacramento

More than two years removed from the pandemic, only half of state workers are back downtown compared to levels in 2019, and empty state office buildings are sitting in limbo.

City Councilmember Phil Pluckebaum is calling on the state to speed up its reuse of empty and underused office buildings, which are double-trouble for a city getting no property or sales tax from them.

Scott Kingston is a downtown Sacramento commercial real estate agent. He is selling Downtown Sacramento with the idea that state workers will not be coming back for in-person work. “We need to think differently about the uses that are coming into the central city,” Kingston said. “Our understanding is it’s not happening anytime soon for a variety of reasons, and so assuming that that’s true, we need to spend our energy marketing the region and the central city in a different way.”