WellSpace Health buys abandoned Sacramento office park. Here’s what it’s planning

It has taken nearly 13 years but a never finished office park in Sacramento’s Little Saigon neighborhood on Stockton Boulevard is now owned by WellSpace Health which plans to spend $120 million to turn the vacant eyesore into a medical campus.

“Part of that campus is going to be 24 hour operations bringing lights on, hundreds of employees to a community where there’s been a blighted building, a blighted property,” said Jonathan Porteus, CEO of WellSpace Health.

The partially completed office park has remained vacant since 2009 to the chagrin of local leaders who helped the office park would help increase other development in Little Saigon.

WellSpace Health plans to turn one of the partially finished four buildings by October 2023 into a 32,000-square-foot 24-hour mental health hub, housing its state and federally funded 988 mental health suicide prevention and crisis hotline, in addition to facilities for emergency in person counseling, Porteus said.

Later, the seven to eight year plan for the 13 acre-site calls for dental clinics and expansion of an institute, currently based in Carmichael, to train health professionals.

One hundred employees staffing the mental health crisis center will be the first employees on the campus.

What this means for Little Saigon

Today some of the windows in the two story office buildings are boarded, other uncovered windows show empty unfinished space without walls. Garbage lines a side street by the office park including an abandoned mattresses.

“It’s a white elephant that stood empty for 13 years,” said Frank Louie, the executive director of the Stockton Boulevard Partnership, a private public improvement district that includes the two mile stretch that makes up Little Saigon.

Back in the summer of 2009, there was high hope for the office park to help build momentum to encourage other commercial development. The Stockton Boulevard area had become home for thousands of Southeast Asians who immigrated to Sacramento in the years following the end of the Vietnam-American War in 1975.

Vincene Jones, who was chief of staff for then Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo, said the office park dedication ceremony in the summer of 2009 attracted all the key people representing the Little Saigon community.

“It was a massive dedication with everybody attending. Your congressman, your assembly member, your council members who all were really enthused about the fact that these buildings were going to be a catalyst for Little Saigon. So it was just wonderful,” she recalled.

But the dedication ceremony was held before the construction of the 64,000 square feet in the first four buildings in the office park were completed. The exterior of the buildings had been finished but the insides were just empty shells, said Louie.

A few months later the great financial crisis was at hand in the U.S.

“We had a fallout in the economy and the buildings were a little over halfway completed, ”Louie said. ”All the construction stopped and the access to capital just kind of dried up.”

Why the office park hit hard times

The original idea was to sell individual spots in the first 64,000 square feet of space as business condos, Louie said, an idea that could have worked if the economy had not collapsed.

Louie said the office park went into foreclosure, and was acquired by a new set of developers. A series of owners over the next 13-years were unable to obtain financing to finish the office park’s initial buildings, he said.

He said another problem that may have prevented development were unconfirmed rumors that spread through Little Saigon that the financing for the office park came from financial backers who were once tied to North Vietnam. He said that did not sit well with Vietnamese residents of little Saigon, who came to the U.S. from South Vietnam.

Jones said she also heard rumors, but could never determine if they were true.

“People in the community said the money used to finance the building of the park was dirty,” she said.

Little Saigon developed despite unfinished park

Even without the office park, much of Little Saigon has prospered over the last decade. Shopping centers have been renovated and multiple Asian supermarkets compete for customers.

The Sacramento City Council official designation of the area as Little Saigon in 2010, helped encourage pride and new businesses in the area, said Louie.

But not every business made it through the pandemic, and Louie said the vacancy rate on Stockton Boulevard is 8% to 10%.

He feels finishing the office park will boost all of Little Saigon, helping increase occupancy of some of the vacant stores and construction on 40 vacant lots on Stockton Boulevard.

“It definitely is going to be a catalyst,“ he said.

WellSpace Health paid $13.2 million for the property from the latest ownership group, said Porteus. The money included $.4.75 million approved by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors.

WellSpace’s 30 health clinics in the Sacramento region serve largely low-income residents covered by Medicaid or seniors covered by Medicare or the uninsured.

Porteus said the new campus was essential for WellSpace Health, particularly because of quickly expanding staff increases for its 988 mental health crisis hotline. The federal government mandated a separate hotline starting in July 2022 to divert calls away from the 911 system and untrained dispatchers not equipped to offer immediate mental health services.

WellSpace provides crisis services for callers from 26 California counties.

A representative of the ownership group that sold the office park property to WellSpace Health did not return phone calls. The group, Little Saigon Plaza Sacramento LLC, is registered to a Quang Luong, according to the California Secretary of State’s Office.