The West Village housing community has been receiving lots of hype recently. Well, all the hype is recent since the community is only 2 years old. It’s young, shiny, colorful and not only is it net zero energy, it is even net positive. That’s right, the combined solar production from the acres of solar panels actually exceeds the amount of electricity used by the complex.
While this is all well and good, a village can not be a village if it is just residences. Obviously, the architects thought of this and incorporated spaces that were to be filled with convenience stores, coffee shops and the like. If you happened to attend the Sacramento City College extension and live in West Village, these stores would ensure that you would never have to leave the comfort of your resort-style housing. But alas, for the past two years, residents have been forced to seek their convenience store nourishment by actually leaving the complex!
Until about three weeks ago, all this store space was vacant and filled to the brim with cardboard boxes. At long last, the first sign has been hung for the HUB, a coffee shop and eatery that will be the first of (hopefully) many shops to grace the storefronts of our housing paradise.
Now, it’s great that a store has finally opened, but shouldn’t it have taken a little less than two years for this to happen? Couldn’t West Village have focused their energy on these stores instead of buying 10 iPads for the leasing office? Maybe … But those iPads are just so darn pretty!
We want a store where we can buy sunscreen before lounging at our two pools. We want a store that sells 600-thread count Egyptian cotton towels to wrap ourselves in after hot tubbing.
But seriously, it would have been great to have a coffee shop nearby last year when construction was waking us up every day at 8 a.m. This coffee place should also stay open 24 hours a day, so that residents are not relegated to buying overpriced energy drinks from the vending machine in the 24-hour, well-stocked gym.
We look forward to seeing what other amenities the famed West Village will soon be offering. Maybe when our grandchildren live there, they will have added in a store to buy test supplies.
