By admin Nearly a decade after a developer acquired the former Coca-Cola bottling plant on Stockton Boulevard, construction is underway, and the firm plans to convert the former plant into a Marriott hotel.
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The plant, built in 1936 and shuttered in 2013, has sat vacant since. When Leeland Properties acquired the site in 2017, little had changed. The building was still filled with bottling equipment and manuals for the machinery.
“It looked like all the employees just got up, went to lunch, and never came back,” said Terence Lee, the firm’s vice president.
Leeland Properties closed on a loan to finance construction in July. The firm had completed some initial work on the property three or four years ago, including the demolition of the building’s interior, and the buildout of utility connections and curbs and gutters. Last month, crews began the last phase of construction, slated for completion in early 2028.
The result will be a 146-room hotel, with a view of UC Davis’ expansive medical complex across the boulevard. The facade of the original bottling plant will be preserved and most of the hotel’s public areas will be within that original, two-story structure, like a library, bar and restaurant, said Daniel Osborne, senior project architect with Stanton Architecture. Behind it, a new, five-story structure will contain the lobby, gym and guest rooms.
‘Temperamental’ financing
The plant was built in 1936 for approximately $27,500 near the former state fairgrounds, replacing a former bottling plant a mile south on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The Coca-Cola Bottling Co. boasted that the new facility had capacity “to produce a bottle of Coca-Cola for every person in Sacramento every day.”
The plant thrived over the decades. By 2007, after 80 years in business, the Sacramento Coca-Cola Bottling Co. had become the beverage giant’s ninth-largest bottler, with about 475 employees in Sacramento and Modesto, and $93.5 million in annual revenues, the Bee reported at the time.
But in 2013, Coca-Cola acquired the bottling operations from the Sellers family, who had owned it since its inception. Two months later, the company announced plans to shutter the site, after determining it had an excess of production in the region.
When Leeland Properties bought the site in 2017, the company initially planned to build a medical office building. But as UC Davis doubled down on its campus across the boulevard with plans for the $1.15 billion Aggie Square project, they realized there would be a need for a hotel for visiting healthcare workers, as well as families with loved ones receiving treatment at UC Davis Medical Center.
They settled on the Marriott Element brand, a mix of traditional and extended-stay rooms with connected common spaces, which could cater to visitors coming to downtown concerts and festivals, but would also serve visiting medical staff and patients’ families.
As other hotel developers in Sacramento have found, Lee said, “the financing market was difficult for a long time.”
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Local hospitality experts argue that Sacramento — which has just 3,125 hotel rooms between the waterfront and Alhambra Boulevard — needs a far larger inventory. The city today is excluded from hosting hundreds of religious, political, labor, sports and industry events each year due to lack of hotel beds. But mounting construction costs and interest rates have challenged development of several of the projects proposed in recent years.
“This is not exclusive to Sacramento,” said Chris Cormier, president and CEO of Tricorp Group, the project’s general contractor. “But … the financing for hotels can be pretty temperamental.”
Financing, along with bureaucratic hurdles the city has attempted to address, are often the largest barriers for developments like the Stockton Boulevard hotel, said Councilmember Caity Maple.
“I really applaud the developers for seeing it through,” Maple said. “Those are not easy projects.”
Good stewards
The hotel project sits near the north end of the Stockton Boulevard corridor, the onetime path of the streetcar between Sacramento and Stockton.
The street was separated from the central city as the surrounding freeways were built, and the completion of Highway 99 in 1961 replaced Stockton Boulevard as the main route between the two cities, diverting traffic away from the boulevard, but simultaneously setting it up to become a high-speed bypass to the freeway. Maple described it as one of the city’s least safe corridors for pedestrians and cyclists.
The city in 2024 adopted a wide-ranging plan to guide economic development and traffic safety improvements on Stockton Boulevard.
The hotel development will be a “transformational investment,” Frank Louie, executive director of the Stockton Boulevard Partnership, said in an email. It serves as an indicator, he said, that the area is attracting more long-term investors.
Last year UC Davis opened the first phase of the Aggie Square project. About two miles south, an affordable housing complex opened last month at the site of a former motel. South of that, WellSpace Health broke ground in April on a planned medical campus in a long-vacant office complex.
Lee said Leeland Properties intends to own the hotel site for the long-term.
“I think the future is bright,” Lee said. “We’re trying to be good stewards of the property and the building, and we hope to build something that everybody can be proud of.”
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This story was originally published August 8, 2026 at 6:00 AM.