New Shopping Area(s) (San Francisco, Sacramento: fit in, section 8, apartments)

[zen_klown]

Originally Posted by NewToCA

You have a good point about the mixed income ordinances, it certainly is a factor that can limit the per capita income around Sac County developments. Perhaps there are a couple of ways to compensate for this though. One idea could be to just go with a bit higher density, offsetting the lower income with a higher volume of folks per trade area. Another would be "creative" processes for meeting mixed income ordinances. Such an idea could be to allow a developer to build a lower % of units, say 5% in their development, and as compensation pay a fixed amount per unit built into a fund to be used for allowing low interest loans to renovate existing affordable housing.

But I agree, it needs to be factored into how to constructively develop a viable downtown core.

I am not sure additional density of the poor is the solution.

Here is listing by zip code of the most dense neighborhoods in Sacramento and a map of zipcodes so you can see where those neighborhoods are.

A lot of the more economically distressed neighborhoods already are pretty dense. Foothill farms is the most dense zip in the region. 95824 is just South of Oak Park, another not so wealthy neighborhood. More significantly, those areas are already having problems supporting the existing stock of retail in there areas. You have lots of empty store fronts in those neighborhoods or just lots of thriftstores because those both serve the neighborhood and thrive in areas with cheap rent.

Adding more of these types of folks to your community isn't going to be doing much to strengthen the downtown shopping core. When the folks in these neighborhoods are going shopping generally its either to Kmart or Walmart, not to the mall downtown.

City Ranks - Population Density Mashup

Click for a Zip Code Boundary Map.


As to your creative financing solution. It limits the effect of the mixed income ordinance. But if you aren't going to build new low income housing with it, why have it all?

[wburg]

Originally Posted by zen_klown

In the existing stock of housing.

If there was enough affordable housing, there wouldn't be a need for a mixed-income ordinance. And what if there is no existing stock of housing, as in new growth areas?

[zen_klown]

Originally Posted by wburg

If there was enough affordable housing, there wouldn't be a need for a mixed-income ordinance. And what if there is no existing stock of housing, as in new growth areas?

When the government got in the business of providing free cheese, people lined up to take it. Whenever the government mandates that something should be provided for less than cost, you will find a group eager to take the government up on that offer. In Venezuela gasoline is priced at 12 cents a gallon and there are shortages for that too. Does the strong demand for cheap gasoline in Venezuela mean that they need to do more oil drilling in Venezuela because the demand is so great for $.12 cent a gallon gas? Or does it just mean that the item is just mispriced by a poor government policy?

The existing group of people in the region will live in the existing housing stock in this region. If you impose a building moratorium, things here won't change much at all. The primary industry will still be government.

The only issue is under what circumstances should we permit growth at all?

New growth with a mixed income ordinance means more areas like Natomas. The effect is going to turn this region into another Stockton. In the Natomas plan, Natomas was supposed to land a fortune 500 company that isn't going to happen. The schools out there are too medicore. Look at what businesses Natomas has attracted. It has a school to train people to drive and repair tractor trailers. It has a distribution center for Raley's, Coke and Java City. El Mexicano brand of Mexican Foods has a regional office there as well.

These relatively low skill low education jobs are going out there because in that area is a workforce well suited for that type of low skill low education employment.

Elk Grove is similiarly bad. For a while it had JVC and Apple, but Apple shut down the manufacturing plant while leaving the call center. Last I heard the JVC plant was going to be turned into a gym. Neither a call center nor a gym are high paying employers.

These areas are lacking knowledge work.

In the big picture what is happening is the best and brightest in this region are moving away when they go to college and fail to return. A lot of these folks are moving to places where you can find knowledge work like in coastal California.

At the same time, as Berkeley and Oakland gentrify, the less educated from the Bay area are moving here because we are building a lot of housing for those type of folks here.

In terms of parental educational attainment the demographics for Natomas High are already worse than the demographics for Cordova or Foothill High.

2007 API Growth School Report

2007 API Growth School Report

2007 API Growth School Report

Does this region need more neighborhoods that look like Rancho Cordova or Foothill Farms?

If we changed the type of neighborhoods that we build we could also change the types of employers that we attract. When the area was building nice suburbs the region was also able to attract employers like Intel and HP.

But Sacramento doesn't seem to be interested or able to build nice suburbs anymore.

Look at the educational attainment of the neighborhoods in Palo Alto.

2007 API Growth School Report

2007 API Growth School Report

Why Palo Alto is able to attract these really high paying employers is that it has an incredibly well educated work force.

Mixed income ordinances will ensure that this region will never create neighborhoods that look like that. But it will also ensure that we never have employers like that region either.

Growth for the sake of growth seems silly. This region isn't building freeways because of air quality concerns and most trips in this region aren't being done by mass transit. More growth in this region basically just means more traffic and congestion. If the new growth isn't going to improve our communities by adding nicer communities or better employment prospects why permit it at all?

[wburg]

Am I to understand that a growth moratorium would not, in your opinion, constitute "social engineering"?

[zen_klown]

The issue no longer is about whether to engage in social engineering or not to engage in social engineering. When this community adopted mixed income ordinances it made the decision to engage in social engineering. When the feds decided for air quality reasons to limit the construction of freeways, again more social engineering. In this region, the planning process the laying out of the various community plans is all social engineering.

Right now the primary beneficiaries of our social engineering is the Tsakopoulos family and the politicians that they back. They own the land and smart growth is an effective form of greenwashing that allows them to squeeze more lots into a given amount of land without having to contribute as much for infrastructure. That the permitting process reduces but does not eliminate the supply of buildable lots makes their inventory of land even more valuable.

But the question is what is the result of this social engineering? Will this social engineering make the place better for the existing residents? When the police are being redeployed from the rest of Sacramento to Natomas, did the addition of Natomas make the city of Sacramento a better place to live than if Natomas was just left as rice fields? As traffic from all of the homes in Natomas congests the freeways, did the addition of Natomas make the region a better place to live? Is the Sacramento region really better off because it beat out Stockton for the truck driving school and all of the warehousing and distribution centers that it managed to bring into Natomas? I would rather have the rice fields.

When you keep on adding addtional poor people to the region, how does that help the ability of the existing poor people in the region to better themselves?

When you go out to Roseville and you walk through the Galleria or the Fountains and you compare that with how Roseville used to be a railroad town with a bunch of biker bars and tattoo parlours and, you know why they permitted all of that growth. When you see the new jobs they brought into Roseville, where people can get paid to do interesting work in places like HP, you know why they permitted the growth.

But when you drive through Natomas, aren't you kind of wondering why did they do that?

A building moratorium would preserve our existing quality of life. Traffic wouldn't be getting worse, and air quality would improve. Open space would be preserved and the natural enviroment would be protected. There would be no new construction in floodplains because there would be no new construction.

If growth isn't going to improve the quality of living in your region, why permit it?

[wburg]

Rather than explain in detail, I'll refer you to a paper by Harvey Molotch:

The City as a Growth Machine - Harvey Molotch

I'm not saying I agree with it, but it's a persuasive theory: cities build new-growth areas to pay for services without raising property taxes, but eventually they reach the point of diminishing returns. Natomas is pretty much at that point.

Why Roseville looks like Roseville:
Suburban counties near an urban center slough off their social costs onto the nearest large municipality, because while a suburban county has no requirement to provide social services or low-income housing, big cities can't get around those requirements. Roseville (and Placer County in general) doesn't have a homeless shelter, or really any social services for anyone over the age of 18: once you're an adult, their idea of social service is a one-way ride to Sacramento and a kick out the door at Loaves & Fishes.

On the flip side, if Sacramento doesn't provide any low-income housing, people do what they do in Elk Grove (which also doesn't provide low-income housing): they overcrowd. Elk Grove developers built big expensive single-family homes on the assumption that poor people would never be able to afford them, but instead four or five families combine their income and move into one big house. Now, it wouldn't be hard to put a 4-5 unit apartment complex in the same space as a big house, with separate bathrooms, parking areas, and bedrooms. That's density, which isn't the same as overcrowding. Instead, those 4-5 families have a bedroom each, share 1-2 bathrooms, and pile their 4-5 cars (because suburban public transit is so worthless) minimum into a garage/driveway intended for 2 cars. Or, failing that, you see a dramatic increase in homelessness. Sure, we already have plenty of homeless, partially because other surrounding counties do the same "dumping" trick as Placer County, but if we didn't have some quantity of low-income housing we'd have even more.

Policies that are intended to designate certain neighborhoods as "Rich Only" don't work. You see this happening in Elk Grove now, but you'll see it in Roseville as soon as there is enough demand for service workers.

You seem to assume that we can somehow do without the non-wealthy: not just poor people, not just people on welfare, but middle managers and service workers and blue-collar folks in general, even though they make up the majority of the population. Or, at the very least, we can shuffle them off into exclusively-poor ghettoes where their misery can be concentrated and the wealthy can pretend it doesn't exist. It seems like you don't have any problem with "social engineering" as long as you don't have to look at people who aren't rich. That's a really elitist idea.

[zen_klown]

First factually what you are saying is just wrong on a number of fronts.

The City of Elk Grove does have a low income housing program. Since at least 2004 it has been a member of the Sacramento regional compact on affordible housing.

City of Elk Grove Planning :: Affordable Housing
Sacramento Housing Alliance | Inclusionary Guide

But the theory propounded by Harvey Molotch is also contradicted by the emperical evidence. Incomes in the bay area where people are better educated are also much wealthier. Four of the top 5 counties in the state measured by income tax return are all clustered in the bay area. Of the top 10 counties, 7 are from the bay area. There are only 9 counties in the bay area.

California Income by County

Why is the bay area doing so much better then the rest of the state? The bay area isn't exempt from prop 13. But it does have a significantly better educated population. The better educated folks attract the better paying employers. Incomes are higher.

What depresses incomes in the valley and in rural areas is the proponderence of low paying low skill work. In urban areas where the population isn't very educated, people earn low wages. Both Santa Clara and Los Angeles County are attracting lots of immigrants. But the immigrants in LA are poorly educated folks leaving agricultural area of Mexico and central america. In Santa Clara, the immigrants are very highly educated from places like India, Taiwan and the rest of the world. The bay area overall is both better educated and wealthier than Southern California.

The cities and countries that adopt policies to attract the wealthy get wealthier. Like the bay area, Vancouver BC has been very successful in attracting the educated from Asia.

The places that suffer from a brain drain stay poor. A big part of the problem Pittsburg, Detroit and the rust belt cities of the midwest have is that smart people leave when they finish college. A big part of the reason the bay area is so wealthy is that its good at attracting the smart people from the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

El Dorado County and Placer County figured out how to do something that rest of the Valley wasn't able to do. It figured out how to build communties that would attract and retain the educated. The reason Bakersfield and Fresno were campaigning so hard for a UC campus is those cities are among the least educated in the California and in the country.

Look at the unemployment rates for the valley towns that haven't been able to attract the knowledge work. There are reasons these towns were hit so hard by meth.

http://www.calmis.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/frsn$pds.pdf
http://www.calmis.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/bake$pds.pdf
http://www.calmis.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/yuba$pds.pdf
http://www.calmis.ca.gov/file/lfmonth/stoc$pds.pdf

HP and Intel never bothered to expand into Fresno or Bakersfield despite those areas have significantly lower priced housing, because they could not find the educated workforce. If you look at where they are expanding its places like Boise, Austin and Colorado Springs. Places where they find both cheaper housing for there employees and pockets of highly educated work forces.

Yuba City is another valley town that relies and government work(AFB), agricultural work and shipping and logisitcs. Its also has a major structural unemployment problem. To the extent that the Sacramento region fails to attract the knowledge work the more the region will look like the other cities in the valley that have failed to attract the knowledge work.

If you need to label me an elitest because I don't want this area to suffer the problems that Fresno and Bakersfield are suffering so be it. I am an elistist.

I really don't think that the purpose of new growth in this area should be to graft another Stockton into this region. I would rather graft another Roseville.
I see nothing wrong with demanding a better quality of life as a condition of new growth. But to me growth for growths sake is silly. What matters is the quality of life for the people in your region. If growth helps to bring down unemployment and makes the region wealthier then new growth might be a good idea. But if its just creating a bigger region while crime goes up and infrastructure gets overburdened, I don't think that type of new growth this region needs.

[NewToCA]

BTW, Roseville, where the shopping centers mentioned in the original posting are located, has an affordable housing program with specific units listed (second link below):

The City of Roseville has been assisting the development of new housing that is affordable for its low and middle income families since the early 1980's. The City has provided its assistance in a variety of ways and in return required a certain portion of housing units to be affordable to a specific income group. The City has established a 10 percent affordable housing goal in an effort to create a partnership with the development and business communities in providing housing for low to middle income families.

The Affordable Housing Development Agreements (AHDA) are the mechanisms by which affordable units are identified. The AHDA requires affordability be maintained for a specific time period. City staff monitors each AHDA project on an annual basis to ensure compliance and reports its findings to the City Council during a public hearing.


City of Roseville, California - Affordable Housing Policy

http://www.roseville.ca.us/civica/fi...ID=12194#page=

[wburg]

Wow, NTC, thanks for the info! I was unaware that they had such a policy. I find it interesting that the city lists "The Gathering Inn" on its homeless-resources page: that is a technically-illegal homeless shelter (the city of Roseville doesn't want any homeless shelters) run in semi-underground fashion by several Roseville churches. I guess they figure if they can pretend it doesn't exist they don't mind?

Why...it's almost as though affordable housing didn't necessarily mean all of the horrible things that zen_klown assures us that it means!

[NewToCA]

Originally Posted by wburg

Wow, NTC, thanks for the info! I was unaware that they had such a policy. I find it interesting that the city lists "The Gathering Inn" on its homeless-resources page: that is a technically-illegal homeless shelter (the city of Roseville doesn't want any homeless shelters) run in semi-underground fashion by several Roseville churches. I guess they figure if they can pretend it doesn't exist they don't mind?

Why...it's almost as though affordable housing didn't necessarily mean all of the horrible things that zen_klown assures us that it means!

In light of this information, what do you think it means about the potential for commercial downtown development, without be a tradeoff with what exist in Roseville?