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There are a couple of issues in this thread that are treated equivalently* in this thread that aren't all that equivalent. There is widespread disparities in the number of poor people in different communities. Depending on what policies an area implements, it might be able to attract wealthy people, it might drive them out or it might attract poor people.
Most poor and rich people are rational. They respond to price incentives. There are policy choices a region can make to influence how many of one or both of these groups a region has.
A lot of the homeless people aren't or are only sometimes rational. If you are mentally ill because of something organic, because of too much drugs or because your a vet with PTSD , you probably are going to say in your town even if you loose your job, your health care and your house. Irrational people don't really respond to price signals. If you look at the data, most of the homeless has been in the communities they are homeless for both the past 5 years and often for most of their life. This is a population that really isn't moving around much.
This population is extremely expensive to deal with because too many of them lack capacity to function very well in any system. The big issue is will they be dealt with by the mental health system or the criminal justice system. If someone is ripping off all of there clothes they probably will get sent to the psych hospital, but if they rip off all of there clothes and throw a rock through a car windshield, they might be sent to the psych ward in the jail. I have heard estimates that up to 25% of the people in the criminal justice system have mental illnesses. In either case they are expensive to deal with assuming you deal with them. Right now we ration care to this population. The segment of the mentally ill that has family support and is persistent to make the system work for there family member, often can make the mental health system seem like it could function. But there is a huge number of people that the falling through the system, a lot of these people are on the streets. Budget wise there is only so many tax dollars and people want other things from their government, better schools, police, fixing potholes and powerful people can push other items to the agenda like new arenas for sports teams or redeveloping land near land owned by powerful people.
If we expended more money on government, we could have fewer criminals on the street, we could have better schools, we could have less congested freeways and fewer homeless people on the street. But there are diminishing returns issues with all of these programs. You may have to spend as much addressing the needs of the last 10% of the problem as you spent on the first 90%. If you look at all of these issues we have never built out enough freeways to eliminate congestion and we probably won't do it in my lifetime and I doubt we will eliminate homelessness either for the same reasons.
But poor people do respond to price signals. If you look nationwide, there is a wide disparity in incomes both in cities and regions. Overall the coastal areas of the state are* much wealthier than inland parts of California. SF County is currently about 3 times wealthier than Imperial County and assuming Caltrans projections are correct, by 2030, it will be 4 times wealthier than Imperial County.
When the Hmong were brought over to this country in the various refugee programs, originally the Hmong refugees were much more spread out across the country. Today, the Hmong are in the Central Valley, including Sacramento and Fresno and there is a large Hmong community in Minneapolis. If you look at patterns of immigration, it turns out the immigrants cluster. Its not just that lots of hispanics are moving to the US from Mexico. Often its people from the same villages in Mexico moving into the same Mexican barrios in southern California. How immigrants decide where to live is they talk to there friends and family members who have crossed the border. If someone is saying that Stockton Blvd in Sacramento is a great place to live and someone else in Colorado is having problems finding work, the immigrants will move to Stockton Blvd and not Colorado and the immigrant in Colorado might move to Stockton Blvd as well.
Its not just foreign immigrants who move around. The domestic poor works the same way. The great migration of African Americans from the South to places like Chicago and other cities in the North functioned the same way. A similiar pattern was at work with the Okies after the dustbowl. More modernly after Hurricane Katrina happened, you saw again similiar clustered migration patterns.
Lastly the well educated are mobile. The reason the bay area and Washington DC regions are wealthier than other parts of the country is that these regions are much better educated. But these reasons aren't better educated because these regions have historically done an outstanding job of educating their own populations. The schools in Washington DC proper are some of the most dysfunctional in the country. These regions are highly educated because they managed to attract lots of educated people from outside of these region to move to their communities. The well educated immigrants are among the most mobile groups in America. The Indian engineers from IIT came to this country primarily for the employment opportunities and they will move to any location in this country that offers them the best employment choices (perhaps the Silicon Valley, perhaps Boston, perhaps somewhere else).
Washington DC, NYC, SF are all regions that have managed to be very successful while having some of the highest taxes and costs of doing business in the country. But these regions also ofter very high levels of amenities.
But high levels of taxes with low levels of amenities creates civic death spirals. Detroit has less than half the population that it had in 1970. Currently its trying to sustain the infrastructure of a city of 2 million with a population closer to 900k. So taxes in Detroit are quite high. But it doesn't have the money to fund the amenities that make urban life appealing to the wealthy and middle class. The result is a brain drain. The well educated who can flee do flee. The only people left in Detroit are those people too poor to flee Detroit.
For a long time the Central Valley has a had a problem with a brain drain. A large part of the talented in this region leave for the coast or elsewhere. Roseville and then Folsom and later Elk Grove all tried to follow a strategy of being a more affordable version of Santa Clara County. Build bigger homes in newer areas with good schools. Approve large lots which mean larger homes which are unaffordable to the poor. Use the new growth to attract automalls and new malls and use the taxes from that to fund efforts to recruit companies in the bay area having trouble finding affordable high quality housing in areas with goods to come to there respective communities. When the region was following that strategy it was successful in attracting both knowledge workers and reversing the general central valley brain drain. All of these regions were attracting knowledge employers like Apple, Intel, HP, JVC etc.
But the Sacramento Blueprint has probably killed that strategy. The Sac Blueprint was based upon the Natomas plan. The Sac Blueprint is requiring smaller lots and more mixed income neighborhoods. In the future this region is going to build more places that look like Natomas. If you look at Natomas its been more of a cheaper version of Vallejo. The increased number of renters means that schools aren't very good. As a result the area never attracted high tech firms, but distributorships for Coke, Raley's etc instead.
In the Sac Blueprint, the City and County of Sacramento basically teamed up against the new cities in the region and against Placer and El Dorado Counties. They were afraid that their malls and auto sales were being taken away from them meaning that they would be stuck with the responsibility of paying for the poor people in their regions but not the tax base to cover the cost of services to these populations.
If you look at the one strategy that brings back older neighborhoods its strict growth control. The stricter the better. If this region put a cap of 3000 new units a year going forward, the people who couldn't find new homes would instead fix up older homes. In the bay area, the need to preserve existing rent controlled units is one of the factors that significantly prevents new construction. But because construction is so limited, people don't have the option of moving into new areas. Instead they gentrify older areas. This is one of the reasons former industrial neighborhoods like North Beach turned around in the past and why neighborhoods like West Berkeley are turning around today.
Absent growth controls with bite, I don't see anything capable of turning around N. Highlands, Meadowview, Del Paso Heights, South Sac, Bryte, Brodrick or Oak Park. Employment in the region continues to diffuse to the suburbs.
Growth control preserves quality of life. More people in your region, means more people on your freeways and more traffic on your streets. Growth control also prices out a lot of people that the region might be better without. If the region was more expensive, I doubt the Hmong would have settled here. That also means a lot of the Asian gangs they have brought to this region also wouldn't be here.
If new growth in this region just means more areas that look like Natomas, why permit it? If new growth isn't making your region better why allow it? Especially when no growth might make existing neighborhoods much nicer.
How is the air quality in Sacramento getting worse when it was just published that the air quality has improved in the past 10 years. I swear some people just say things like this just to make a scene. How about some facts?
In the Sacramento region, you have pollution from two sources. You have the locally derived pollution from the people living here plus you have the pollution air from the bay area brought in by the Delta breeze. Remember air in Sacramento is bad in the summertime because the heat cooks the low level ozone. In the winter time when the tule fog comes, the region gets an inversion layer which again traps pollution in.
Uh we know the air is polluted, and we know where it comes from and we know how the air gets trapped. You are not saying anything that people do not already know. You should use the search feature provided, air quality is discussed here: State of the Air 2009 report released
NorCal Dude, I am not really following your point. If the particulate pollution is the reason the region is getting on top ten lists for bad air, why is ozone levels germane to this discussion?
IF the air quality is getting better, than the improvement must be marginal at best beyond what any reasonable person would notice.
Two Sundays ago, the "haze" was so bad that the brownish, grey gunk completely eliminated any view of the foothills to the east and the coastal range to the west. The view to downtown became a still, murky brown giving our aesthetically challenged skyline an even more apocolyptic feel.
In the fall, when the wind kicks up to finally push the muck out of the valley, the beloved crop burning begins. You can see waves of fine smoke billow into parts of the city accompanied by a powerful, burning stench that waters the eyes and stings the throat.
Bottom line, you just can't win in this city when it comes to the air quality.
Crop burning? Wasn't that banned years ago? I remember the smoke from it when I was a kid but I haven't seen nor smelled it in many, many years.
From the CA Air Resources Board, "The Connelly-Areias-Chandler Rice Straw Burning Reduction Act of 1991 mandates that rice straw burning in the Sacramento Valley be phased down starting in 1992 and, beginning in September 2001, allowed only under specified conditions for disease control."
IF the air quality is getting better, than the improvement must be marginal at best beyond what any reasonable person would notice.
Two Sundays ago, the "haze" was so bad that the brownish, grey gunk completely eliminated any view of the foothills to the east and the coastal range to the west. The view to downtown became a still, murky brown giving our aesthetically challenged skyline an even more apocolyptic feel.
In the fall, when the wind kicks up to finally push the muck out of the valley, the beloved crop burning begins. You can see waves of fine smoke billow into parts of the city accompanied by a powerful, burning stench that waters the eyes and stings the throat.
Bottom line, you just can't win in this city when it comes to the air quality.
Apocolyptic feel. I liked that.
I thought I was hard core because I grew up in Butte County and had exposure (and immunity) to the worst antigens. Yet in the last 5 years or so I seemed to have developed allergies for the first time in Sacramento. There is just not a moment I'm without post-nasal drip.
The air quality in Butte County is about the same as it is in Sacramento. Furthermore, the breeze coming in from the Delta pushes the smog out of much of the Sacramento area quite often.
Your allergies are probably due to developing allergies as you get older, living near people who like to blow the fine particulates that fall into the air with leafblowers, and possibly living near a source of specific allergens you are allergic to.
I've never really been troubled with allergies, with the exception of mold/mildew. Japanese Privets always gave me allergies. As long as I stay away from them I'm ok. My big problem is people have become obsessed with bringing out the leafblowers everytime they see a few leaves on the sidewalk, then blow all the dust, pollen, and mold spores into the air.
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