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Specifically the Marysville Blvd and Rio Linda Blvd corridors in Del Paso Height. I had the (unfortunate) pleasure of driving though this area and sheesh, it looks like there hasn't been a dime of private or public investment in this area for the last 20 years. This has to be Sacramento's worst case of urban decay I have ever seen. In another 20 years this area will start looking like Detroit.
South Sacramento is a ghetto but at least there is actual investment in the area and it still has plenty of (low end) shopping and dining. Things are still being built in this area all time time. The area is still very active. Polar opposite to Del Paso Heights which seems to have long been dead and is void of any activities besides prostitution.
Specifically the Marysville Blvd and Rio Linda Blvd corridors in Del Paso Height. I had the (unfortunate) pleasure of driving though this area and sheesh, it looks like there hasn't been a dime of private or public investment in this area for the last 20 years. This has to be Sacramento's worst case of urban decay I have ever seen. In another 20 years this area will start looking like Detroit.
South Sacramento is a ghetto but at least there is actual investment in the area and it still has plenty of (low end) shopping and dining. Things are still being built in this area all time time. The area is still very active. Polar opposite to Del Paso Heights which seems to have long been dead and is void of any activities besides prostitution.
That area would really look kind of neat if it were fixed up too.
The problem with that area has a lot to do with slumlords and a city government that allows it to go on to the point of encouraging decay. The area has become one of cheap investment for slumlords. Their niche in the rental market is that of renting to people who have so many problems nobody with any amount of ethics would rent to them. Basically, they put a place up for rent, charge an application fee, pocket the money for the background check because their renter's backgrounds don't matter. They don't fix anything, and allow their properties to just fall apart to the point they will have to be bulldozed at some point, thus the odd vacant lots scattered throughout the area. Ten years ago there were pockets of nice areas up there, but those people couldn't take it anymore, sold and moved elsewhere.
I think some of it is serendipity and some of it is geography.
Del Paso Heights is fairly isolated. The American River, Bus 80 and the railroad tracks, Arcade Creek, the Natomas drain and McClellan act as huge barriers that separated Del Paso Heights from both the rest of the region. The need to build expensive bridges over the rivers, freeways and rail road tracks limited the number of roads into Del Paso Heights and its quite difficult to get around McClellan.
Del Paso Heights has very little through traffic of non-residents. So when the area got poor, the retail in that area couldn't really rely on people out of the area cutting through Del Paso Heights as a source of traffic and customers.
South Sac is better connected to the rest of the region. As Elk Grove has grown, some people choose to bypass traffic on 99 by driving part of the way on Stockton Blvd. That helps some. There isn't much retail in the Pocket area, so when those people need to shop, some of that shopping is done in South Sac. That also helps.
Next there is serendipity. As a regions Asian population grew, there was a need for retail and restaurants catering to the special needs of the Asian population. That retail probably started on Stockton Blvd because the rent was cheap, but as it expanded, it grew the market. The trading area for the Asian shops in South Sac isn't just the local asian population in South Sac, but the Asian population in the entire region.
That meant that even though S. Sac is poor, its drawing on the Asian communities in neighborhoods like Folsom and Gold River who make the drive to Stockton Blvd once or twice a month to find stuff that they can't find at the Raleys in their own neighborhoods.
Lastly, no political juice. When it comes to redevelopment government has the potential to be a big player. The city subsidized the construction of a new Safeway downtown. Most of the projects developments downtown subsidies from various government sources like the Redevelopment agency, CADA, etc and even the state and feds.
If Del Paso Heights was better organized, a lot of those funds probably more properly should have gone to the more destitute Del Paso Heights. But because Del Paso Heights doesn't deliver the votes, the developers are able to channel the redevelopment funds downtown. A big reason Kevin Johnson carried Del Paso Heights was the hope/assumption that KJ would deliver more redevelopment funds to Del Paso Heights than Heather Fargo did.
It's the problem of an area (Sacramento) that has high-priced housing in relation to income. Low income people keep getting pushed down to worse and worse areas where there is little business investment.
I see it in old Rancho Cordova where I live. With the exception of the new development off of Zinfadel/International, there are no malls, no decent restaurants, not even any decent strip centers. I worry that old Rancho is going to evolve into a Del Paso area over a period of years and for the same reasons. It's scary.
Calling that area "urban decay" depends on a very, very loose definition of "urban." Del Paso Heights was built as an "agri-burb" of the city of North Sacramento (at the time, its own incorporated city) based on small (1-5 acre) plots where working people could farm part-time and work in the city (thanks to the electric commuter train that ran to downtown Sacramento.) As the electric commuter trains were phased out (basically, after the real estate developers stopped paying subsidies to the train company) cars were becoming more attainable, and there were important auto routes through North Sacramento and Del Paso Heights that supported the community. The wartime growth of McClellan AFB also spurred some growth in Del Paso, encouraging some of those small-lot farmers to subdivide their 5-acre parcels into 20 1/4 acre parcels for base employees.
When Highway 160 replaced Del Paso Boulevard as the main route out of Sacramento, Del Paso Boulevard dried up and pretty much blew away: the semi-abandoned and dilapidated buildings there were built to serve motorists along Highway 40 on their way to the Sierras or the Bay Area, or on the way to Marysville/Yuba City and points north.
In the World War II and postwar era, North Sacramento gained more of an African American population, both from AFB employees and an exodus from the old West End. Most suburbs were still racially restricted until the late 1960s, and a lot of the white residents of North Sac/Del Paso moved out to the newer, white suburbs. Because the Federal Housing Administration's policies still discouraged investment in non-white neighborhoods (policies that stayed in place until the early 1970s), banks stopped lending to property owners in the community, property values plummeted, and the city of North Sacramento went broke. They were annexed by the city of Sacramento in the mid-sixties.
All of this background is still relevant today because it explains why North Sacramento/Del Paso looks the way it does. It was never an "urban" center, other than its brief status as a small suburban city, and always intended as a satellite of Sacramento.
In the past couple decades, there have been efforts to "revitalize" North Sacramento, mostly via investment along Del Paso Boulevard and top-down efforts to gentrify the neighborhood. The problem is that top-down gentrification efforts generally do not work. The other problem is that money for community reinvestment is not unlimited--only a certain number of projects can be funded, and, as edwardius mentioned, the neighborhood has little political pull compared to the central city. The business interests that push for things like redevelopment are more interested in promoting such efforts near their downtown offices than in outlying neighborhoods.
Sorry wburg I don't really know the history of Del Paso Heights but driving through that area, it doesn't look like it was ever used for farming. Most of the lots look very small/dense (densely laid out anyway... most of the stuff is abandoned now). It does look like it was build up as a satellite city but abandoned 50-60 years ago. Just like some areas of Detroit.
BTW I'm not really talking about the Del Paso Blvd corridor (North Sac), that's not as bad, I'm talking about deeper in and closer to I-80 (Marysville and Rio Linda Blvd corridors).
I'm not sure I completely buy your white flight argument on why the area looks like way it does. Most of South Sac is a white flight area as is Oak Park to a lesser extent. Both areas look to be in way better shape. I'd argue South Sac is orders of magnitude better than Del Paso Heights and it's universally considered a ghetto.
To me it looks like it was a very continuous and deliberate decision not to invest in that area and to let it rot.
North Natomas doesn't look much like farmland anymore either, and it was farmland ten years ago. If you go beyond I-80 into Robla, Rio Linda and Elverta, there is still a bit of farming acreage up that way.
South Sacramento didn't become subject to white flight until much later, after racial covenants were made illegal and nonwhites could buy land there. The presence of the mall and the auto businesses on Florin Road also gave south Sacramento a longer lifespan before problems started to emerge.
In the case of Oak Park, it looks different because it is older than Del Paso Heights and was built up more like a city--thus, the urban fabric of the neighborhood, while damaged, was stronger to begin with. That's one important reason why Oak Park will probably be the next part of Sacramento to gentrify, at least to some extent.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there seemed to have been a fairly valiant effort to turn Del Paso Heights into a bit of an art mecca some years ago (a decade or so?) with galleries, small cafes, street art, etc. It seemed to be working for a short while and then crashed. I attributed the crash to a combination of lack of interest and lack of funding. I don't think it drew the public as some had hoped it would. Everything that went in during that period had left by the time we moved east. Not even the Garden Highway extension helped. More's the pity! Now it seems just a switching station from light rail to bus service.
Curmudgeon you're thinking of Del Paso Blvd. which is not Del Paso Heights. Del Paso Blvd. is North Sacramento or "Old North Sacramento". Yes, there is/was a cool art scene.
The way is see it, the art/music scene in Sacramento was more spread out nearly evenly between Downtown, Midtown, Oak Park, North Sac, the area around Sac State, among other places. Then around 2003, the center of gravity shifted so heavily into Midtown, that is sort of drained the North Sac, Downtown and Oak Park areas a bit. Now everything happens in Midtown. Galleries pulled up out of Del Paso and Broadway and moved to Midtown because no one needed/wanted to head that way. Even this month, Sac Comedy spot moved from Broadway to Midtown. However, the tide seems to be slowly shifting back to Del Paso a small bit.(News and Review just moved from Midtown to Del Paso Blvd. These are just my anecdotal observations.
(sorry for the side track)
As for Del Paso Heights, yeah it's bad and it probably won't get better anytime soon. It's only chance actually is if Old North Sac and the Swanson area improve greatly, then at least Del Paso Heights would be near something cool. Right now it's like 4 bad neighborhoods deep.
I like Edwarius's reasoning why South Sac is doing much better: the location is one of the best and there is actually some destinations. North Sac in general is a forgotten corner of the region. People drive around it on the freeways and there is no reason to go there.
Curmudgeon you're thinking of Del Paso Blvd. which is not Del Paso Heights. Del Paso Blvd. is North Sacramento or "Old North Sacramento". Yes, there is/was a cool art scene.
Ah, you're right. How quickly we forget. It will be interesting in a year or so to visit and see what other changes have taken place.
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