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Old 11-14-2012, 06:16 PM
 
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While developers were pretty powerful throughout the state, there were other economic interests in the mix too. It's tough to say whether Sacramento's developers held a unique level of sway over local government among California cities, but it certainly seems like it. The Metro Chamber and thinktanks like "Valley Vision" are very keen on the idea of being able to plan and oversee regional growth without government wherever possible. Our "Uncity" is kind of a unique feature, but there are still large unincorporated, populated areas in many parts of California--like East Los Angeles, over 100,000 people, in unincorporated Los Angeles County.

I suppose I'm a bit resistant to the idea that Sacramento didn't expand sufficiently due to some sort of moral deficiency among its leadership. I think we probably expanded as much as we could, given the circumstances and the resources available--keep in mind that the city expanded from around 10 square miles in 1950 to close to 100 square miles today, which is pretty explosive growth when compared to other regions of California with a lot more money flowing around, and more population pressure. Could we have expanded the city boundaries more? Sure, probably. The question of whether we should have, and how much more was possible, and what other factors may have resisted such efforts, is more difficult to answer. There are reasons to grow horizontally--and reasons not to.

And I'm not all that convinced that Sacramento's satellite suburbs are going to overtake Sacramento in size or population anytime soon. Most of them are still quite economically dependent on Sacramento as an economic center, directly or indirectly, not to mention as a place to dump their unwanted LULUs.
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Old 11-14-2012, 08:02 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NickB1967 View Post
But how does that explain every other county? Whether San Mateo or Orange counties, made up of lots of little cities, or LA, Fresno or Santa Clara counties, dominated by one big one, the urban areas and growth are just about entirely incorporated. Surely developers were calling the shots in those places, too.
I've wondered the same thing myself. Perhaps the County supervisors wanted to keep their power, and the city council members didn't want to change the demographics.
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Old 11-15-2012, 10:55 AM
 
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I've brought this up many many times and wburg has never given me a satisfactory answer as to why Sacramento county has the largest unincorporated area in the history of the world. My theory is Sacramento's local governments (the cities and the county) have always been dysfunctional and anti-growth up until maybe the last 15-20 years when it was far too late and all of the suburbs were built out and established. Plus the overriding NIMBYism that has been built into unincorporated CDPs such as Arden, Carmichael, etc.

Just look at the No on Arden cityhood in 2010 (or was it 2008? can't remember). Their campaign rhetoric was nonsensical.
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Old 11-15-2012, 01:31 PM
 
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Originally Posted by Majin View Post
I've brought this up many many times and wburg has never given me a satisfactory answer as to why Sacramento county has the largest unincorporated area in the history of the world.
I've told you a million times, don't exaggerate!

What you're saying isn't actually true. Los Angeles County, for example, is about 65% unincorporated area, and over 1 million people in Los Angeles County live in the unincorporated area. We're about neck and neck with San Diego County and Riverside County, with about half a million in the unincorporated county. Nor are we proportionally the county with the most population in unincorporated area--we're not even in the Top 10 of California. El Dorado County, for example, has a population of about 190,000 but only 15% live in incorporated cities--the biggest "city" in El Dorado County is unincorporated El Dorado Hills, twice the size of county seat Placerville. We are unique in being the only major city in California with such a high proportion of unincorporated population to primate city--the top 10 counties with large percentages of unincorporated residents are all relatively rural, or suburban sprawl zones with no major city like El Dorado and Yuba County.

Quote:
My theory is Sacramento's local governments (the cities and the county) have always been dysfunctional and anti-growth up until maybe the last 15-20 years when it was far too late and all of the suburbs were built out and established. Plus the overriding NIMBYism that has been built into unincorporated CDPs such as Arden, Carmichael, etc.
I know a lot of real estate and finance type guys take a lot of Dale Carnegie classes and assume that success is 100% attitude, and if a place doesn't live up to their expectations of what it should have been, it's because the people there are somehow dysfunctional, but things like climate, economics, geography and technology do have a huge effect on how cities grow. Sacramento had a really good position for a transportation/trade nexus, but was hampered by our hot climate, our inland position and our tendency to flood every few years. Coastal cities had huge advantages of location and climate, and generally didn't flood, and other economic factors (like San Francisco's establishment as a mining town during the gold rush and Comstock Lode silver rush giving it a lead on banking, or the Los Angeles housing bubbles brought on by having 2 transcontinental railroads and a port) which swept past Sacramento. Pressure to incorporate is felt the strongest in areas with higher population pressure and economic pressure--those forces were (and still are) more acute on the coast than in the valley. The only cities of Sacramento's size and stature inland from the coast are Fresno and Bakersfield, and at the risk of raising FresnoFacts' ire, I think Sacramento stands out as the most developed and the nicest--either despite or because of our ring of suburban communities, depending on who you ask.

I have read enough about Sacramento's business and political leadership (who were pretty much interchangeable--the same people would switch back and forth between running the Chamber of Commerce and being the mayor) and they were overwhelmingly pro-growth. They would have loved to see Bay Area or Los Angeles levels of growth in the Sacramento Valley. What they were, however, was anti-regulation, especially when it came to what they could and couldn't build--and they assumed that an unregulated suburban market would perform better than a regulated one. The invention of air conditioning let hot places like Sacramento, Phoenix etcetera grow a lot bigger, and because the cheapest, easiest way to build was horizontal, low-density suburbs, that's what we built. One could also argue that this same generation of developer/politician was responsible for the de-urbanization of Sacramento's downtown core--redevelopment and freeways literally kicked 50% of Sacramento's downtown population (about 30,000 people, a loss we still feel acutely today.) out of the central city. Now, this was also not an attitude unique to Sacramento, but few cities were able to so thoroughly ethnic-cleanse their downtowns!

In a lot of ways, the transition from the businessman-politician to the professional political class in Sacramento over the past 20 years, and resulting increase in regulation (in part with an interest in returning power to the city center) is what Majin refers to above. Generally, opposing growth doesn't prevent it from happening, it just moves it somewhere else--the main ingredient in sprawl. This also means that communities can direct growth where they think it should be, an action that often gets tarred as "NIMBY" if there is a difference of opinion about where development should go.
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Old 11-15-2012, 09:03 PM
 
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What if we expanded the borders to the parameters that I mentioned before or something similar, and instituted a sort of borough or district type government that could micro manage each specific region/former suburb of the city seperately while being part of a larger city council system? That could make everyone happy potentially. A lot of the gripe about Arden being annexed into Sacramento was a perceived lack of services to that area. They claimed that being controlled by the city council downtown would make them worse off than they are now, which I completely disagree with, but if Arden and Carmichael and the North Highalnds/Foothill Farms/Antelope areas etc had their own sub council to handle things in each specific district that was part of a larger whole of Sacramento Cuty Council would that satisfy their needs?

Also with regards to a perceived lack of police/fire protection in these areas, what if we merged the Sac PD with Sac Sherrifs Dept to create a Sacramento Metro Police department, and Metro Fire/Sac Fire as well to create 1 larger department that can spread services throughout the county? I know a lot of other cities such as Miami for example have done this.
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Old 11-15-2012, 09:13 PM
 
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A bigger question is, would annexing those areas result in sufficient tax revenue to provide sufficient services to those areas? If so, then annexation makes fiscal sense. If not, then it doesn't.
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Old 11-16-2012, 08:48 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg View Post
While developers were pretty powerful throughout the state, there were other economic interests in the mix too. It's tough to say whether Sacramento's developers held a unique level of sway over local government among California cities, but it certainly seems like it. The Metro Chamber and thinktanks like "Valley Vision" are very keen on the idea of being able to plan and oversee regional growth without government wherever possible. Our "Uncity" is kind of a unique feature, but there are still large unincorporated, populated areas in many parts of California--like East Los Angeles, over 100,000 people, in unincorporated Los Angeles County.
Outliers like East LA aside, the overwhelming portion of urbanized LA county is incorporated. What isn't LA is Long Beach, Torrance, Hawthorne, etc.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg View Post
I suppose I'm a bit resistant to the idea that Sacramento didn't expand sufficiently due to some sort of moral deficiency among its leadership. I think we probably expanded as much as we could, given the circumstances and the resources available--keep in mind that the city expanded from around 10 square miles in 1950 to close to 100 square miles today, which is pretty explosive growth when compared to other regions of California with a lot more money flowing around, and more population pressure. Could we have expanded the city boundaries more? Sure, probably. The question of whether we should have, and how much more was possible, and what other factors may have resisted such efforts, is more difficult to answer. There are reasons to grow horizontally--and reasons not to.
Not a moral deficiency, but an unwillingness to see what was plainly happening. WW2 and its aftermath were going to set the pace for massive growth of California cities. The horizontal growth happened *anyway*, whether the Sacramento civic gentry of the 1950's wished it or not.
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Old 11-16-2012, 09:01 AM
 
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And, again, the horizontal growth wasn't something they had a problem with--it made them money, after all. But they saw less benefit to expanding city boundaries, which they saw as an increase in regulation and taxation on their investments. Unlike in other cities, here they had the sway to build their neighborhoods without having to corral them into city limits. And while the Sacramento region saw explosive growth, they didn't face the population pressure or the economic reasons to incorporate developed but unincorporated land that you see to a greater extent (but not a full extent!) in other counties. As I mentioned above, Los Angeles County has over 1 million people in its unincorporated area--San Diego, about 400,000--and we're not even in the top 10 California counties in proportion of population in unincorporated areas.

So far you haven't made any sort of argument as to why unlimited horizontal expansion of Sacramento's city limits is a good thing--other than a vague "bigger is better than smaller" ethos, without any sort of numbers to back it up. Despite the rather vague argument that Rancho Cordova or Elk Grove is someday going to leap past Sacramento in population, Sacramento still has four times the population of the biggest of them, and they are all essentially economically dependent on Sacramento--plus, with almost 100 square miles of city, we can fit hundreds of thousands more in our existing footprint through infill alone. Why be so dead-set on horizontal expansion unless we want to build 10 more North Natomas style auto suburbs?
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Old 11-16-2012, 09:07 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg View Post
I've told you a million times, don't exaggerate!

What you're saying isn't actually true. Los Angeles County, for example, is about 65% unincorporated area, and over 1 million people in Los Angeles County live in the unincorporated area.
Meanwhile, the other 9 million *do* live in an incorporated area. Note: I am talking about *urbanized* population, the ranchers in the high desert area, the remaining farmers and others who live in rustic parts of LA County shouldn't count.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg View Post
We're about neck and neck with San Diego County and Riverside County, with about half a million in the unincorporated county. Nor are we proportionally the county with the most population in unincorporated area--we're not even in the Top 10 of California. El Dorado County, for example, has a population of about 190,000 but only 15% live in incorporated cities--the biggest "city" in El Dorado County is unincorporated El Dorado Hills, twice the size of county seat Placerville.
El Dorado County is still mostly rustic, although that is changing. Again, rustic dwellers should not count for San Diego and Riverside counties.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg View Post
We are unique in being the only major city in California with such a high proportion of unincorporated population to primate city
That's the point! Forest, trees and all that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg View Post
--the top 10 counties with large percentages of unincorporated residents are all relatively rural, or suburban sprawl zones with no major city like El Dorado and Yuba County.
Yuba County's urban areas are Davis, Woodland, and West Sacramento, none of which have allowed unincorporated suburbs to spring up around them. (Well, West Sac *was* unincorporated suburbs until it united and incorporated. That ought to be the model for Sac County, and to the extent Citrus Heights, Elk Grove, and Rancho Cordova have incorporated, it is).
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Old 11-16-2012, 09:18 AM
 
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Davis, Woodland and West Sacramento are effectively suburbs of Sacramento. The first settlements in West Sacramento happened during the Gold Rush and there were significant suburban developments there starting 100 years ago, but they didn't incorporate until the 1980s. And it's tough for any of them to grow horizontally, inside or outside their city limits, as all three are pretty much surrounded by water in winter months--the same way that Sacramento was before serious levee improvements.

I'm still not seeing the economic justification for incorporation/annexation--you're taking "bigger is better" as a point of faith rather than justifying it somehow. Not saying it's not a good idea (I think it's silly that Arden-Arcade, Carmichael and other uncity neighborhoods haven't incorporated or annexed too) but it seems like you're not adequately exploring the reasons for not annexing or incorporating--such as the lack of sufficient tax base, or resistance by those in the unincorporated areas.
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