why does sacramento get such a bad rap? ;(

[HILife09]

Originally Posted by wburg

I like Oakland just fine, they have a lot of civic pride that they don't mind sharing with visitors through the "Oaklandish" campaign, and their "first Friday" art walk, which draws crowds of about half what we get at Second Saturday (and a quarter of what Second Saturday got back when it was still a mob scene.) But they're also losing long-held cultural institutions, as San Francisco is, due to development pressure and the superheated housing market.

As I have mentioned above, I don't mind at all that NorCalDude is happy in San Leandro, but he seems to strongly object when people are happy in Sacramento, because he wasn't happy living in a remote suburb outside of Sacramento. And I suppose a Granite Bay native is too erudite and high-class to understand my crass, lower-middle-class Citrus Heights argot--"taint" is a slang term for "perineum."

I believe the points he makes are still valid. Sac has no culture. Walking through downtown Sacramento yesterday, it was quite depressing. There are so many old abandoned buildings and absolutely no life in the central core of the city. If you don't enjoy endless suburbs then Sac really has nothing else to offer. Great place for young families looking for affordable homes in CA. Otherwise if you have the opportunity to move and experience true culture and entertainment it would be best to look elsewhere.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by HILife09

I believe the points he makes are still valid. Sac has no culture. Walking through downtown Sacramento yesterday, it was quite depressing. There are so many old abandoned buildings and absolutely no life in the central core of the city. If you don't enjoy endless suburbs then Sac really has nothing else to offer. Great place for young families looking for affordable homes in CA. Otherwise if you have the opportunity to move and experience true culture and entertainment it would be best to look elsewhere.

If a high life is what you're looking for and if high prices for "culture" and entertainment are what define it I suppose Sacramento is not for you. If self-defined snob value and over-priced abodes are what you need to feel "successful" and COL is more important than QOL, NorCal Dude, then I suppose Sacramento isn't for you either.

With thanks to wburg, Thomas Dodson wrote "I love not driving my car for days at a time (when is the last time you can say you did that?)." Well, my wife and I lived in downtown Sacramento for 11 years. After our car was totaled by a red light runner - sadly, not an isolated occurrence there - we, by choice, did without a car for four years. When we wanted or needed one, about twice a month, we rented and it was significantly less expensive that way than owning. It's easily doable and all the walking (two miles to my office for example) didn't hurt us a bit. Light rail helped during lousy weather.

My point is this, my wife was mostly raised in Sacramento and I spent the better part of 20 years there. Both of us are former military brats (I like to think we outgrew the "brat" phase long ago) and have lived in many other states and a number of other countries. Based upon those experiences I can tell you that you could do worse than Sacramento.

As with all of these senseless, "Mine is bigger and better than yours" domicile battles, it all boils down to what you as an individual enjoy. That really can't be argued. But by all means, keep trying!

[wburg]

If you believe Sacramento has no culture and has nothing to offer besides suburbs, you haven't tried very hard to look for it. The central business district is a zone of office buildings, a lot of the buildings that look "abandoned" on a Saturday are actually occupied offices during the weekday, but that isn't an uncommon scenario in many cities. There are a couple of well-known vacant parcels and vacant buildings, primarily because they are owned by real estate speculators who are holding out for some not-yet-arrived bull market, or held by the former redevelopment agency. And yes, these are parts of Sacramento that could be doing a lot better, for various reasons--but they're hardly the length and breadth of the city. Nor is it the only possible repository of culture and entertainment in the region. Most of that is found outside the central business district--in Midtown, Alkali Flat and Southside, and the outer streetcar neighborhoods, in small clubs, local theaters, restaurants and cafes, small music venues and art galleries. The central business district covers less than 1% of the city.

Sure, we have a lot of suburbs--but so do most American cities and regions. Most of Chicagoland is suburban strip malls, and often the only way to tell the difference between commercial strips in Roseville vs. Downer's Grove is that they have Hardee's where we have Carl's Junior. The Bay Area's retail power centers are mostly the same vacu-formed Target/Michael's/Petsmart/Home Depot as ours, just plopped down along the Bay Area's rolling hills instead of our flat plains, and the nearby vacu-formed beige/taupe housing costs three times as much. If you like suburbs and strip malls, you'll find plenty of them just about anywhere. The difference is that, for various reasons relating to 1950s/60s redevelopment, and Sacramento's relatively small prewar size, our "urban" places look like "streetcar suburbs" to those who don't expect to find coffee shops, theaters and art galleries among neighborhoods of Craftsman bungalows and two-story commercial buildings--and, these days, they are by no means limited to one neighborhood.

Some folks seem to have difficulty with comparisons--sure, the Bay Area (for example) has a greater number of cultural amenities than the Sacramento area. But the fact that some places have more cultural amenities than Sacramento does not mean that Sacramento has no cultural amenities. It's just one of those things that is remarkably easy to disprove, but people keep repeating it out of their own ignorance, or because they believe that taking credit for a nearby city's cultural amenities helps justify the money they sunk into a suburb near that city whose amenities are limited to a local strip mall and an on-ramp they can use to drive to 'Frisco.

[NatureYogi]

Fascinating thread. Fun hearing such different views on Sacramento. Thank you.