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Austin is literally a government town larger than Sacramento, and only about 4% of its employment is tech workers, as opposed to 2% in Sacramento. We don't have Dell or Samsung but we do have Intel and HP, we don't have H-E-B but do have Raley's. Of their top 10 employers, half are either government (state, local, federal) or public schools/universities (UTA and Austin public schools.) But people make a big deal out of Austin because it's not 90 miles from San Francisco; if we didn't share a state with two of the best known arts/cultural hubs on the planet, we'd likely have a reputation more like Austin's. In addition to the cultural tidal pull of San Francisco, I think to some extent the local marketing folks really try go play up the "normal-ness" of Sacramento, so even though our city and region really does have some fairly robust artistic cred and homegrown talent, because it isn't as big as San Francisco or Los Angeles people tend to dismiss it entirely--and also why so many talented people who grow up in Sacramento tend to move to cities that don't mind admitting that talented people live there, like San Francisco, Los Angeles--or Austin. Speaking of which, a talented local friend recently moved back from Austin with her partner and opened a really neat "micro cinema" here in Sacramento, The Dreamland Cinema!
And why would tech workers count as "human capital," but government employees don't?
Austin is bigger in that the city has 1 million people. But Sacramento is a much larger capital region, both in terms of government jobs available and employees who work them.
And 4% of tech workforce for Austin is very significant. Considering the SF Bay Area, tech capital of the world is at 10% or so. Austin literally has twice the tech work force of Sac and it shows. Nevermind 3 Fortune 500 companies, HQd there (Dell, Oracle, Tesla). Intel, HP, and Apple may have campuses in Sac, but no HQ's.
And 6/0 of Sacramento top employers are either hospitals or the state/County. We have not even touched the schools yet there.
Austin is a bit of a higher cut than Sac, so to speak. Sacramento will feel noticeably more blue collar/lower-middle class, and appear much grittier than Austin.
As much as we are very much similar to Austin and Portland after returning from both recently I’m left with these sentiments:
Sacramento has this hidden, modest, reserved, humble, unpretentious, under the radar, plain-jane, veneer to everything about it.
It’s actually more than a veneer its part of our DNA. We just can’t shake it and it probably will never change no mater what we do.
This affects everything about Sacramento from the trivial to the substantial. Often it is just bad luck, but sometimes its self-inflicted.
Being so close to the SF Bay Area and being in the same state as LA and San Diego has never helped us and really has just contributed to this sentiment.
On a national scale, our achievements, income levels, educational attainment levels, housing, architecture, pretty much everything stands right in the middle. This is a good thing.
And as much as I hate to admit it, VISUALLY, ranked against Americas major and largest cities and metros, we are, cough, cough, glance downward…..unremarkable…..and what we do have is “hidden”….hard to find, hard to see. As a first time visitor, little may jump out and grab your attention, like an amazing vista or view of the city. There is alot to see and do in Sacramento, but the coolest things to see are equally marred by the unseemly or the mediocre.
To put it bluntly, Sacramento does not have good hair days. If you are not into average, this city is not for you.
That doses not make it bad per se, just rather unremarkable.
Of course, the beauty is in those details. Housing prices are more reasonable, so is child care. You don't have militant BLM/Antifa dictating policy for city hall. Folks work 8-5 government/health care shifts. There's no work till you die culture here, and we don't have blow ins and blow outs with the latest tech boom/busts.
Change happens at the snails pace of government here, but you won't wake up next week and realize you've been gentrified out of you neighborhood. It might not be a trendy tourist town, but you also do not have to live in a million dollar home for your kids to be in higher performing schools.
A lot of people knock Sac for what it isn't, without being thankful for what it is.
Sacramento actually has a whole lot of underground vitality, playfulness, and downright weirdness, but a lot of not particularly well-paid boosters and influencers try to hide any evidence of creativity in Sacramento and instead focus on the watered-down palatability of our suburbs, or the proximity of salt-of-the-earth farming regions to the city (which are actually pretty far away, because we paved over our nearby farming regions to build those bland suburbs.) So finding Sacramento's creative niches is kind of like finding an underground no-limits poker game or a speakeasy during Prohibition; you kind of need to Know A Guy, but once you find it, there's plenty more weirdness where that came from. Also, one little-known advantage of government employment is that, if you're a low-level employee, tolerance for things like weird haircuts or extended vacations to tour with your band are often more tolerated than they are in the private sector. The underground here is still kind of underground, and occasionally it pops through the surface, resulting in either a local-interest story about quirky artists or a thorough stamping down to avoid disrupting our delicately-maintained illusion of being Stepford, Connecticut.
Bay Area hyper-gentrification during the last decade slowed down young creative people moving to the Bay Area (the traditional pattern preferred by those marketing influencers is that talented people should take their talents elsewhere more tolerant of creativity) resulting in some fairly high-profile (by Sacramento standards) artistic eruptions, but ongoing efforts to attract Bay Area washouts to relocate to Sacramento have spiked housing prices just as they started to drop in coastal cities, restarting the exodus of talented mutants who hadn't managed to find a local niche yet. We'll see what happens next; there are a lot more million-dollar homes in Sacramento than there used to be, but largely they aren't getting much bigger, just the budgets of the people bidding on them, but things may have turned the corner into recession. But, unfortunately for the Steford crowd, low rents are often a highly successful way of attracting and maintaining counterculture and artists in a community.
Lots of people seem utterly convinced that militant BLM/Antifa are dictating policy at Sacramento city hall, if not the State Capitol Building itself, and tend to post regularly about it here on this forum; while it would be nice, it isn't true, but then, it's not true in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland or Seattle either. We do have a BLM/Antifa presence, of course, and multitudes of other political opinions from middle-of-the-road to out-of-this-world; because we're the state capital city, there's often drama about how the state is run and people come to Sacramento in large groups to give their advice on how they'd see it done instead.
Sacramento has a lot a latent potential that people don’t truly appreciate. I recall being invited to participate in a focus group some 10 years ago and the facilitator was from the East Coast. She casually asked about fun and interesting things to do and see in Sacramento and the answers from the participants were going to Lake Tahoe, Reno, Napa and San Francisco. No mention of any local attractions. Chimerique would have had a fit ;-).
I think the excess civic boosterism though gets in the way of acknowledging problems so that they can actually get adressed. Back in the 80's and 90's Sacramento was able to get HP, Apple, Intel, Oracle and Packard Bell to bring facilities to the area. In that era, Sacramento was successfully competing and sometimes beating places like Austin, Phx, Salt Lake City, Portland and Boise for these types of employers.
But more recently, we haven't been nearly as successful. Lots of employers were moving out of the bay area because housing and rents were too high, but when Tesla , Oracle, and Charles Schwab moved, they really didn't even bother considering Sacramento. Instead the employers we are recruiting are lower value added employers, more warehouses and restaurants and such. That is better than nothing, but I think its indicative that the area isn't doing as well right now as it was doing in the past.
The issue is that a lot of the older legacy companies aren't doing well. Tower Records and McClatchy Newspapers went bankrupt. Other ones like Raley's don't seem to be fairing well either so we probably should be doing something to backfill for the jobs we are losing or might lose. Government jobs aren't bad, but state tax rolls are highly volitile and cyclical, so I think it would be good for the regional economy to have a more diverse high value employment base.
Silicon Valley isn't setting up shop in Sac, because the only thing Sac offers is cheaper real estate. The same anti business climate in CA is still there.
I think the excess civic boosterism though gets in the way of acknowledging problems so that they can actually get adressed. Back in the 80's and 90's Sacramento was able to get HP, Apple, Intel, Oracle and Packard Bell to bring facilities to the area. In that era, Sacramento was successfully competing and sometimes beating places like Austin, Phx, Salt Lake City, Portland and Boise for these types of employers.
But more recently, we haven't been nearly as successful. Lots of employers were moving out of the bay area because housing and rents were too high, but when Tesla , Oracle, and Charles Schwab moved, they really didn't even bother considering Sacramento. Instead the employers we are recruiting are lower value added employers, more warehouses and restaurants and such. That is better than nothing, but I think its indicative that the area isn't doing as well right now as it was doing in the past.
The issue is that a lot of the older legacy companies aren't doing well. Tower Records and McClatchy Newspapers went bankrupt. Other ones like Raley's don't seem to be fairing well either so we probably should be doing something to backfill for the jobs we are losing or might lose. Government jobs aren't bad, but state tax rolls are highly volitile and cyclical, so I think it would be good for the regional economy to have a more diverse high value employment base.
Sacramento's business community were behind the push for a focus on government employment, including military bases and aerospace, back in the 1950s, instead of transportation and the canning/packing industry, using largely the same arguments of cyclical volatility--government was seen as a "recession-proof" industry that was not subject to economic volatility, and often government employment is counter-cyclical, doing the most when the economy is worst via government-funded "stimulus" packages. Of course, the fact that canneries, mills & railroads were mostly a blue-collar workforce consisting of people of color, and also a largely unionized workforce, was also a factor. Government jobs, at the time, were principally a white workforce that wasn't yet unionized, so they were seen as the great white hope for the future of Sacramento's labor force. The shine kind of came off of that workforce in the 1970s when public employees unionized and the workforce started to become much more diverse, and then after the Cold War military bases closed down--and even though military budgets are at an all-time high, Sacramento hasn't been able to leverage Second Cold War dollars back to California, perhaps because we're going to be dealing with the pollutants from Aerojet for generations (covering a geographic area much wider than the Superfund sites at the Sacramento Shops.)
Speaking of which, companies like Tesla didn't consider Sacramento because we're in California, whose environmental laws and tax structures were not to their liking; short of seceding and starting our own state, that's unlikely to change. Our failure to attract employers looking for new sites that aren't subject to California regulations can hardly be blamed on Sacramento.
But the larger issue with tech was mentioned above: even in the tech-rich Bay Area, it's only 10% of the workforce, which raises the question of what the other 90% gets to do? As we have seen in the Bay Area, it's rapidly turning into a stratified society of wealthy techies, a coterie of middlemen (middlepersons?) who don't actually do tech but make money off its proximity, and a large service workforce who make them sandos & coffee and DoorDash it to their home offices, resulting in massive displacement of low-income service workers during economic booms AND busts--first they have to move because the rent goes up, then they have to move because the Panera closed after everyone at the tech offices next door shut down due to the latest tech bubble. Sacramento tried to position itself as leading with its service industry as part of the "Farm to Fork Capital" campaign, but if your end goal is a professional workforce in an industry that's less subject to economic volatility, restaurants don't seem like the best possible choice. What is the best possible choice for an employment sector that has less volatility, potential for growth, and will actually employ a significant percentage of the population?
What I've been waiting for far too long.... will Sacramento ever have some synergy or one or two attributes that catches the nations attention and lasts for a generation or more.
Such as:
Austin's Foodie and Drikke(Bars) and Music scene
San Antonio's River Walk
San Diego's Zoo and Balboa Park
Seattle's Pike Place Market and waterfront
Portland's waterfront access and numerous interesting restaurants
Sacramento has notable elements of the above, and by are more than anything else in the Central Valley or Fresno, fer sure, and distinctly more than we had 20 years ago.....but still nothing that's lasted a long time.
Nationally, even globally, the one thing we had was a really good NBA team, which had a 10-20 year solid run that was respectable and fun. Will they become relevant again?
Last edited by Chimérique; 08-29-2022 at 01:01 PM..
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