Sacramento city Map

[cityx]

When I first moved here years ago I had a great deal of trouble figuring out if I lived in Sacramento City, or Sacramento County. I was living in Carmichael at the time and I had argued with my roomate if I should write on envelopes Carmichael or Sacramento. It turned out both worked but it still never solved the dilemma. This may sound like a dumb question, but I always wondered why Sacramento never officially annexed the unincorporated parts of the county that surround the city.

[wburg]

Annexing unincorporated areas isn't always an easy or inexpensive project. Over the past century, Sacramento has expanded in size by about 1000%. Originally, the city was just the downtown grid: B Street to Y Street (today Broadway) and from the river to 31st Street (today Alhambra.) About 100 years ago, the first big annexation took place, and there have been several since then. One included taking over the separately incorporated city of North Sacramento (along Del Paso Boulevard and Arden.)

Suburbs were built outside of city limits in order to avoid paying city taxes and fees. This is how the first suburbs were built, and it is still part of the suburban equation today--the name of the game is avoiding city taxes and city overhead (like social services and low-income housing) while being close enough to take advantage of city benefits (like job markets and transportation access.)

Other areas, like Arden-Arcade, want to form their own cities.Some unincorporated areas don't want to be incorporated. The town of Freeport just recently voted down an effort to make them part of the city. In order to incorporate, generally one has to have the approval of the residents of that area. If they don't want to be part of your city, there isn't really a way to make them sign up. And sometimes annexing an area is just not economically feasible for the city--they have difficulty justifying the expense and trouble.

I used to live on the edge of Carmichael, but I just put "Sacramento" on envelopes too...works just as well, I guess.

[pba]

Originally Posted by wburg

fillip: Historic districts aren't based on where neighborhoods historically were, but on the existing historic structures as assessed when the district was created. Historic districts are distinct administrative units, administered by city planning and preservation staff: neighborhood associations are not. There's no "then" involved.

The neighborhood association map is based on the city map, but if you look at the list of associations, not all of them are represented on the map. This is because not all of the neighborhoods on the city map have their own neighborhood association.

Someone takes the time to post some pretty cool maps of Sacramento and someone else has the nerve to complain about it??? Same kind of person that complains about having to pay income tax on their multi-million dollar lottery winnings. Sheesh.

[zen_klown]

Politics factors in as well. Pete Wilson's big claim to fame as Mayor of San Diego was to incorporate a lot of the suburban fringe of San Diego into the City of San Diego. By doing so the city of San Diego had better tools to control growth in the area and it was able to use impact fees on growth on the fringe to pay for redevelopement projects in the city core like Horton Plaza and the Gas Lamp district. But if he hadn't expanded the boundaries of San Diego, the city of San Diego probably would have lost its Republican majority. So consolidation was both good practical politics and smart regional planning for San Diego.

In Sacramento when Joe Serna was mayor there was an opportunity to consolidate the city and counties of Sacramento. Serna killed it because at that time, the county of Sacramento was trending republican and if the two merged, he might no longer be mayor. It was after the Sacramento City/County consolidation had been squashed that is people started to organise cities in Elk Grove, Citrus Heights and Rancho Cordova.

A big reason Arden Arcade hasn't incorporated is that there isn't the tax base to fund the area as a new city. When a new city incorporates, it is supposed to pay the county for 25 years, the revenue that the county would have collected in that area if it had remained an unincorporated part of the county. When Citrus Heights incorporated, the Birdcage Mall was mostly dead, so sales tax revenues were relatively low. The idea in Citrus Heights was to incorporate and then turn around retail in the Sunrise Mall Marketplace and the incremental money from turning around the malls there would pay for higher level of services in Citrus Heights. When Elk Grove and Rancho Cordova incorporated, they didn't have a strong sales tax basis, but there were adjacent to land in the path of development. Elk Grove used that empty land to build an automall and its planning to build a mall to strengthen its tax base, more over property taxes are effectively higher in new area with lots of new development.( you don't have a lot of people living in 400k homes with an assessed property tax value of 75k in Elk Grove, but that is fairly common in older areas like Arden Park).

In the Arden Arcade area, there isn't a really strong sale tax base. The Fulton Avenue auto district is slowly being killed by the various automalls and the Country Club Plaza and Country Club Malls were wounded pretty badly when the Arden Fair Mall was remodelled in the early 90's and the various remodeling projects have never been enough to challenge the Arden Fair Mall.