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@musicsaverdude I did start coding at 15 (well, 13), and mostly did freelance computer consulting/PC repair in the 90s. But I wasn't all that good at it, and didn't really like the tech industry. No worries about your assessment of the music industry, but heck, there was plenty of music about drugs and gangs when we were kids, and parents were all up in arms about it. Then, as now, it sold records. I figure there is great new music out there but I'm nowhere near hip enough to know where it is. The issue of homogenization & consolidation of the entertainment industry is a serious one; there's a lot of grumbling in town about Live Nation, who control a lot of local venues, setting off the usual debates about pay-to-play and exclusion of local bands from top billing at clubs. But recent events have basically upended the table about musical culture, and there's an opportunity for dramatic change. Before COVID there was a lot of discussion about Sacramento's arts economy, and ways that larger numbers of artists could make a living as artists in Sacramento through marketing and development of Sacramento's creative communities. There were a couple major art events in 2016-17 that brought a lot of attention to local art circles. If you saw the profusion of public murals in downtown, midtown, and Oak Park, those were probably the most visible effect of that era. Also, hypergentrification in the Bay Area and Los Angeles slowed the tendency of arts folks to leave town for those regions in pursuit of an art career, which meant for a while local artists stayed in town & developed their talent here. But while a lot of people are talking about the abandonment of urban cores due to telecommuting and worries about crime and social upheaval, those are EXACTLY the eras that result in artists flocking to urban centers, because rents typically go down, the dang yuppies don't complain about your band practice, and you can get some work done. So a lot of the young creative folks I know are starting to fly the coop again, to larger California cities and often to Portland. To some extent that's just natural relocation, but it's always a bit disappointing. One thing that has changed is that Sacramento artists who leave town tend to express more pride about Sacramento than they used to back in the days of Herb Caen or Joan Didion; they even do things like make movies about how much they love Sacramento.
There has been some sociological exploration of how arts economies work, but generally they tend to depend on cheap rent (so people have time to create instead of having to set aside artistic pursuits and hustle to pay rent) and the physical proximity of other artists (artists tend to form informal networks that become the primary methods to get paying gigs.) Artists also tend to like the idea of being where other successful artists lived; people moved to San Francisco because they read about Jack Kerouac, even though most of what Kerouac did in San Francisco was work in dead end night watchman jobs. Now, I have no illusions that Sacramento is going to stride past New York City or Los Angeles as an American arts hub, but we certainly do have potential to take a spot as a second-order city with a thriving arts economy and jobs for artists, along the lines of Portland or Austin; the challenge is how to do so without pricing out the same creative people we want to keep in town, or having the presence of those artists price out and displace other people who don't make much money and just work for a living, which is one of the major issues in neighborhoods like Oak Park. There's a lot of healthy civic debate on that general topic, some in this here forum.
I think the lack of a large new musical movement has to do with the super-availability of music online since the 2000s: musical genres seem to need time to develop out of the spotlight. There have been many new genres and innovations, but they don't have time to develop in isolation, like punk and hip hop did in the dangerous, burnt out parts of bankrupt New York City in the early 1970s. Regarding MTV, it's an obsolete format. Why should kids sit down watching a single television channel watching videos that someone else decided to broadcast when they can watch any video they want, on demand, and if they decide they don't like it they can just jump to the next video? To quote one of the visionaries of our generation, "This sucks, Beavis."
@shelato - As always, thanks again for the detailed demographic/geography intel. In the spirit of reciprocity, I feel I owe you (and wburg) a partial agent fee for your help haha. Again, much appreciated. Before I forget, I still remember you mentioning Hmong gangs? Is this prevalent in the Meadowview and/or Filipino areas you had mentioned earlier?
Regarding your excellent explanation of the housing dynamics of Sacramento vs coastal, curious if you feel Biden's American Rescue Plan will have a different impact on a potential recession vs previous ones? It's where they're providing $350 BILLION to over 19,000 cities across the US to help with post Covid relief. Here's a FAQ from the Treasury: https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/SLFRPFAQ.pdf and a great video on approved uses: [vimeo]560619496[/vimeo] https://vimeo.com/560619496
Without getting to detailed, my simplistic thinking is this is a big money grab and whether or not these funds end up spurring post COVID relief, it will at least allow the public sector to keep the economy going even if inflation hits with a massive stock market crash. Based on some presentations I've seen over the past year, we're due for another correction as there seems to be one every decade (dot-com boom late 90s, subprime crisis 2007/2008, etc). So the thought has even occurred to me to just sell now and wait on the sidelines but as real estate speculation is not my main revenue generator, figure forget timing the market and just get a stable home base to work on core competency. But am curious if you think prices will come down substantially later this year?
During covid, a lot of people lost their job or their business because of shutdowns. Now that things are opening up again, the government is spending a lot of money to help get people back to work. Congress is arguing about just how much we are going to spend later this year but the money hasn't yet been spent yet and when it does it will keep juicing the economy.
Unlike the stock market, housing prices have momentum. With the stock market how well stock prices do today, doesn't do a good job of predicting how well stock prices will do tomorrow or next week or next quarter. There is a lot of noise in prices. With housing the best predictor of how well housing is doing tomorrow, next week and next quarter is how well housing prices are doing right now. When the market is going up it keeps going up and when its going down it keeps going down.
So for this year I think housing prices will keep going up.
But the big difference between the stock market and the housing market is leverage and transaction costs. If you come in with 20% down and the market drops 20%. You have lost your entire investment. You also have a lot of substantial transaction costs like loan origination fees and real estate commissions. During real estate busts, real estate can also become illiquid because who wants to use leverage to buy an asset that is falling in value?
Right now housing prices are higher than average, at least in Sacramento, and generally reversion to the mean is one of the most powerful trends in markets. So how things revert to the mean is important. If housing prices stall and fall like in the last real estate boom bust cycle that would be bad, you could loose everything. If we have a period of inflation like the late 70's and early 80's having a mortgage at 3% when the inflation rate is 5%, the banks are paying you 2% a year to borrow money from them and that would be great for you.
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Originally Posted by musicsaverdude
Lastly, regarding IPO, yes that is the way it's usually done. Develop an MVP (minimum viable product), get users to validate it, get your seed/Series A to scale out to a few markets, refine it further, Series B, wash, rinse, repeat all while increasing the multiple to sell it to the next sucker (either IPO or M&A). Sadly, I'm taking the much harder route as I'm focusing on something more sustainable that does't cede control to VCs as it's near and dear to my heart, helping artists. And sadly, when you get involved with venture capital, as you mentioned, they want those home runs, waaaaay more IRR% than what even the most speculative RE developers want as that's the VC business model. Lose out on 99% of their bets but the unicorn pays for all the other losers. It's almost exactly the same as the record industry. But it's not sustainable so I'm more focused in the impact investing space where there's double and triple bottom line returns expected with market rate returns being acceptable. For example, in this space, an impact investor may be okay with a lower return so long as there are say, 1000 kids who got jobs or were fed, or pick whatever socially disadvantaged group/demographic/gender/etc and be able to measure how you help x number of them all while reducing carbon and/or any other environmental metric. The UN SDGs (sustainable development goals) give a good reference: https://sdgs.un.org/goals. But as this is a new space and many of the players are former Wall St investment bankers, there's a lot of greenwashing so it's almost better to go with a typical VC because at least you know what the expectations are. MONEY. Vs an impact investor where the pool is much smaller and you still need to know the right person to make the right introduction. Sorry, sorry for TMI but this has been a frustrating recent realization because had I just been a pure capitalist the last year, probably would've made more headway vs focusing on impact space but I do believe in the concept of social entrepreneurship being the future of the world. It's taking the best of capitalism and philanthropy and merging them. Anyways..
Oh! One more question please if anybody has an opinion?
Oak Park - Where is the dividing line of safety? @shelato - I think you mentioned near Broadway was better vs 12th?
Oak Park is gentrifying. Oak Park is the historic center of African American community in Sacramento. Until quite recently if you were looking for a streetwalker, you could easily find them on second Avenue, on Broadway and on Stockton Blvd. But Oak Park is also close to downtown. Kevin Johnson who played for the Phx Suns and then later became Mayor of Sacramento grew up in Oak Park. When he retired from the NBA, he bought up a lot of Oak Park and he raised money to start charter schools to help turn the neighborhood around. While I think that helped what I think is really driving gentrification is proximity to downtown and this area being cheaper than downtown/midtown. People priced out of those areas, especially if you didn't grow up in Sacramento and didn't know the history were more willing to take a chance on it.
Bars and restaurants are showing up on Broadway between 99 and Martin Luther King Blvd. You can find houses that have been fixed up and houses that haven't. But there are more house that have been fixed up in that area than in the area of of Broadway between Martin Luther King Blvd and Stockton Blvd. As you go South on Stockton Blvd, south of Broadway the neighborhood gets worse because you are getting further away from downtown and from the UC Davis Medical Center and you start seeing more hookers.
Its that type of neighborhood. How safe do you feel bringing your wife and kids there? Some people might feel comfortable bringing their wife and kids into that, would you? I myself wouldn't do that, but others might. But I think there is money to be made there if you did and if you held on to the property long enough.
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Originally Posted by musicsaverdude
Rancho Cordova - There seem to be a lot of homes right at the top end of my price range near the river but based on some OLDER Reddit threads, Rancho had a bad rep (with exception of Anatolia) and I'm curious why? I get why Folsom St by the tracks seems sketch but did some other major thing happen in the past because frankly, they all sort of blend together? I know that's not the case but Rosemont, Rancho, Folsom, Roseville, Rocklin, they're all suburbs to me so unless there was some sort of mass murder or crazy environment/fire hazard, it seems cool to me?
Ok all, hope you have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend all! Domo arigato gozaimasu!
Historically, the principle employers in Rancho Cordova had been Mather Air Force Base and the Sacramento Army Depot. At the time there were also a lot of warehouses along the rail spur that light rail later was built upon adjacent to Folsom Blvd. That made the neighborhood kind of blue collar. In neighborhoods where you have military families you have people moving in and out of the area and kids often had no father at home while Dad was sent on a military rotation overseas. When all of the military bases were closed in the Sacramento region, that didn't help Rancho Cordova and a lot more of the owner occupied homes got turned into rentals.
When Rancho Cordova incorporated, it also got a lot of land zoned for future development. Some of the assessments on new development go into impact fees that are being used to fix up the older more established parts of Rancho Cordova. So Rancho Cordova is spending a bunch of money trying to fix up Folsom Blvd. Additionally because of higher land prices and just new residential growth along the highway 50 corridor, more office space is being built in this area and some of the warehouses, older shopping areas are being torn down to make room for this. My hunch is that as more new house are built in Rancho Cordova in that area South of Aerojet and South of the former Mather Air Force Base, the people living out there will mostly be working along highway 50 and that will spur a lot more office space construction near 50.
Oak Park is not the historically black area. Blacks started moving there after World War Two. Mainly using a loophole that allowed them to rent from a straw owner until the mortgage note was paid and then the deed passed on to them. Until housing covenants were ruled unconstitutional in the late 40's. By 1960 is was 20% black and in 1980 it was 60% black, and 1990 about 80%. So it was really only "very black" for a couple of decades before gentrification became too much to stop around 2010.
The historic black area was on the West End, basically downtown directly to the west of the capitol. In 1950 90% of ALL minorities lived there.
What I am getting at is The Sacramento Observer the African American newspaper for Sacramento was headquartered in Oak Park. The local Black Panther chapter was headquartered in Oak Park. A lot of the major African American churches in the area including St Paul Missionary Baptist Baptist and Shiloh Baptist Church were in Oak Park , I was told Cornel West went to one of them. It had the Guild theater. The cultural center of African American Community in Sacramento was for a while center in Oak Park. Where that is no longer really the case like it once was.
As rents are going up, that is changing. I think the Observer moved out to somewhere on Del Paso Blvd. The Sacramento Food Bank is still in Oak Park, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were to move out, because the neighborhood is in transition.
You're both right. Sacramento's Black community started out in the West End during the Gold Rush, then many moved from the West End to Oak Park due to redevelopment in the 1950s. Oak Park's largest ethnic group prior to redevelopment were probably Italians; after the war, they started moving to other neighborhoods like East Sacramento, especially once Black families started moving there in large numbers (aka "white flight"). But because most of Oak Park didn't have racial exclusion covenants, there was already a Black presence dating back to 1906 when George Dunlap built a house there. The first Black church in Oak Park, Kyles Temple AME Zion, was founded in 1916, and its founder won Sacramento's first anti-discrimination lawsuit. I think the Sacramento Observer started out in the West End as the Sacramento Outlook. Dr. William Lee moved it to Oak Park as redevelopment wasn't long after he renamed it the Observer, as did Shiloh Baptist Church, previously at 6th & O Streets.
So yes, Oak Park is a historically Black neighborhood, in that the 1950s-80s are long enough to count as "history," it just wasn't the first such neighborhood. And for @musicsaverdude's benefit, the West End downtown where the Black community started out was also where our Japantown was; they moved principally south into Southside and Richmond Grove after redevelopment, along with the Chinese and part of the Latino community. North Sacramento along Del Paso Boulevard, as Shelato notes, was another neighborhood of exodus after redevelopment, due to the presence of African American workers at McClellan AFB nearby, and that area's general lack of racial covenants (other than Woodlake, I think.) I believe Cornel West did attend Shiloh Baptist Church, but he grew up in Glen Elder near the Army Signal Depot.
Also, racial exclusion covenants were still enforced in California until 1967, despite having been ruled unconstitutional in the 1940s. From 1964-1967, California was denied federal redevelopment funds because of Proposition 14, which prevented enforcement of the Rumford Fair Housing Act (it was supposed to ban enforcement of racial covenants), which put California law in conflict with the federal Civil Rights Act, until it was overturned by the Supreme Court. Local attorneys like Nathaniel Colley (who also moved his office from the West End to Oak Park during this era) helped with that effort!
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