1) The key policy statement in this excellent article about Sacramento is that about 80% of Californians want to live in the suburbs and the future of our town and region depends on realizing that, and acting on it through the shaping of our public policy.
It is one thing to revitalize the urban core—as Sacramento has been doing for several years—but if it is done at the expense of our major attraction (wonderful suburbs and the American River Parkway), we will continue to see the negative effects of a continuing drop in the net migration rate.
An excerpt.
“Although a healthier downtown with reasonable density is good for the entire region, the high-density focus does not make a good fit for a predominately middle class, family-oriented region such as Sacramento. Unlike an elite city like San Francisco, Sacramento's growth has been fueled by an influx of educated, family-oriented residents – the populations that have been fleeing such high-priced places where the housing supply is constrained.
“Long-term demographic trends, and perhaps common sense, suggest that most people do not move to Sacramento to indulge in a "hip and cool" urban lifestyle. If someone craves the excitement, bright lights and glamorous industries of a dense city, River City pales compared with places like San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles.
“The fact Sacramento has fared far better than these cities over the past 15 years suggests the region's recent problems lie not in a lack of downtown condos and nightlife, but with a housing market that, as in much of California, has been totally out of whack. Once a consistently affordable locale, by the mid-1990s Sacramento's housing prices jumped almost nine times income growth, an unsustainable pace seen in a few areas such as Riverside, Miami and Los Angeles.
“As a result, the refugees from the coastal counties who had been coming to Sacramento for affordable housing stopped arriving. Net migration to the region, more than 36,000 in 2001, fell to less than 1,000 in 2006.”
2) Dan Walters column on taxes is excellent and informs us that the courts invalidated an attempt to get around the 2/3 voter approval requirement for new taxes for general use, and last month’s ruling might have helped kill a recent attempt to increase taxes for property owners along the Parkway to pay for Parkway improvements with a simple majority vote, something that is clearly a county-wide general-use issue requiring a 2/3 voter approval.
An excerpt.
“All of the local taxes must survive Proposition 218, a measure approved by voters as a follow-up to Proposition 13 that raises the voting threshold for local taxes that are used for general purposes, such as the proposed Santa Clara tax for schools.
“That hurdle was driven home in a Supreme Court decision last month that invalidated another Santa Clara County tax, a property assessment imposed by the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority in 2001 to finance expansion.
“The assessment violated Proposition 218 because it failed to connect the revenue being collected to specific public improvements, the court said in a ruling that contained this somewhat acidic observation: "An assessment calculation that works backward by starting with an amount taxpayers are likely to pay, and then determined an annual spending budget based thereon, does not comply with the law governing assessments, either before or after Proposition 218."
