[wburg]

ozone: I remember you're a fellow Midtowner, didn't mean to offend by my presumption but I guess I don't run into as many Debbie Downers as you do. Maybe I really am not able to recognize those traits? Either that or I scare them off.

Personally I think a lot of the talented/creative people moving away has to do with the fact that we share a state with two of the greatest cities for entertainment, the arts and culture on the face of the planet. People around the world move to Los Angeles and San Francisco to be part of their creative culture, and it's a lot easier for a Sacramentan to move to one of those cities than someone from, say, Ohio--you don't even need to get a new state ID or pay out-of-state tuition. Trying to directly compare ourselves with LA and SF is never a fair comparison. Cities like Portland and Austin became their respective regions' arts and culture destinations, in part due to the relative lack of other big international cities nearby--they really aren't any bigger than Sacramento, but because they have established themselves as creative hubs, they keep that population instead of having them move quite so easily to California (although I have met more than a few Portland expats here in Sacramento...)

I like the idea of a university in the Railyards, and have discussed the idea on other online forums (you may well have too, under other usernames.) Not where the arena is planned--they have that crammed into a six-acre corner of the Amtrak parking lot, really for no other reason than the city already owns the land (and overpaid through the nose for it.) There is a lot more room in the greater Railyards (north of the relocated tracks) for a university complex--the whole area is around 240 acres, and a lot of it isn't spoken for yet.

Using the proximity of UC Berkeley and UCSF to try and justify another UC isn't that bad an approach, but keep in mind that Berkeley's university came first, and both were established in the 19th Century when California's first generation of millionaires were trying to establish legacies. The UC system, as well as the state of California, is in pretty rough shape these days.

We could always try to secure the legacy of someone local with those bucks, but most of them don't live in Sacramento proper and might be more interested in, say, placing a new university campus on greenfield in return for the right to build even more suburbs on even more greenfield.

Another approach might be to encourage already-extant schools in the Sacramento region to relocate or open new expanded facilities in the Railyards, assuming we can find a way to pay for those facilities--which, as always, is kind of the rub--or, ideally, a new private college of some sort.

In either case, having an actual college campus in the central city would bring focus and attention to the already-present academic community in downtown/midtown. There are already a lot of small campuses in or adjacent to the central city--law schools, graduate programs, satellite campuses--but you generally don't notice them because most just take up a few rooms in an existing office building, with limited traditional "university" facilities, and the students seldom live downtown. There has always been a large number of students in the central city, but they go to Sac State or UCD or Sac City and live downtown because it's a fun place to live if you're in your twenties. There are still some fraternity houses in the central city, which have been around for ages. And of course we already have the coffeehouses and used bookstores of a college town, just without the immediately accessible college.

Another benefit of building a university campus in the Railyards: an undergraduate campus would create a fairly massive demand for dormitory housing, which is high-density and well suited to urban infill, and because students generally don't have high incomes, it could be used for a large proportion of the "low-income" housing component for the Railyards build-out. Students are also ideal "introductory" central city residents: they're generally single, spend money disproportionate to their income, and like late-night and entertainment amenities.

So yeah, I definitely agree that a university in the Railyards would be a far better idea than an arena on top of the Amtrak parking lot. If you're serious about pursuing that effort, Ozone, maybe we should hang out sometime and talk about it.