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Originally Posted by rampant_jwalker
I think one good strategy would be building up the industrial sector, so Sacramento becomes known as a productive city. Industrial jobs will help the population continue to grow.
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Again we have an advantage with the weight of tradition--we were an industrial city for our first century, state government was a very minor employer until the mid-20th century. The Railyards are the perfect example of this, but they weren't the only one--we were an industrial hub. People tend to assume that anything having to do with food processing is a "farm town" thing, but it's actually big city business--look at Chicago, the ultimate "cow town" with its slaughterhouses, or Los Angeles' suburban growth based on the citrus industry. A lot of that stuff is gone now, but we still have the buildings where the two biggest canneries in the country were located (one of which is part of the largest almond packing operation in the world), and a complex that people think is a cannery now but actually did nothing but make cans for other canneries to fill--more than any other similar facility in the nation at its peak. With the growing interest in "farm-to-table" and locavorism and the return of interest in craft/artisanal production of food and drinks, we could certainly step back to our roots in industrial food production, assuming that transportation networks become more localized and once again based on rail transportation--given the price of fuel these days, I wouldn't rule it out entirely.
And we still have a lot of industrial capacity, big and small--the aforementioned Blue Diamond packing plant, Campbell's Soup, and other examples--we even still make trains, at the Siemens light rail/electric locomotive plant near Florin.
The problem is that "global cities" generally aren't big industrial producers. Industrial production is an interim to higher-order functions--service economies, banking, information economies. As a city of administrators and information specialists, we might be better suited to use that existing brainpower for higher-order needs than packing vegetables (although there are a lot of vegetables that need packing, and plenty of folks who could use the jobs.)
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Another strategy would be to surpass San Francisco in something, anything. Fashion? Sustainable technology development? Culinary arts? Furniture Design? If we take fashion design as an example, there will need to be a world renowned fashion design school here, as well as fabric suppliers, and an active fashion design industry built around at least one major high-end label. A first step would be attracting a school with a fashion design program with potential to be great. Some private donations to the schools endowment would allow them to bring in famous designers to teach and lecture. Then the school could begin to be very selective, choosing the best applicants to accept. Talented individuals would come to Sacramento to study, and a few would choose to stay and work here post-graduation. Maybe a few former classmates would succeed in starting a trend-setting clothing label. Then all of a sudden Sacramento is known as a hub for fashion design, and it takes off from there.
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Creative scenes typically don't happen due to government subsidy--they happen when there is enough room for a creative scene to emerge. A school of fashion design might be nice, but it's hard to set out to break into such a field. Also note that this does not count as an industry--even in fashion centers like New York and Los Angeles, the real work of creating clothes doesn't happen there, it is done overseas and shipped here. So counting it as an industry is hard to justify.
Generally, creative scenes are fostered by cheap rent, a critical mass of creatives in a relatively small geographic area, and enough flexibility (or at least ability to pass under official radar) to set up creative events that cross genre lines--from fine art to hip hop shows.
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A less strategic approach can be found in Portland and Vancouver, where urban planning, design, architecture, and development trends have created interesting urban experiences that attract new residents. Creative people are drawn to those cities because they are dense, walkable, and full of variety. Sacramento is on the right track as long as there is some population growth to warrant the continued development of housing in the central city. When there are enough people living in an urban environment in close proximity to each other, spontaneous kinds of productive enterprise start to happen more frequently. Sacramento's identity will form and take shape on its own as new ideas and movements emerge.
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Portland used an urban growth boundary to limit outward growth and redirect population to the city center. Vancouver's physical limitations had a similar effect--they grew upward because they couldn't grow outward. As long as the Sacramento region's ability to sprawl outward is unrestricted, we'll continue to build more "landscrapers" in the suburbs and fewer skyscrapers downtown, with resulting lack of central city density.
Case in point: We already have an art/design college in town, but it's in a low-rise office park in Natomas instead of a walkable neighborhood near the central city, so the students live all over the region and drive to class instead of living nearby and being part of a campus/student community where creative interaction takes place. Personally I'd love to see it move downtown, where it would become part of a neighborhood instead of being something folks visit by car that goes dark at night.