POPULATION

Growing Pains: As area's population booms, officials scramble to cope

By Mary Lynne Vellinga
Bee Staff Writer
(Published Aug. 22, 1999)

From her tiny government office above Sacramento's L Street, Mary Heim issues the numbers that throw communities into a panic.

Through births and migration, California's population is expected to balloon by 12 million more people over the next two decades, Heim says, and nearly one million of them will wind up living in the Sacramento region.

Heim, 46, is deputy director of the state Department of Finance's demographic unit, and the person primarily responsible for predicting California's population 20 or even 40 years hence.

In the six-county Sacramento region -- including Sacramento, Yolo, Placer, El Dorado, Sutter and Yuba counties -- Heim and her staff project that the population will grow from an estimated 1.85 million last year to 2.7 million in 2020 -- a 46 percent increase.

The projections are forcing local governments throughout the region to examine their various approaches to growth -- whether they want to encourage it, and how, or whether they want to try to slow it down. In doing so, they're also confronted with the factors, including some of their own development policies, that contribute to the rapid rate at which suburbia is consuming California's rural landscape.

The shape of growth to come The six-county Sacramento area is expected to grow rapidly in the next two decades, raising questions about how to best accomodate more people, jobs--and traffic. The statistics below show the projected increase in daily commute trips to three of the area's growth centers.
Commute trips each day from other parts of the region to:	1995	2015 (projected)
Sacramento	130,100	174,300
Rancho Cordova	80,100	120,600
Roseville-Rocklin	56,400	115,800

Sacramento leaders, for example, say they must steer more growth into existing neighborhoods to ensure the region is an attractive and easy place to live in the next century, but economic, political and policy barriers have made their task difficult.

One local official called Heim's population predictions "staggering." But the state demographer said the numbers aren't intended to scare anyone -- they're designed to help leaders around the state plan for the future.

"Hopefully, groups will get together and say, 'This is how we're going to accommodate (growth), or not accommodate it,' " Heim said. "Our philosophy has never been (to say), 'This is where we'll be in 50 years,' but 'If current trends continue, this is where we'll be in 50 years.' "

Some Sacramento-area communities, such as Roseville, Lincoln and Folsom, have enthusiastically embraced expansion, while others, such as Davis and Loomis, have pledged to hold the line -- preserving their open spaces, their small-town character, their farmland.

Throughout the Sacramento Valley, groups of community leaders also have banded together and called for more regional cooperation and a lessening of the brutal competition among local governments for sales taxes generated by shopping malls and "big-box" discount stores such as Target and Wal-Mart.

"I don't think 'no growth' is an option; you can't really draw a line in the sand and say no more," said Kevin Eckery, president and chief executive officer of Valley Vision, a group dedicated to promoting regional cooperation in the Sacramento area. "I think to start off, we should get a firm handle on what the growth numbers really are. Second, we have to take a good hard look at whether we've created too many barriers to local governments working together. . . . If everybody prepares for the same amount of growth, we're going to be overbuilt."

For maturing metropolitan areas such as Sacramento, the challenge is to revitalize urban neighborhoods that must compete with an ever-expanding ring of suburbs that offer amenity-packed homes, parks and better schools.

That challenge is no longer confined to the inner city. While downtown Sacramento is enjoying a renaissance of attention and investment from people who like its urban feel, older suburban areas such as south Sacramento, Citrus Heights, North Highlands and parts of Arden Arcade have been hurt by the flight of middle-class homeowners and businesses to newer suburbs farther down the freeway.

When Chevy's, for example, opened a new Mexican eatery in booming Elk Grove, it closed one just a few miles north off of Mack Road. Mervyn's also closed its Florin Road store in June after opening an outlet to the south in Laguna.

"Businesses want to be where the new residential growth is going to be, so that's where the malls go and the big box (stores) go," said John O'Farrell, administrator of the Sacramento County Community Development and Neighborhood Assistance Agency. "Believe me, every major metropolitan area in America is trying to figure out a way to reverse that trend."

While some cities crave big retail stores for their sales-tax revenue, state controller Kathleen Connell came out with a proposal last week that would reduce the dependence of local governments on sales taxes, saying the change would encourage better land-use decisions.

For now, however, communities that win the war for sales taxes, such as Roseville, have much more money to lavish on their citizens in the form of schools, parks and services. Roseville currently collects about $430 in sales taxes per citizen every year, compared with about $450 for Beverly Hills -- the state's epitome of wealth -- and just $100 for unincorporated Sacramento County, said Sacramento County's chief financial officer, Geoff Davey.

David Chamberlain, 45, is one of those fueling the exodus to the foothills. After living in Santa Barbara, Newport Beach and other parts of the state, he moved to the Sacramento area with his family in October to take a job as vice president of Internet services at Packard Bell NEC. Though he works in Sacramento County, Chamberlain chose to live in a neighborhood in Roseville on the edge of Granite Bay.

Slow going Category F traffic, the worst "level of service," is constant stop-and-go traffic at a crawl. By 2022, the estimated number of F-level miles traveled by Sacramento-area drivers will increase by 467%.
1997	2022 (projected)
542,000	3,072,000

"I love to run outdoors, and there are all these beautiful trails out there by the lake," Chamberlain said, adding, "We just loved the schools."

Chamberlain and his wife, Colleen, also looked at houses in Sacramento County near the American River, but decided they wanted something newer. His 45-minute commute may seem long to some, but it's a breeze compared with the two hours it used to take him to drive to work in Los Angeles.

Like Chamberlain, high-level executives who come to work for Sacramento County government often choose to live in the foothills, said O'Farrell, the county official.

"A lot of people are moving from San Jose, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale. Once they sell their house in the Bay Area, they have a lot of money. They're going to go where the real estate is high."

O'Farrell's agency has been working for several years to develop an "early warning system" for communities on the edge -- a list of indicators that could be monitored so county officials would know where they need to target public investment dollars.

Nearly all politicians these days would agree that more needs to be done to bolster distressed neighborhoods.

At every conference dealing with growth, for example, panels inevitably meet to discuss the importance of "infill" development, the practice of building on vacant land in the already-urbanized area. By emphasizing such inner-city projects, the theory goes, local planners will reduce the pressure for continued growth of new subdivisions and help maintain healthy real estate values in urban neighborhoods.

Sacramento City Manager Bob Thomas has declared investing in the urban core as one of his priorities. He is assembling an economic development team to concentrate on attracting business to the city's aging boulevards -- Franklin, Florin, Broadway, Stockton, Alhambra.

"I think in the next 10 years we're going to determine what we're going to look like at build-out," Thomas said of the city. "How can we ensure quality of life and quality development? If we can't, then I think we will have a city at build-out that we don't want to retire in."

But in the Sacramento area, where large parcels of relatively cheap land are still available on the outskirts of town, the incentives for developers to continue pushing farther into the farm fields and foothills are enormous.

Inner-city projects are difficult to pull off and usually mean far smaller profits, especially in economically depressed areas.

Allen W. Warren, a developer who grew up in Del Paso Heights, has built some of the few new suburban-style housing developments in that neighborhood and in Meadowview. "I don't know of anybody else doing these kinds of projects in these areas," he said. "They're very difficult to do."

And even as politicians talk about preserving the inner city, some of their decisions play a key role in allowing older neighborhoods to deteriorate while new ones attract wealthy families.

Sacramento County's growth boundary, adopted in 1993, has been hailed as a victory for environmentalists. But it was a slim one. The boundary takes in far more land than most environmentalists viewed as appropriate -- some 95,000 undeveloped acres. Several large parcels were included at the last minute at the request of developers.

Other jurisdictions, such as El Dorado County and Placer County, have no growth boundaries at all. And cities such as Lincoln and Folsom have moved aggressively to annex nearby land -- a move seen as a precursor to development.

"It becomes difficult when it becomes a regional problem," O'Farrell said of Sacramento County's attempt to contain growth within a boundary. "We can hold the line, and we have for the most part, but when you have some very appealing amenities in El Dorado County and Placer County, nice homes in the rolling foothills, schools that are relatively new, beautiful malls going in, what's not to like about that?"

Under the current system, government building codes and fee policies also contribute to sprawl by making it more difficult to rebuild the inner city, said those who have devoted considerable time and money to urban projects.

Bob Slobe, whose family helped found North Sacramento, has spent years investing in that economically depressed neighborhood. He said the city often throws up bureaucratic barriers to inner city projects, even as it professes to want them.

For instance, he said, when one of his North Sacramento business tenants wanted a place to park its company cars, Slobe went to the city for permission to add a new gate to the chain-link fence around a parking lot he owns in North Sacramento. He was told it would cost $5,000 for a special use permit, which would take six months to obtain.

"The incentive is there in rhetoric. They say, 'Go get 'em Bobby, build in the urban core,' " Slobe said. "But you try to do it, and it becomes impossible."

Back in her state office, high above the traffic on L Street, Mary Heim continues to crunch the numbers that predict massive change for Sacramento and the rest of California.

She bases her predictions on past trends -- historical birth and death rates, past migration patterns -- and extrapolates into the future. She also incorporates feedback from local communities about how fast they think they are going to grow. If she reads about a new development or a slow-growth ordinance in the newspaper, she factors that in. It's an inexact science, she admits, "a daily lesson in humility."

And, judging from her track record, it's more likely that Heim is underestimating the size of the Sacramento area's future population than overestimating it.

When she started doing population forecasts in 1983, Heim said, "I was forecasting that in 2020 we would have 33 million people (in California). That's what we have today."

Population growth 1990 population and forecasts for 2000, 2010 and 2020
	1990	2000	2010	2020
Yuba County	58,776	63,983	73,935	84,610
Sutter County	64,967	82,040	100,437	116,408
Yolo County	141,504	164,010	194,977	225,321
El Dorado County	127,396	163,197	215,155	256,119
Placer County	174,979	243,646	325,684	391,245
Sacramento County	1,049,010	1,212,527	1,436,286	1,651,765