Elk grove

 

Lately ive been watching a series of tennis and sports events out of places like Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Qatar, Doha, including golf, soccer, beach soccer which I've never seen before but probably has been around as long as beaches have been around.

One interesting thing ive noticed is the overviews of some of these oil rich desert cities is quite amazing. Especially at night, the emergence of a metropolitan landscape comparable to urban environments such as chicago, new, york, and many other modern (old) cities worldwide.

So, i got to thinking about elk grove. For those who dont live around sacramento california ( California by itself, one of the top five economies in the world, though you wouldn't know it by all the hype over its impending bankruptcy) should know that forty years ago, elk grove, was an all rural, old post gold rush community made up of farms, oak trees, and though i don't know for sure, maybe a lot of elk.

In the past forty years, land development there has been a keystone example of suburban development for people who want to escape the drudgery of urbanity, though have to make the sacrifice of driving everywhere to go shopping.

Well, it was inevitable that the growth of sacramento proper met the growth of suburbia (elk grove in this case) and elk grove took up the banner of self cityhood. 

Unfortunately for elk grove and many other small, fast growing towns and rural communities, they found they still have to comply with many broader regional and state mandates, especially when it comes down to the national crisis of homelessness and its parent, the lack of low cost housing, sometimes arbitrarily called affordable housing, which in today's world with the cost of contracts and construction is always a misnomer, but it looks good on paper.

Ive come this far but as yet haven't made my point yet.

The particular issue in some places like elk grove  and other small, older communities who want to retain that rural background, especially in their old town downtown main street america style, are under pressure to build more up to date "low cost apartments" right in the midst of their one connection to the simpler past that suburbanites enjoy with  outdoorsy cafe coffee and pastry, like they do in paris or rome, but never did in gold rush era towns.

After much hoopla, mostly limited to the small elk grove tabloids, the battle over where to put its low-cost apartments it was being forced to comply with, was by deciding they would put it somewhere else, further away from old town the better. This was not a simple thing though. It would entail having to tinker with local, state land use requirements, rights of ways, buying of property, all causing either money restraints or time-consuming regulation statutes.

Time will tell how it all turns out, but it seems obvious to me, if not to you, that the housing crisis is going to go on for a while, the real question being will the "right of people to have a space where they can be, go the same way as the rights of privacy, opinions, and hairstyles went?

Let me just finish by saying, "Were not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy."

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