Yes indeed.
That’s what I thought. I spent a good share of my formative years in the Sacramento area (mainly Citrus Heights and Fair Oaks). I haven’t been back there for about 8 years but still occasionally keep posted on what’s going on there via old family friends and the net.
Anyway, if I may tie in my childhood memories to the topic of this thread, one thing I noticed about Rancho Cordova and the other Sacramento suburbs like Carmichael, Foothill Farms, and Citrus Heights was that they really didn’t have a center to them (Fair Oaks, incidentally, was a notable exception). They just seemed to consist of large tracts of housing periodically bisected by four-to-six lane avenues/boulevards lined with fast-food franchises, chain restaurants, mini-malls, strip shopping centers, and a few large malls here and there. As I referred to in an earlier post, I felt I was experiencing first-hand what Gertrude Stein meant about a place having “no ‘there’ there.” (Although I do know that this quote was about Oakland and had nothing to do with post-WWII suburban sprawl.)
Sorry, the cyber cafe in my town closed and now I am two hours of hard travel via bush taxi to the nearest Internet connection. C’est la vie.
This is a bizarre hijack. Rancho Cordova. I never knew it in the good days. Mostly I saw it’s short spectacular decline, which coincided with my growing up years. Simply put, the base closed, the people who could afford to move moved to newer sexier suburbs, the Sacramento city council decided to use this long chunk of sprawl as a bit of a dumping ground. The only people left were old people and people too poor to move elsewhere. Within a matter of a few years this once shining example of early 1960’s suburbia because full of gangs, meth houses, and general downtroddeness.
Not that it was all bad. It became a pretty big center of immigration. I’m ever grateful for my international cast of neighbors and schoolmates, and I’m sure that palyed a role in where I am in my life right now. I remember when the big Korean supermarket opened- there were so many Eastern Europeans shopping there that they had to open a Russian/Ukrainian aisle. That’s something a little beautiful. Diversity will be all of Sacramento’s saving grace.
It seems like Rancho has been saved for now. They incorporated and became their own city, and now they are able to create the kind of growth and sense of community that the city of Sacramento wasn’t concerned with cultivating. Although there is still no center, ands till no street life to speak of, at least you are less likely to get beat up walking down her long sprawled empty streets.
But honestly I feel like the whole place should have never been built in the first place. The problem with suburbs is that the affluent are always moving outwards, to newer shinier suburbs. And so a ring of near-abandoned houses with no reason to exist and quickly declining infrastructure surroundes our every city, ever expanding, disrupted only now and then by a wave of gentrification that repeats the process in miniature.
Once streets are laid, they stay there just about forever. We need to keep this in mind when building new development. Disposable developments like Rancho Corodova will continue to cause problems for generations.
I nominate this as the coolest-reason-not-keep-up-with-a-thread ever! Makes me feel so pedestrian.
I’m sure it’s only cool from the receiving end.
That’s funny, my first thought was whether he was talking about Reston. I guess this thing is actually happening all over though.
Downtown Fairfax is next.
Yes…for that, even sven is forgiven! 
Well, except for the fact that Virginia Beach has never had any kind of downtown area - it’s just miles and miles and miles of sprawl. Since this Town Center that’s being built is apparently an attempt to create a downtown area, I guess in its own way it will be authentic and original! 
Basically all that’s happening is old stores and businesses are being torn down to make way for new ones, so really nothing to weep about there.
We moved away from Virginia Beach 7 years ago and I’ll be going back to see a few friends this coming weekend. I used to live just a couple miles from where the Town Center is being built. The housing prices in that area have skyrocketed - I cannot believe the prices that are now being asked for the 50s and 60s-era tract homes that make up most of that residential area. These homes range from ‘nothing special’ to ‘butt ugly,’ but are selling for $150,000-$200,000 more than what we sold ours for when we left. I’m gobsmacked, frankly.
Virginia Beach and its environs are mainly military towns, and one wonders who can afford those prices - military salaries certainly haven’t kept up. The area I lived in was considered desirable at the time we lived there because it was safe, a good place to raise kids, and the prices were reasonable for young military families. It looks like they’ve effectively been priced out.
I don’t disagree with your other points, but my girlfriend and I, as well as several of my friends, attend a comedy club semi-regularly, even in 2007. Like 3-4 times a year regularly. It is a fun 10-12 bucks, drink some alcohol, relax and laugh at the monkey on the stage.
It is often packed, and sometimes even sold out. So the answer to your question is, A lot of people, at least in this area still go to comedy clubs.
That’s similar to what’s being proposed in the city where I live, Spokane Valley, WA (albeit on a smaller scale). However, unlike Virginia Beach, the area that was incorporated as the City of Spokane Valley initially consisted of about five or six unincorporated communities that, after WWII, sprawled together when the farms and apple orchards that used to separate them were replaced by suburbia. Still, most of these communities had their own small business districts (i.e., town centers). Unfortunately, the county road department, in its infinite wisdom saw fit to totally gut the town center of one of these communities (Dishman) when it widened the main east-west drag to six lanes and put in a north-south couplet in the 1970’s. The six-lane widening project also wiped out the front store parking for the business district in the Valley’s biggest community, Opportunity. Such myopic planning by the county was one of the reasons why we decided to form our own city. However, in a painfully ironic twist, just as the Spokane Valley city planners are trying to bring a new town center into being, the nearly 100-year old buildings that make up the old Opportunity town center are about to be demolished for a Rite-Aid strip shopping center. :mad: