Picture of the week

Gated community

Outside the walls of a new gated community development in El Dorado Hills.

The sprawl in El Dorado Hills and Folsom in the Sacramento region is on a rampage that seems to know no bounds.  With the price of housing continuing to go up to record levels, it is a lucrative business to the developers and numerous other businesses that support such construction. The county and municipal planners happily approves such projects given the new tax revenue that this creates.  While a lot of these people involved in such projects are getting rich, there seems to be a lack of acknowledgement on the pending problems that such sprawl will inflict on the region as a whole, and any consideration to the quality of life for existing residents.  Rather than try to encourage more infill development and revitalization within existing communities and help keep them strong, its seems more profitable to just expand out into previously rural farmlands and convert them to suburbs, while neglecting the core neighborhoods.  As a symptom of this, existing shopping malls like those found in Citrus Heights or closer to downtown Sacramento are dying, while newer ones on the outskirts are expanding.

More traffic, longer commute times, noise, air quality, heat islands, less open space, water quality and shortages will all be in our future.  Additional images reflecting this trend can be found below.  Some of these were shown at an exhibit I held at the Sacramento Viewpoint Gallery back in March of this year, focusing on the endangered landscapes of this open space.

If you are interested in reading more about the dark money behind the Folsom Ranch project south of 50 and the disinformation campaign to put a positive spin on it, there is a good in-depth article from Sacramento News and Review here. Unfortunately, the mainstream press such as the Sacramento Bee tends to sidestep the uglier side of these issues, and not giving them adequate scrutiny.  This is not surprising given their financial livelyhood in the form of advertisers is hostage to this real estate development complex.

By clicking on this adjacent thumbnail you can view a timelapse sequence of an open space area off Scott Road transitioning from a green pasture to a bulldozed parcel of dirt for a future suburb in Folsom Ranch.