Newston

The Sacramento area is readying itself for another 100,000 housal units by 2030, through the development of three large swaths of land to the east -- New Brighton, Newbridge, and Cordova Hills.

These planned developments are all but certain to be approved shortly by the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. Certain, because sprawl based moneyed interests have always held sway and always will. The regional economy is based chiefly on sprawl, from the aggregate miners to the baseboard installers to the re-fi lenders. If we didn't continue to approve sprawl this region would simply fall apart, for we have no other economic model with which to stand on.

With this approval we can be assured of three things: the new developments will not be self-sufficient; regional transit options will be completely ignored; and every one of them will look just like every other one built in the past forty years save for their newness, which will attract middle class money to occupy them, fleeing the earlier built run-down suburban slums of Elk Grove, Natomas, and Rancho Cordova, slums which they will inevitably become.

You also might also add a fourth item -- that a handful of landowners/developers get insanely wealthy in the process -- but this is the least of my concerns. This will happen regardless; it really doesn't concern me whatsoever. Just like our national obsession with CEO pay/compensation, this is just a distraction to the real issues. The continuation of sprawl is the real issue, that we continue to build places not worth living in, places not worth caring about. Newbridge will, after fifteen years, become just another suburban shithole, wholly car dependent, overgrown with incomplete and uncared for vegetation, occupied by another cadre of mortgaged-to-the-balls homehowners, homeowners in name only, while the new "community" of Newston will be approved in the 2030 plan, another fifteen miles distant, ready to lure those with means ever further away.

Newston, New Bridge -- the names mean nothing. These will become just another set of suburban losses by 2070, just like the myriad places we already have that are worthless...worth less each passing day.