San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A’s temporary home already a major league city
The Oakland A’s are baseball’s biggest losers. But their new temporary home — West Sacramento — is a winner.
No California city has had a better 21st century than West Sacramento. The municipality has grown in population and prosperity with striking speed, even as California has stagnated.
The A’s will spend 2025 through at least 2027 playing in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark until its new stadium is built in their future home, Las Vegas. Perhaps their relocation will bring West Sac, as it’s often called, more of the notice it merits, especially in city halls and among state policymakers.
The city’s success is best explained through three paradoxes.
The first paradox: West Sac grew rich because it was so poor. Sacramento became a city in 1849, but West Sacramento didn’t incorporate until 1987. For most of the 20th century, it was an afterthought — an industrial town of seedy hotels, vacant lots and warehouses.
All that kept land prices low, which made West Sac attractive as the region became more expensive. A first wave of development, beginning in the 1990s, focused on the riverfront and included the A’s future ballpark, which opened in 2000.
This brings me to the second paradox: West Sac achieved big success because it was small. A quarter century ago, it had just 30,000 residents and a median household income of $32,000. (Today those figures are 54,000 people and $87,000). The powerful unions, environmental groups and state agencies that often delay or block California projects had little interest in a poor small city.
So, the ballpark took just 19 months to build. Businesses found they could launch quickly. And while housing construction languished elsewhere, West Sacramento built market and affordable housing, as well as entire new neighborhoods, at some of the fastest rates in California. The small city also brought in large new retailers, most notably the Sacramento region’s first IKEA, which produced the sales taxes that West Sac could use for more projects and better services.
Such speedy development points to the third paradox: West Sac benefited
because of its distance from and its proximity to the city of Sacramento.
The two cities are just across the Sacramento River from each other. But West Sac is a separate municipality situated in a different county, Yolo, with a mix of rural areas and smaller cities. Sacramento runs on constant political competition, which can distract from the slow and painstaking work of governance. West Sac has had the good fortune of stable political leadership for over a generation.
The embodiment of that stability was Christopher Cabaldon, a legislative aide and higher education administrator who first moved to West Sac after taking the wrong freeway off-ramp. He ended up serving on the City Council and then as mayor for more than two decades.
In a small community, he could move fast.
“We focus on results as opposed to process,” he told Governing magazine in 2019. “A lot of other communities are into community meetings and workshops and planning and task forces and consultant reports, and, no, that’s not us.”
In contrast to Sacramento, where the city government is prone to obsess about creating signature attractions (an arena, an aquarium), to draw visitors, West Sac focused on building the housing and amenities to attract more residents.
Its proximity to the state Capitol eventually became a draw. As California’s growing state government brought more people to Sacramento
and affordable housing became ever harder to find, people took notice of West Sac, with its new homes, new neighborhoods and new restaurants. Many West Sac residents lived so close to the Capitol that they could walk across the Tower Bridge and be at work in minutes.
In 2014, West Sac was named the “Most Livable City in America” by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The honor only made West Sac more ambitious. In 2017, with more families moving in, the city devoted its growing revenue to West Sacramento Home Run, an initiative offering universal preschool and college saving accounts.
Ironically, the very same state government that helped West Sac grow also produces regulations that make it harder for California cities to grow. Now that West Sac is bigger, its leaders confront more obstacles and opposition. But West Sac remains a great counter-example of what California cities might do if they had more freedom.
The A’s decision to come to town brought public joy to the Sacramento region, where residents say they can’t wait to go to the West Sac ballpark and marvel at famous Dodgers and Yankees stars as they hit homers against the weak, and temporary, home team.
Of course, the real marvel won’t be the ballplayers, but the small city they’ll be visiting.