Another triumph for West Sacramento
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 2027 playing in West Sacramento’s minor league ballpark as a 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). And 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 both market and affordable housing, as well as entire new neighborhoods, at the some of the fastest rates in California. The small city also brought in large new retailers, most notably the Capitol 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 both because of its distance from, and its proximity to, the city of Sacramento.
The two cities lie just across the river from each other. But West Sac is a separate municipality situated in a different county, Yolo. Sacramento runs on constant political competition, which can distract from the 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 served on the city council and then as mayor for more than two decades.
“We focus on results as opposed to process,” he told Governing in 2019. “Other communities are into community meetings and workshops and planning and task forces and consultant reports, and, no, that’s not us.”
West Sac’s proximity to the Capitol was a significant draw. As California’s growing state government brought more people to Sacramento, finding housing became harder. So more people took notice of West Sac, with its new neighborhoods, some of them close enough to the Capitol that residents could walk across the Tower Bridge to work.
Ironically, the very same state government whose proximity 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 has brought public joy. Many Capitol region residents say they can’t wait to go to the West Sac ballpark and marvel at the famous stars of the Dodgers and Yankees 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.
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.