Rachel Dovey | Next City

Sacramento streetcar rendering from a report prepared for the city by URS Corp.With cranes dominating skylines nationwide, redevelopment and displacement are often portrayed as the yin and yang of city makeovers — one a dark but inevitable counterpart to the other. But gentrification, as Susie Cagle wrote for Next City last year, is not necessarily “an act of nature.” Usually, it’s the culmination of policy and investment choices. With that in mind, as California’s capital paves the political landscape for a streetcar — an attempt to both spur and piggyback on new development — city leaders have some decisions to make.

To realize what’s at stake, you need to understand the city’s geography, which I wrote about last year. Sacramento’s downtown, occupied from 9 to 5 by state workers, was the after-hours home to some of the city’s lowest earners — mostly renters — when census data was collected last. But according to long-range planner Tom Pace (with whom I spoke for that 2014 article), many state workers still commute in from the suburbs, meaning that the central core needs more housing of all kinds. Through an arena, several mixed-use projects and an intermodal transportation facility, city leaders want to fill the area with walkable development. The streetcar, which will get a $30 million boost from property owners along its proposed line, is part of that vision. Read more