When we look outside our hidey-hole we see that not every place follows the unincorporated Sacramento County model. Sometimes we learn from the experiences in other places where things seem to work better than here. Other times, mistakes made somewhere else can be instructive. Things that make you go, "hmmm..."

Arden Arcade isn't some kind of pastoral setting with more cows than people. It's been fully built-out for over 60 years. In round figures, it has 100,000 people packed in at 6000 people per square mile. In 2009, when told the community remained unincorporated as though it was still a rural area, a person who grew up in Arden Arcade and moved away in the 1970s said, "That's ridiculous. It's old…

Land use planning can be a difficult subject. For starters, it's detailed, convoluted public policy stuff that normal people find boring and/or hard to understand. It's also how some people (investors, developers) make a lot of money, how others do business (real estate brokers, construction firms, building materials suppliers and contractors, land use consultants and lawyers) or make a living (…