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Who knew? Almost no one back in 2003. Back
then, “Northern California” meant the San Francisco
Bay Area to most people. “The Good Life” tells the story
of a North Valley built on consensus that was able to make long
term plans for the betterment of the entire region.
“I JUST LIKE THE PACE UP HERE”
On the morning of May 22, 2025, Miriam Turner,
a 42-year old real estate agent, checked her teeth in a window reflection
on the Red Bluff split level, 3 bedroom, 3 bath she was showing
that morning. (“IMMACULATE, PERFECT FOR RETIREMENT”
was how she listed it). While Miriam knew she was good saleswoman,
she had to wonder if there was anything else that could explain
her amazing success over the past 3 years?
Even the oldtimers in the office kept saying the
change in home sales seemed less like a bubble and more like a wholesale
shift in the market. The closest answer she could figure was something
a buyer had said at a closing two weeks earlier: “I just like
the pace up here, not too urban, not too suburban, but I don’t
feel like I’m in the sticks either.”
A real estate columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle’s
even styled the North Valley as “The Goldilocks Market”
of 2025. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.
Sure, “location, location, location”
still mattered, Miriam thought. But the balance that had been found
between the arts and the sciences, work and play, body and mind,
old and young, male and female. . . the balance — that’s
what made for the good life, and that’s what she emphasized
to prospective buyers.
BALANCE
Just then, she heard the familiar hum of a hydrogen
fuel cell vehicle pulling up the driveway. Looking out the window,
she saw a silver Ford Celera SUV carrying a middle-aged couple come
to a stop.
Joseph Barrett and his wife were lawyers from Sacramento
looking for a new home away from the constant noise and congestion
of the state capital. As she showed them the sunroom upstairs, she
broke away from her pitch and decided to indulge her curiosity.
“John, I have to ask, how did you come across Red Bluff, of
all places?”
The 60-year old attorney, dressed in frayed khakis
and a faded green button down shirt smiled slowly. “Way too
many depositions.”
Apparently, John had been part of a small wave
of lawyers called up to participate in the hundreds of planning
meetings (sometimes extending into the late night) that precipitated
the North Valley’s stunning success. In his day, he had represented,
to limited success, the interests of those who resisted the nascent
movement towards regional approaches to selected problems.
Oh yes, the meetings. Between business leaders
and elected officials, of course, but also between parents and teachers,
between transportation planners and environmentalists, between representatives
of different ethnic groups, between city planners and real estate
developers (Miriam even recalled attending a few of the real estate
forums), between air quality monitors and industrialists, between
experts on water and agricultural researchers.
However, in 2005, researchers at a North Valley
think tank pushed local interests to see how careful planning and
coordination could produce positive sum solutions. We could have
economic development and open spaces too; we could move more workers
and have clean air too; we could diversify the Valley’s economy
and preserve agriculture as well.
No get rich quick schemes or overnight successes
were promoted. Rather, a slow build toward a “truly new economy”
that was based on values very different from the bubble economy
built on silicon and venture capital.
For Joseph and his wife, the North Valley offered
amenities for the kind of life they wanted to live: Hiking, white-water
rafting, access to the mountains, the arts, good schools, and a
vibrant community life.
Miriam could see the Barretts’ would fit
in well. Time and again she had seen how the region had benefited
from the cadre of skilled, experienced, and even wise citizens who
came to retire only to turn renewed energies toward educating the
young, attending meetings, and working as volunteers on any number
of projects on behalf of the community.
Case in point was her own dad. He had been co-chairman
of the citizen’s committee that helped Chico and Butte Counties
established a new joint planning development standards protocol
to preserve open space between city and countryside over the next
20 years.
SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES
Events throughout the world also helped to create
improved conditions. But it was the individuals, the people of the
North Valley, who did a better job than anywhere else at taking
advantage of the opportunities.
China’s continued growth, the lowering of
its trade barriers and a Pacific Rim rebound meant more exports
from the U.S., including lots of rice from the North Valley which
found welcome markets. Nationally, the federal government approved
an overhaul to the Environmental Protection Agency and Endangered
Species Act that enabled green development that save the environment
and allowed a profit.
No major terrorist attacks followed the World Trade
Center events of 2001. So, when the nation’s and the world’s
economy climbed out of the recession after the technology crash
of 2000-2004, the North Valley was poised for success. The experts
said “The Long Boom” has resumed the course it had been
on since 1980 and California’s economy rose with the tide.
REAPING THE HARVEST
By the second decade of the century the people
of the North Valley were starting to reap the harvest they had patiently
sown in all those meetings during the previous decade. The “Ring
Transportation Corridor” that was part of the Chico General
Plan was finally complete. The ribbon cutting ceremony celebrated
no less than twelve new public art projects. Riders on the ring
road included growing numbers of employees at a software company
started by an ex-Sun Microsystems executive.
Jobs, of course, were an issue, and not just any
jobs. For too long the North Valley, like the rest of the Central
Valley, had advertised low cost labor to prospective employers,
mainly on the model of migrant workers in agriculture. And there
was little likelihood that the region could leapfrog straight from
an agricultural economy to a high-tech, high wage economy.
Part of the planning in the first decade laid out
a step-by-step progression from specialty agriculture through warehousing
and light manufacturing and on up to the kinds of jobs the creative
class would embrace. And the poor were still with us. In-migration
from the south, and a continued need for agricultural labor left
thousands at the bottom of the pyramid even as its top was reaching
higher and wider.
Typical of the North State’s talent for turning
old problems into new solutions was the transition from the burning
of rice fields to the use of rice straw in a new process for paper
manufacturing — which also eased the demand on timber for
paper. Later in the period, when fuel cell technology was providing
clean energy with less air pollution, some scientists at a research
lab in Red Bluff worked out a process for extracting hydrogen from
rice straw to feed the fuel cells. On the way up the value-adding
technology ladder however, the first step toward cleaning the air
was to reduce commuting distances.
From Shasta to Oroville and towns in between, people
created communities that balanced home life with work without requiring
long commutes that wasted time and dirtied the air. Air quality
had been a big issue in guiding the transportation plan laid down
in 2005 and by 2015 the results were as visible as the mountains.
Shasta and the Sierra had been out more days in 2020 than back in
2010.
WATER AND TECHNOLOGY
Seen as a source of water by the thirsty south,
the northern counties had a major stake in the efficient management
of water. Here, a regional perspective promoted.
Back at the beginning of the century, Butte County
had the greatest number of organic farms and Kern County had the
highest volume of organic produce. A coalition of farmers from these
two counties pooled their experience to lead other farmers throughout
the Central Valley toward practices that reduced the use of herbicides
and pesticides, increased the amount of precision irrigation, preserved
the quality of the groundwater, and improved the quality of runoff
into the Sacramento Delta. By the 2020s, salmon were spawning in
the Sacramento in record numbers and local anglers caught trophy
salmon in Clear Creek.
As for water quantity and availability throughout
the state, it was necessary to achieve balance between efficient
use, fair allocation and smart conservation. Biotechnology produced
strains of crops that called for less water. Investments in storage,
transport, and desalination produced more usable water.
But in dry years, conservation was still necessary
and the question of what counted as fair allocation became acute.
Sacramento was the place where comprehensive, statewide water policy
had to be set. In order to keep from getting sucked dry by the rest
of the state, the North Valley had to rely on fearless public officials
to represent their interests.
WILL SUCCESS BREED FAILURE?
As word spread about the Good Life in the real
northern California, it attracted the very best doctors, nurses
and teachers. This made Miriam’s job selling homes easier
than ever.
School performance in Redding and Chico in 2025
was the best in the state, even with the ever-recurring influx of
students for whom English was a second language.
With all of good things being said about the North
Valley, some got nervous. Growth looked like it might become a real
problem. “Nothing feeds failure like success” they said.
But the North Valley had learned how to husband scarce resources,
how to take a regional perspective, how to plan, and how to reach
agreements on contentious issues. They were not about to let success
turn into failure - and they did so without relying on heavy-handed
regulation. They simply figured it out and got the job done.
As one success built on another, the individual
citizens of the North Valley found that the Good Life was possible.
So they chose to envision it, agree upon it, create it, and live
it.
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