As thousands of tech workers move into Sacramento, the city long considered California’s overlooked middle child is enjoying the attention – for now

Joan Didion, the patron saint of California, once managed to summarily dismiss and define her hometown with just one flippant eye-roll of a quote: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”

California residents have long derided the state’s capital for the crime of being perfectly average. “The midwest of California”, they call it. A cow town. Sacramento’s appeal, it’s often said, is that it’s close to places that are actually appealing, like San Francisco and Tahoe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Apartments under construction in midtown Sacramento. An estimated 27,000 people moved here from the Bay Area in 2018.

Then an asteroid hit San Francisco in the form of the tech industry, and the aftershock of the boom reverberated far beyond the boundaries of the nine Bay Area counties.

In recent years, the climbing cost of living amid the influx of tech wealth has forced an exodus of longtime Bay Area residents that has irrevocably changed the surrounding cities as well.

The local economists’ tongue-in-cheek term for those joining this exodus is “Bay Area refugees” – those fleeing a region decimated by the economic disparities and untenable cost of living created by the massive wealth of the tech industry. They leave for cities like Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and now, more and more frequently, Sacramento, seeking affordable housing, good schools and more space for children.

Quarter after quarter, the city has ranked as a top destination for those leaving the Bay Area, according to the real estate website Redfin. An estimated 24,000 moved from the Bay Area to Sacramento in 2017, and 27,000 moved in 2018, according to the Greater Sacramento Economic Council.

And with this onslaught of Bay Area refugees, Sacramento, a city that had long ago resigned itself to being California’s overshadowed and forgotten middle child, now has its time in the sun.

Today, downtown and midtown Sacramento are reminiscent of downtown San Francisco with all its construction equipment, scaffolding and work sites. Talk of new apartments or condominiums on this street or that one pop up as suddenly as the buildings themselves. Amid all this development, the city now known as the hometown of the Oscar-nominated film Lady Bird has carved out a spot for itself in the farm-to-fork movement in California, with new restaurants, coffee shop wine bars and local craft breweries.

“Our city has been on the up and up over the last few years,” said Cornelious Burke, who sits on the city planning commission. “I think we’re starting to finally recognize that Sacramento is a hidden gem. Housing is affordable. It’s a great place to raise a family. Crime is low here. It’s kind of like a quirky Portland of California.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Karma Brew in midtown Sacramento. New bars and restaurants are proliferating in the city. Photograph: Salgu Wissmath/The Guardian

But the influx of new residents has also exacerbated longstanding disparities within the city. Those disparities came into stark focus during the protests in March over the city’s handling of the death of Stephon Clark, a black man fatally shot in his grandmother’s backyard by two Sacramento county sheriff deputies who mistook his cellphone for a gun. Almost a year after Clark’s killing, the district attorney declined to file charges against the two deputies, and activists took to the streets of an affluent neighborhood in east Sacramento known as the Fabulous 40s, where the former president Ronald Reagan had a home.

Is it nice to be able to walk down K Street and have people out and have businesses and places to eat? Yeah. But it’s so uneven

As the police chief himself admitted at a city council meeting the next night, protests happen regularly in the state capital. But rarely do they result in mass arrests, including those of reporters and clergy, in addition to reports of police brutality. And as activists pointed out at that same city council meeting, police only seemed to respond this forcefully when the protest took place in an affluent neighborhood.

The same activists are eyeing Sacramento’s current growth warily because these booms tend only to sharpen such divides.

“It’s not like we don’t know how this story ends,” said Katie Valenzuela, who has lived in Sacramento for 11 years and is the capitol director for the state representative Eduardo Garcia. “We’ve seen it in the Bay and in LA. Is it nice to be able to walk down K Street and have people out and have businesses and places to eat? Yeah. But it’s so uneven. Who benefits?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s not like we don’t know how this story ends’ ... Katie Valenzuela, capitol director for state representative Eduardo Garcia.

The effects of gentrification have already swept past Sacramento’s downtown and midtown areas and into the other neighborhoods. The main battleground is the historically black neighborhood of Oak Park, south of the city center.

The neighborhood is easily accessible. Its main thoroughfare, Broadway, allows anyone wishing to head downtown to get there quickly, and anyone wishing to get to south Sacramento to do the same.

“When I lived in Oak Park, nobody wanted to live there,” said Tanya Faison, who founded the Sacramento chapter of Black Lives Matter. “If you got evicted or if you needed to find a cheap place to live, Oak Park was where you would go.”

It’s a tale as old as tech in California. Renting in Oak Park has become impossible for many longtime residents, Faison said. What becomes available is unaffordable: a 680-sq-ft two-bedroom unit for $1,400 a month. A 480-sq-ft one-bedroom unit for $1,100 a month. A 700-sq-ft two-bedroom unit for $2,950 a month.

“Folks move from the Bay because they got pushed out, so they rent equivalent to Bay Area prices, but we’re not getting Bay Area wages,” Faison said.

Suddenly, it seemed like multiple longtime residents were getting pushed out of their homes, Valenzuela and Faison said. Code violations that had never been a problem before were suddenly problems now until the homeowners had no other choice but to leave their home. Meanwhile, people were hosting workshops in the neighborhood on how to buy and flip houses. “I remember the first time a house sold for more than $300,000,” Valenzuela said. “People were pissed. That was in 2013. Today, we have condos two blocks down that are selling for $500,000 each.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Folks rent equivalent to Bay Area prices, but we’re not getting Bay Area wages’ ... new townhouses in Oak Park. Photograph: Salgu Wissmath/The Guardian

Valenzuela bought a house in the neighborhood in 2014 for $200,000. She had been organizing in the community long before then, and it meant a lot to her to live in the neighborhood. But in 2017, when she ended her relationship with her husband, she learned she could no longer afford to keep her house.

Having spent so much of her time fighting for others to stay in the neighborhood, Valenzuela wanted to keep her house and stay as well. “But the value had gone up 50% in two years and I couldn’t afford to pay him out,” she said. “Here I was fighting for my neighbors who were losing their homes for code violations and back taxes and auctions, and then I was like, ‘Oh shit.’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest California’s state capital has long been a hub for public sector, politics and advocacy jobs.

Sacramento’s issues are all familiar to those who have followed the trends of the tech boom. But what’s unique to the city is that Sacramento’s boom is an after-effect of the Bay Area boom.

Sacramento has always been a hub for the public sector jobs, politics and advocacy work. Government jobs make up 26% of Sacramento county’s total wage and salary employment, according to state figures. Beyond all the legislators’ staff and various aides, state business is an industry in and of itself, with no shortage of consultants, pollsters, lobbyists and not-for-profit workers around the city center.

Population growth has led to a boom in industries like real estate, construction and services, but the job hubs still remain along the coast. And though Sacramento is developing to meet its growing population, it’s unclear if there are enough jobs and industries growing with it to sustain the population boom.

The Greater Bay Area Council estimates that up to 100,000 people commute from the Sacramento area to the Bay Area to work each day. The Greater Sacramento Economic Council estimates that number to be closer to 86,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LeRoid David moved to Sacramento from the Bay Area last year and now works for Claimstake Brewing Co.

LeRoid David spent his youth giving his cousins grief about Sacramento. “I used to crap on Sacramento,” said David, who moved from the Bay Area in November. “In high school I’d come out and my cousins and I would hang out at the mall because that was what you’d do. There wasn’t anything else.”

But now he believes it’s the right place for his family – even if that means partially joining these super commuters.

David got a job with a Sacramento brewery, but his wife kept her full-time job at the Redwood City Kaiser Medical Center, just north of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley.

I used to tell myself that I would never leave the Bay Area. But then I used to say the same thing about San Francisco

During the week, David and his son live with David’s mother in east Sacramento while his wife stays with family in Oakland.

“My wife is still trying to find positions that she can transfer to,” he said. “It hasn’t been easy. She’s here every weekend and she’s trying to make the most of it. We saw it coming. We knew this was something we’d have to deal with, just for the meantime.”

They had both come up in the service industry, David in various positions and his wife as a pastry chef. While the service industry is a growing sector in Sacramento, the wage difference would be substantial.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An estimated 86,000 people commute from Sacramento to the Bay Area daily.

But they’re hopeful. The potential for career growth and homeownership in the Sacramento area far outweighs whatever they could have found in the Bay Area.

“I used to tell myself that I would never leave the Bay Area,” he said. “But then I used to say the same thing about San Francisco – I would never leave San Francisco. I was raised in the city, I went to San Francisco State, and the next thing you know, I have a family, life happens, things get costly, and you start looking elsewhere.”

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, catch up on our best stories or sign up for our weekly newsletter