Sacramento County will need an estimated 23,000 low- and very low-income housing units in the next nine years. The six-county region stretching from Yuba to Placer to El Dorado would need more than 41,000 units. But without the tax increment financing once provided by redevelopment agencies, city leaders are wondering where they’re going to come up with the cash to build.

Right now our region is in the dumps. We bemoan our high unemployment, our devastated city budgets, our beleaguered school systems. We look enviously at our neighbors to the south and west, whose economies are improving faster than ours.

When the future of redevelopment agencies started to look shaky last year, West Sacramento decided it could do without one. The city put together a new financing strategy, and in May the Community Investment Action Plan was revealed.

The icy retail climate along the Highway 50 corridor east of Sacramento is slowly beginning to thaw, but an overabundance of standing inventory remains.

The number of distressed properties on the market in the Capital Region is finally shrinking. And, the so-called shadow inventory — properties that are not yet on the market but which are seriously delinquent, in the foreclosure process or foreclosed — is also declining.

Developers looking to build in the Capital Region are finding cash in emerging green-financing products.

Immediately south and southeast of Elk Grove are thousands of acres of mostly undeveloped farmland that officials think the city will someday need. The plan is to add nearly 8,000 acres — about 29 percent of Elk Grove’s current size — to its fold. But critics say Elk Grove has plenty of unused land within its borders, and California is losing farmland fast.

Life often has been unkind to economic development directors since California put its redevelopment agencies out of business last year. Randy Starbuck tells it first hand.

High-speed trains linking Northern and Southern California have been a point of contention for more than a decade. For some, such “bullet trains” are the ideal solution to growing transportation needs; for others, they represent a boondoggle with enormous economic risk.

A town long known for its quaint historic authenticity, Truckee in the past five years has evolved from a sleepy hamlet to a city with the promise of vibrancy.