Ever get lost in a place you thought you knew like the back of your hand?
Computer repair in Sacramento is a travel-intensive business. Our crew of mobile nerds gets out to every corner of the county to keep our Nerds customers technology-glitch free. We travel a lot.
The other day I was driving across Sacramento to meet a new client, and I turned left when I shouldn’t have. In a part of Sacramento I thought I knew like my own backyard, I had to pull over and pull up a map on my smartphone to figure out what the heck happened.
Anyway, this sparked off a conversation with the team, and it turns out most of us have had a similar moment – unless they were just saying that to make me feel better! Eventually (and probably in an effort to arrive at an excuse) we hit on a very basic question: how large is Sacramento, anyway?
Here’s what a bit of Google-sleuthing taught us.
Let’s Get Geographical
This kind of surprised me in two directions. It turns out the physical area of Sacramento City is just shy of one hundred square miles. If I had to guess, I’d have probably estimated close to double that. Sacramento County, on the other hand, fills up close to a thousand square miles. That figure seems impossibly large.
But it all makes a bit more sense once you give a decent zoning map a once-over. Check this out. A substantial part of the county is designated for general agriculture. Many spaces in the southern part of the county are recreational.
While all that green stuff is part of what makes the Greater Sacramento area beautiful, most of the space we regularly interact with is all that yellow and brown stuff, where humans tend to sit about with technology.
Sustainable Growth is Cool
Not to get too starry-eyed here, but it makes me happy that the City of Sacramento have their headlights switched on high beam when it comes to sustainable growth.
The City of Sacramento is committed to maintaining diversity in its land assets. Sacramento’s zoning code is designed to encourage environmentally-friendly approaches to building, efficient use of land, and a whole bunch of green on the county map.
Sure, it throws off my estimation of how large Sacramento actually is, but that seems a small price to pay.
Oh Yeah… What About Technology?
While we’re talking about the size of Sacramento, it’s probably worth mentioning the size of our tech sector — because it’s growing fast. Technology industries clearly have a growing role to play in the Greater Sacramento area because of the ever growing population of Sacramento. While Silicon Valley remains the technological Mecca for big tech companies, Sacramento is playing host to a growing number of satellite offices for companies like Apple, Intel, and Oracle.
It’s interesting though. We’re not seeing a repeat of the Silicon Valley sector here. The focus of tech companies in Sacramento is quite diverse, with businesses working in agricultural tech, biotechnology and various corners of manufacturing and logistics.
Maybe this little side-alley has all been a rambling excuse for why I took a left when I should have gone straight, but Sacramento is a big place, and it’s growing in interesting ways.
