It's also true that Sacto has had its rough patches. Don't forget the squatter riots. If memory serves, around 1850 the city tried to clear folks from approximately the same site as our recent tent city, and by the time it was all over several city officials were dead and wounded. Sacramento has bounced back from all sorts of things, but so did the Rust Belt...until it didn't. Our previous troubles came during times when there was a lot of economic growth, a lot fewer people in California, and a lot less environmental pressure from drought. As they say in the financial services industry, "past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results." There has been a lot of anarchist-inspired cooperation in Spain, but that was primarily centered around Barcelona. "Homage to Catalonia" is George Orwell's first person account of fighting (and almost dying) in one of the militias, and well worth a read. Mondragon is primarily rooted in Catholic Social Thought. The Church was mostly allied with Franco, but the Basque Country was the main exception. The co-ops grew out of the ministry of a priest named Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta (who was nearly executed by Franco after the civil war). Mondragon has also been influenced by Basque nationalists, anarchists, and labor activists, but the philosophy known as distributism is probably the closest match. There is another Catholic cooperative movement modeled after Mondragon in the Valencia area of Spain, and Catholic communities have also played key roles in Italy, Nova Scotia, Quebec, the US Midwest and southwestern Louisiana (the latter connected to the Civil Rights Movement. Anyone who wants more on faith-based cooperation can start by looking at www.holycoop.wordpress.com.

cpmciver, good luck with your paperboard plant. If you haven't already contacted them, the Montana Co-op Development Center can provide some help: http://mcdc.coop/ The Ohio Employee Ownership Center has a lot of information about conversions to ESOPs and cooperatives. www.oeockent.org

William: Thanks for commenting. It's clear you've got a strong background and interest in Sacramento, and I appreciate your input. You're very right that we're not anything like Detroit 2009 or even Detroit 1967 (when the riots triggered the "white flight" that has contributed greatly to the city's collapse). The question is whether we might be somewhat like Detroit 1965, when auto industry consolidation had already begun but the metro area population was still growing, creating pressure for jobs. It would have been impossible for someone in those days to envision what was coming. While elsewhere in Michigan, I met a man who grew up in those days, and he described his old neighborhood as literally "gone." State government obviously isn't going anywhere, but keep in mind that the auto industy is still in metro Detroit, although at a lower level than before. The question we should be asking is what portion of "Detroit" (the industry) left the city before things really fell apart. My guess is that it isn't a huge percentage, and we should be wondering what happens if 20 percent of state jobs disappear (to correspond to the roughly 20 percent hole in state budget). What sort of ripple effect would that have? Probably not Detroit, but maybe. My hunch is that we'll take more of a Cincinnati route, but even that isn't all roses. And even if the city center does well, we've got some very poorly designed suburban areas that could easily fall apart. South Sacramento is already struggling, and there's no reason for them to wait before attempting, perhaps, a worker-owned system of local food production, processing, and distribution. Thanks for the correction on my "never much of a factory town." I suppose our manufacturing legacy is on clear display in the twin railyard brownfields that continue to vex our best efforts to develop them. Blue Diamond is one of only a few co-ops in our area. The list also includes Rice Growers Cooperative, California Co-op Cab, Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op, Golden 1 and other credit unions. Cooperatives are individually helpful, but no panacea; having a few of these is not likely to change anything for urban working people, who are generally just employees working for the benefit of members. Mondragon (and Evergreen) is a peculiar model of worker ownership, which ties jobs to their communities. I believe that's what we really need. Comparing ourselves to Detroit (or even Pittsburgh) is hard and humbling, but I think we should be proactive about that so we can see and address the warning signs that are already around us. And bbbmer, thanks for bringing up the red scares. That dynamic has been a huge part of why we don't have more of a co-op economy, even though there have been times that this approach has succeeded on a massive scale. For example, check out Upton Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial campaign, known as EPIC. He got 37 percent of the vote in the general election, despite intense red-baiting: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/epic.html. Also consider Rep. Jerry Voorhis, who served in Congress for a decade, later directed the Cooperative League of the USA (now National Cooperative Business Association) and wrote a book called "American Cooperatives" that should be required reading. He was voted out of office in 1946, largely due to Richard Nixon's use of red-baiting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Voorhis

Finding a buyer seems like a long-shot. It might be useful for the tenants to form a cooperative or LLC to purchase it. Profits from rents would be distributed back to them (and alas, losses would be charged to them). The different sizes of tenants would make a co-op somewhat complicated, but this could be addressed through multiple classes of stock - each member gets one common share and the additional capital would be raised through nonvoting preferred stock. The catch is that most tenants are chains with relatively little investment in downtown Sacto. Ironically, that points toward including other downtown merchants in it.

Thanks for pointing out the local variations within the larger Tent City. My own visits have revealed significant social organization of at least three separate camps, each with its own culture and values. Any proposed solutions to the current situation should keep that in mind: some approaches, such as a city-sanctioned or resident-led camp will be more appropriate and appealing to some people than others. Rather than view this as one relatively homogenous group of hundreds that must be addressed by a single solution, it might make sense to approach each camp as a separate situation. Then it becomes a matter of coming up with solutions for each, which could include grass-roots solutions like the rotating congregation-based hosting of Olympia's Camp Quixote ( http://campquixoteoly.googlepages.com ) or the relatively permanent and free-standing settlement of Portland's Dignity Village ( www.dignityvillage.org )