There are roads that the director of San Joaquin County’s transportation-planning agency forbids his teenage daughter from driving on.

As Bay Area businesses begin to regain their financial footing, the city of Tracy is aiming to capitalize on a growing need for industrial space in an accessible, affordable zip code.

With fewer discretionary dollars in their pocketbooks and more sensitivity at the gas pump, recession-era gamblers want to spend their quarters closer to home.

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.