For decades, devising a clear solution for California’s suburban sprawl and ensuing car culture has been the Holy Grail for smart-growth advocates. One trip on any of the Golden State’s perpetually clogged roadways during peak hours shows how ineffective most of those efforts have been.

Statistics and headlines indicate doom and gloom across the country, but local developers are still building houses. In the Capital Region, Roseville leads the area in new-home construction.

On an early September morning, federal, city and redevelopment officials, among others, gathered at the corner of 10th and R streets to celebrate the beginning of street improvements.

It should be the perfect prescription for an ailing housing market, but so far few buyers are taking it.

The proposed Shiloh III project, a 120-megawatt expansion that still requires approval by the Solano County Planning Commission this month, would place 59 new wind turbines next to the company’s existing Shiloh II project. Shiloh II, a 150-megawatt operation completed in 2008 in Montezuma Hills, provides electricity to 74,000 households.

Now in its 15th year, the Florin Road Partnership might be one of the region’s great turnaround stories.

In 1999, with the opening of the Galleria at Roseville looming, property owners in what is now the Sunrise Marketplace were having an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

At one time Fulton Avenue was given the ignominious title of ugliest street in Sacramento. It wasn’t completely undeserved.

When West Sacramento-based Clark Pacific went shopping for a third location to expand its precast concrete business, it found a home with a familiar name: the former Spreckels Sugar Mill, just outside Woodland.

California is used to being the trendsetter. The state has led the way on everything from auto emissions standards to stem cell research, but when Assembly Bill 3754 was signed into law in 1994, California was the 40th state to allow the creation of Property and Business Improvement Districts.