Placer County and its individual cities and towns portray themselves as one community that welcomes business. “That’s always been the case,” says Dave Snyder, director of economic development for Placer County. “We don’t look to wrap a new prospective business in a lot of red tape; we go out of the way to roll out the red carpet.”

We’ll be hearing a whole lot of buzz about wage parity this year — in part because groundbreaking research conducted by New York University, University of Pennsylvania and the University of Haifa in Israel identifies flat-out gender bias as the elephant in the room affecting wage parity. This new study, titled “Occupational Feminization and Pay,” is the single most comprehensive study on wage parity in the U.S. to date.

Soon, it will all be over. Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson will leave office, most likely leaving politics behind for good. For a city that has come to simultaneously love and loath his high-flying, face-planting tenure, the future is sure of only one thing: It’s going to be a lot calmer around City Hall the next few years.

Jobs have returned to Sacramento. Many surveys, such as the Sacramento Business Review, show that the region’s employment rates have returned to pre-recession levels. Nearly 25,000 jobs came back just last year alone. Unfortunately, two-thirds of that growth is in retail and hospitality jobs that typically pay low wages, while higher-paying jobs achieved only modest gains. Can we do better?

Once upon a time, Sacramento lived and died by its rivers. As the last outpost of good society on the way to the Gold Rush foothills, Sacramento was nestled conveniently at the confluence of both the American and Sacramento rivers.

It’s possible that — at least until the next technological revolution or wave of globalization — there just isn’t a new frontier on the immediate horizon. If that’s the case, maybe the U.S. should shift from extensive growth to intensive growth.

Sacramento’s health care sector is booming. What does that mean for local spending and jobs?

One of SacMod’s most popular events, the Sacramento Mid-Century Modern Home Tour, is back for 2016 and takes place just once every three years.

The idea of Sacramento adopting the so-called “strong mayor” system of city government is dead. It’s kaput. If this was baseball, it was out on strikes even before voters threw another heater past Mayor Kevin Johnson’s fourth attempt at it in 2014. It’s done. Or maybe it’s not.

Russ Lester’s property looks, at first glance, like that of many of his neighbors. He grows about 900 acres of walnut trees a few miles east of Winters. But at Dixon Ridge Farms, Lester never tills his land, and he keeps cover crops growing most of the time. He also laces the earth around his trees with biochar, charcoal-like leftovers from biomass energy production.