The Race To Be The 'Greenest' City

"Austin has music. Seattle has rain. San Diego has bio-technology, and the funny thing about that is the city barely even had any biotech companies when they first stuck a flag in the ground and declared it so. And what happened? The biotech companies followed. Clean technology has now become the Next Big Thing with Portland, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Boston and others vying for top-dog status. Sacramento's right in the mix, too, with people hyped on the idea that we're poised to become a green hub....In July, a Fast Company magazine report listed Sacramento as a city "on-the-verge" of becoming a green powerhouse worldwide."

"Grist.org named the California Environmental Protection Agency headquarters building, located on I Street in downtown, as the second-greenest building in the world. Soon, Cal/EPA will be one of dozens of green buildings in Sacramento, as local architects, engineers and developers bone up on the subject.

"You feel good about what we are doing. You feel like you're making some good choices for the town you're living in," said John Thompson, a mechanical engineer with Turley and Associates who is LEED-accredited and signed onto SN&R's green-building project on Del Paso Boulevard (we're renovating a building to become our new office late next year)."