While I think it's very brave to write an opinion piece that is clearly astray from many of the readers to SacPress, I cannot help but feel a little saddened by how backwards some people still are thinking. Mr. Burg said it best, you and your organization, are clearly detached from reality. Even beyond your skewed view of the urban vs. suburban debate (which is turning less into a debate and more into fact), I have to pick on your reasoning through the "American Dream". This idea that we're all here to work hard, get paid, and settle in the suburbs with children is seen as a joke to anyone not considered elderly. It simply doesn't work that way anymore and even you, Mr. Lukenbill, will live to see the day when the US is not the world's leading economy. We already trail far behind in terms of infrastructure, largely thanks to the policies and preferences that you seem to stand behind. Thanks for that.

Paul, So true though. I know many of these small farmers in town and I know that they find a lot of these new markets tedious/costly to attend to. If anything, it's worse for the smaller farmers, as they usually end of having to pull out of the markets mid season because they make no money. In general, new markets take a couple of years to gain attendance levels even remotely close to the already established markets. George, I'm not even going to touch on why the economics of farmers markets != restaurants. But in truth, there's a certain subset of the population who patronizes farmers markets regularly, and opening a new market that isn't far away from existing markets will take away customers from the other market, resulting in generally no new customers and working twice the hours.

Does anyone ever think of the farmers for these kinds of things? The problem of opening a new market in Sacramento is that it spreads things even thinner for the vendors. In our metro area, there're already six farmer's markets on saturday (during the season) and pretty much one every other day of the week. Opening a new market makes the farmers take more time/money out of their pockets to show up and sell their produce. In addition, it takes away from the crowds of other markets (Sunday). While consumers have further choices of markets to go to, the truth is that more farmer's markets means more costs for farmers, meaning higher prices for consumers in the end. If anything, we should be closing certain farmers markets! Does the grid really need more than Wednesday and Sunday (with a short hop over to Oak Park farmer's market if you really need produce on Saturdays)? Food for thought.

It is so competitive out there when it comes to the lunch crowd (and really just getting people to spend money) and you really have to have something that stands out. Blaming the economy instead of a bad business model seems to be the cop-out du jour.

This is too true. Anyone who goes to farmer's markets in the area should know that the prices are often far too high for low income residents. Having a market in Old Sac would probably be ideal, as there would be fresh tourists as well as being located close enough to midtown to make it possible to get more well off residents. One big issue with this whole idea though is that there're too many farmers markets in the area as it is. During the season, it feels like there are like 10+ every week in Sacramento. It'd be hard to sustain a market when there's so much competition already from existing markets.