Jul 27, 2020
Katie Valenzuela won’t join the City Council until December. But she is already learning how she won’t fit in. Steve Hansen, the two-term councilmember Valenzuela defeated in March, won’t speak to her. Other members smile and offer congratulations, but the words carry little weight.
At first, this bothered Valenzuela. “I was pretty depressed when the pandemic started,” she says. Sheltered in her Boulevard Park home with her two rescue terriers, socially distanced from work and friends, months from being sworn into office, Valenzuela felt disconnected from the motivations that propelled her run for office.
Jul 27, 2020
Locking onto a snail with laser-guidance precision, Randy Paragary delivers a lightning strike on the gluttonous gastropod. “He died during the journey,” he says. With apologies to escargot, snails would be wise to steer clear of this backyard vegetable garden.
Paragary, his wife Stacy and executive chef-business partner Kurt Spataro have kept Sacramentans well fed and entertained for decades. While retaining his local dining and entertainment venues, Paragary has evolved his interests in recent years to include Midtown’s new Fort Sutter Hotel and (drumroll, please) his backyard tomatoes and other edibles.
Jul 27, 2020
Two children gently plant strawberry seeds in a bed of soft earth while their mother waters the persimmon tree nearby. It is therapeutic, restorative, peaceful. During these uncertain times, many families have turned to their own backyards to create a haven of fruits and veggies while gaining healthy life lessons and skills.
In the backyard of their Arden-Arcade home, Shani Drake and her two children, 5-year-old Jenevieve and 12-year-old Desean, have created a vibrant plot of earth teeming with Mexicola avocados, fava beans, strawberries, elderberries, rosemary, sorrel and purple potatoes.
Jul 27, 2020
Salvador Bradford takes pride in keeping his studio apartment tidy. His converted hotel room has around 250 square feet for a bathroom, stove and mini-fridge.
There is space for the trappings of a home: a shelf of Star Wars and Star Trek DVDs, and a small shrine to Jesus Christ, to whom Bradford credits his past five years of sobriety.
Jul 27, 2020
Inside Sacramento is looking for a few good community journalists. But not just from any community. We are interested in writers from neighborhoods that historically don’t get much attention from traditional media—unless the news is bad.
We want to see Sacramento’s underserved communities from a different, deeper, more personal perspective. This means we want stories by and about people who really know the neighborhoods.
