Dill havarti, mozzarella with homegrown basil and fresh warm ricotta. What do these cheeses have in common? Kim Mack, the Cheese Queen, makes them all.
Since beginning her cheese-making venture almost four years ago, Mack has experimented with about 40 different types of hard and soft cheeses.
Mack was born in Sacramento and works as a contracts analyst for the county Department of Human Assistance. She’s always been interested in culinary arts.
When Denise Rochelle McCoy dons a pink hard hat in March to participate in the annual Women Build event for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Sacramento, it will bring back memories. McCoy wore a hard hat to build her own Habitat house in 2015, when she took the leap into homeownership.
“I was renting a one-bedroom apartment in a challenging neighborhood where there was a lot of violence after losing my job,” McCoy says. “I thought, am I ever going to get out of this? It took three years of research, cleaning up my credit and saving money for a down payment, but I finally purchased my current property through Habitat for Humanity in 2015.”
Last year, 43 people were homicide victims in Sacramento. The number was a 26% jump from 2019, when the city endured 34 homicides. The trend has continued this year, with 44 homicides as of early October.
The increase comes from a variety of factors, not just the pandemic, Police Chief Daniel Hahn says.
“For example, our specialty units, whether it’s our problem-oriented policing officers or our gang officers, they’ve been pulled out of our communities to work protests,” he says. “So they haven’t had a presence. They haven’t been working as much as they normally do in our communities.”
It would have been easy to overlook with everything else happening, but two days after defeating the ill-conceived attempt to recall him, Gov. Gavin Newsom made news by signing three bills to chip away at California’s affordable housing crisis.
Newsom, who three years ago promised to deliver 3.5 million new homes by 2025, is taking a more incremental—and practical—approach to the problem.
None of the bills will come close to solving the state’s monumental housing problems, but if harsh reaction to at least one of the measures tells us anything, the governor has indeed shaken things up.
Pity the company town. Dependent on one big employer and lacking economic diversity, it soars and crashes on lonely shoulders. The company town flies without a safety net. It’s all or nothing.
Sacramento is a company town that never learns its lesson. A dozen years ago, the Great Recession furloughed state workers, shrank government paychecks and wrecked businesses along J, K and L streets.
The recession exposed the city’s economic vulnerability and over-reliance on government workers. Did Sacramento respond by diversifying its economy? No. The city became even more dependent on state employees. In the last 10 years, the local state workforce has grown by about 17,000. Now it’s up to 82,000.
Poppy by Mama Kim is a new restaurant in a new neighborhood serving new American food. The small dining room and patio overlooking Sutter Park may be humble, but the food is some of the best I’ve had this year.
Sutter Park might not be familiar to some readers. Cut from the footprint of the demolished Sutter Memorial Hospital in East Sacramento, the neighborhood comprises several blocks centered on 53rd and E streets. The new community features a variety of homes, apartments, retail and a spacious central park.