Apr 28, 2022
Lynn and Virgil Nelson have had 17 different people live in their home over the past several years. They don’t run a boarding house. They are home sharers, people who offer unused space to those who need a place to stay.
“It’s not a weird idea, it’s a proven model,” Lynn says, citing 47 home-share organizations across the U.S. “We’ve had the personal experience of how enriching it can be.”
The Nelsons have always been ready to help others. Virgil is a retired American Baptist pastor and the couple traveled the world as missionaries. When they settled in Roseville seven years ago to be closer to grandchildren, they saw the need for affordable housing and realized they could make a difference.
Apr 28, 2022
Over the last seven years, the city has spent millions of dollars and embarked upon many projects to address homelessness.
After housing hundreds of people, it looked as though we were meeting needs and lowering the homeless census. Then the pandemic hit.
Under county health orders, we were forced to let people “shelter in place.” Jails were emptied for the same reason. Bail schedules were reduced to zero. The homeless population grew and addiction rates skyrocketed.
Apr 28, 2022
Over the last year and a half, I have become intimately involved with how farmers and ranchers work to rejuvenate land burned by fire.
My partner, Jarrod McBride, bought a 10-acre ranch bounded by Mountain Ranch, Railroad Flat and Mokelumne Hill in Calaveras County that had been devastated by the Butte Fire in 2015. He calls the land Pasture Works.
While many are scared off by these charred areas, we were attracted to Pasture Works because we saw enormous potential in the less expensive mountainous terrain and felt that once land burns, it will not catch fire for quite some time.
Apr 28, 2022
In jazz parlance, a standard is a tune everyone knows and every musician can play. An artist plays a standard to put their stamp on it, toy with it or mold it to their personality.
Downtown’s new restaurant The 7th Street Standard at the Hyatt Centric doesn’t get its name by coincidence. Chef Ravin Patel takes common food constructs and makes them his own. Familiar recipes play with unfamiliar rhythms.
He juggles flavors from multiple continents, often in the same dish. Improvisation feels like an ingredient, yet it’s born of intense study and years of perfecting his craft.
Patel worked at Michelin-starred kitchens and lent his skill to the Selland restaurant group. His knowledge of local, national and international cuisine is on display in a menu that is tight, approachable and titillating.
Mar 28, 2022
In May 2019, I wrote my first article on the tragedy of homeless people living on our streets. The column was titled “Is Sacramento Dying?” It was based on the documentary film “Seattle Is Dying.”
The film was produced by Seattle TV station KOMO in 2018. It begins with a bold thesis: This is about an idea. For a city that has run out of them. What if Seattle is dying? Can it ever recover?
The column was the most widely shared article on our website—shared thousands of times. Many readers feared our city was following Seattle’s course, driven by a lack of civic leadership.
The response helped me recognize the inadequacy of Sacramento media coverage. Homeless problems were not being seriously discussed in 2019. At Inside, we vowed to publish news, viewpoints, ideas and solutions in every issue moving forward.
Mar 28, 2022
What a difference a pandemic makes. In spring 2019, a buoyant Mayor Darrell Steinberg, doing his best Daniel Burnham imitation to “make no little plans,” unveiled his big vision for Old Sacramento and Downtown.
Sacramento would leverage more than $40 million in hotel taxes left from the Convention Center and Community Center Theatre renovation and jazz up the waterfront. New attractions would include an outdoor concert venue, rooftop bars and a barge docked so people could swim safely near the Tower Bridge in our namesake river.
The central city had arrived. Downtown would finally get its must-see family attraction. Construction cranes were everywhere. The future looked bright. Steinberg would have a legacy other than heartache over the growing homeless and housing crises.
