Nov 28, 2021
The sights on lower X Street did it for me. Coming off the freeway, I saw wrecked cars and busted campers and people standing around, a pitiful procession pinned against the gutter like a forlorn carnival that took a wrong turn. Somebody stuck two orange traffic cones partway into the street, warning motorists to steer clear.
Lower X Street, home to warehouses and body shops, never delivered a welcoming hug to visitors who enter the city from river’s edge. Now it arrives with a punch in the face.
Nov 28, 2021
In 2010, Matt and Yvette Woolston opened a new restaurant in Carmichael. A follow-up to their much-lauded North Sacramento spot, The Supper Club, this new enterprise was more of a neighborhood joint, with a focus on wine, pizza and scratch cooking.
More than a decade later, Matteo’s Pizza & Bistro still attracts local diners looking for an upscale but unfussy evening of quality eats.
On a recent visit, my wife and I ran into good friends, the Au family of Carmichael. They were leaving as we were coming in. They gushed about the meal they just finished.
Nov 28, 2021
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.
Nov 28, 2021
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.”
Oct 28, 2021
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.”
Oct 28, 2021
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.
