El Camino and Grove Ave - Good place to live? (Sacramento: crime, homes)

[CeJeH]

Ghettos are mostly full of good, hard working people. Those neighborhoods just have more bad apples than other neighborhoods. Remove the bad apples and replace them with good ones and you have a nice neighborhood.

[caligirlz]

Originally Posted by NickB1967

Can that Del Paso region gentrify? Is it at all feasible?

It's been in the plans & working at it for as long as I have lived here (since 2005). They have some prettier store fronts and a nicer blvd, but not much else has happened.

Originally Posted by CeJeH

Remove the bad apples and replace them with good ones and you have a nice neighborhood.

Exactly. But what do you propose to do with the bad apples, and how will you incentivize them to move?

[CeJeH]

Well gentrification works by raising the prices or rent and home values in the neighborhood so they can't afford to live there anymore. Also with improved policing in the neighborhood you're catching more offenders and putting them in jail where they belong, in addition to discouraging crime in the neighborhood.

Also, if the city would get its **** together and start building low income housing in the neighborhoods where it belongs, then you would have more opportunities for fringe neighborhoods like Oak Park and the Del Paso District to gentrify and become the kinda of place where people want to be. Instead of building Section 8 housing in the middle of downtown it should be built in South Sacramento and parts of North Sacramento instead.

[wburg]

"Low income housing" is not the same as "Section 8 housing." And it sounds like you don't want DPH and old North Sacramento to gentrify if you think that part of town should be designated for the poor. Not that the city has money to build any more low-income housing these days...

[CeJeH]

The point I was trying to make is that if people want Del Paso Blvd in North Sac to improve, they can't build Section 8 type housing there.

Personally I think that sort of Section 8 or Project Housing should be built in already distressed neighborhoods away from the Central City. Del Paso Heights would be a good place because it's already not a great neighborhood and it also has plenty of unused land to build on. Del Paso Heights and the Del Paso Blvd district I'm talking about are not the same thing, btw I'm referring to the old North Sacramento part closer to Hwy 160.

[NickB1967]

Originally Posted by CeJeH

Well gentrification works by raising the prices or rent and home values in the neighborhood so they can't afford to live there anymore. Also with improved policing in the neighborhood you're catching more offenders and putting them in jail where they belong, in addition to discouraging crime in the neighborhood.

But you're profiling! Waaah! (yes, massive /sarc here)

And once again, successful gentrification illustrates the Two Out Of Three Rule:

--If it's nice and convenient to downtown, it's not, or no longer, affordable.
--If it's affordable and convenient to downtown, it's not nice.
--If it's nice and affordable, it's not convenient to downtown.

[CeJeH]

Luckily that doesn't apply to Sacramento yet, but we're getting there.

Also I know you're being sarcastic but I don't see how anybody could say that my statement was profiling. The fact is most crime happens in bad neighborhoods. Neighborhoods get bad because they are cheap and attract a lot of poor people. If you invest a lot in a bad neighborhood and raise the rents/home values it will eventually cease to be a bad neighborhood. Nothing wrong with saying any of those things, although I'm sure some SJW types would argue against that.

As far as what I said about where to build the lowest income (Section 8/Projects whatever) housing I mean just look at a map. There is SO much open land in this city it's ridiculous. It just so happens that a lot of that land (mostly vacant lots in otherwise built-up areas) just happens to be in already bad neighborhoods. Why would we want to dedicate prime downtown real estate to house people that otherwise have no business living there when we could put that government-funded housing in a neighborhood that makes sense?

Take a look at Google maps (satellite mode) and look around South Sacramento and North Sacramento. You would be amazed how many big, empty, vacant plots of land are scattered throughout the city that are close to transit centers. Nearly every one of them is along a bus line, and many of them are within a mile of a light rail station. I spend a lot of time around South Sac and I pass them allllll the time. Stockton Blvd, Florin Rd, 47th Ave, Franklin Blvd, the list goes on and on.

Granted not all of these are in the city limits, some of them lie just outside in the "un-city."

[wburg]

Typically when a police force is instructed to remove the "bad apples" from the neighborhood, they focus on the "darkest" apples instead, because there isn't an objective and foolproof way to look at people and tell who is a "bad apple" and who is not. The result is racial profiling.

Cities don't really build "project housing" anymore, not the way it was done in the 1930s-1950s, and without redevelopment as a funding mechanism, there isn't a way to pay for it. That being said, there is already a lot of low-income housing in Del Paso Heights and North Sacramento. And the reason why concentrating low-income people into particular sections of town is a bad idea is because it creates a ghetto--which is a major reason why Oak Park and Del Paso Heights/Old North Sacramento (which are two adjacent neighborhoods of what used to be an independent city) look the way they do now (along with freeway construction, which cut traffic to their commercial streets.) As to "Section 8 housing," there really isn't such a thing being built anymore--what you're talking about is a Housing Choice Voucher, which can be used in any apartment building whose base rent is below a certain maximum threshold set by HUD and based on county median income. So any private apartment building can be "section 8 housing" if the landlord chooses to accept the HCV and the rent is below a maximum cap. As mentioned before, low-income housing (as seen in projects like 700 K etc. downtown) is not the same thing. Nor is it the same as project housing, like New Helvetia/Seavey Circle or Dos Rios. But we have gone over that multiple times here.

Gentrification is not an automatic result of civic investment--one look at downtown Sacramento, after nearly 50 years of civic investment of various types, should prove that. The half of the central city that is drawing $1500-3000/month rents is the part that wasn't demolished by redevelopment agencies or state projects. Those high rents are not the result of a civic decision to charge more money for rent, they are driven by market demand--there are more people willing to pay that higher rent in order to have proximity to a neighborhood with the urban amenities and culture of Midtown. That wasn't part of any official decree, it came from the people who were already there and worked to create that culture--ranging from artists to business owners to neighborhood activists. The sad part of gentrification is that it often forces out some of those artists, business owners and neighborhood activists, who moved there in part because the rent was cheap even if the neighborhood wasn't so great. Gentrification works best as a bottom-up process that comes from the neighborhood and the people in it, not a top-down official decision that "this area shall be officially gentrified by mayoral decree." That's why the attempted official-gentrification of Del Paso Boulevard in the 1990s failed so badly; it was assumed that the existing population were an anomaly to be ignored until they could be forced out, and that they could force gentrification by setting up amenities for suburbanites to visit and drive home from, using redevelopment money to fund the amenities. But that approach rarely, if ever, works.

A lot of those "empty, vacant plots" are places where something used to be, and an investor is sitting on them hoping that the price will go up a suitable amount. They are typically unconcerned with how those vacant plots or vacant buildings affect the city around them, because their main concern is their own economic bottom line, not how it's going to affect the rest of the city. The city could enforce codes regarding abandoned buildings and vacant lots more strictly, but that wouldn't be "business friendly" so they don't--and often the city is a poor example of property stewardship in that regard.

[CeJeH]

There's the SJW


I mean, you said concentrating low-income housing in certain areas creates ghettos and that's why it's a bad idea. The areas I'm talking about are already ghettos! Why create little pockets of poverty in brand new neighborhoods (think North Natomas), or have little pockets of ghetto spread out all over the city when all of that housing could be concentrated in neighborhoods that are already bad?

[sacite]

Originally Posted by CeJeH

Of course it can theoretically. There's a lot of projects in the pipeline for Deal Paso Blvd. it's just going to take a lot of change over a long time before people get that "North Sac is the hood" image out of their heads, if it ever does change.

I have a hard time getting that image out of my head when I'm in the "good" part and a kid is walkung by me rapping - or, cussing? - looking like he wants apiece of this saltine cracker. Don't eff with a 39 yr old Saltine, kid.

No but seriously, that Walmart in Natomas is a treat. One of my favorite haunts .