Moving from Portland, OR - looking for perfect neighborhood.

[mattinsac]

Look at those houses. Only one of them had 3 bedrooms, one of them was a fixer upper needing a lot of work another backed the freeway and the one at 1811 26th street was a little too close to problems that surround that welfare office 28th and Q. That part of Winn Park is another area I would feel uncomfortable hanging around after dark.

Small children create a lot demands for space. You need space for a crib, for the bassinet, for the walker thing holds babies up while they strengthen their legs before they can walk. A two bedroom home for 4 people probably is too small. Especially when they have 1200 feet or less. These older houses don't have much storage, the closets are tiny, the yards are tiny. Only two of these homes had a garage and one of those was in the house next to the freeway. Where do you put the bikes? the trikes, the big wheel?

In general I agree the Davis probably is too expensive too, but I don't know how the mixed income ordinance works in Davis. From the link damnitjanet provided, the city program offers a two bedroom home for $203,652 and a three bedroom home for $226,967. Depending on how big these homes are, I suspect the 3 bedroom home is probably a good deal or at least something to look into.

http://cityofdavis.org/housing/affordable/pdfs/Req_Summary_and_2007-08%20Prices_(2).pdf (broken link)

I don't know what those houses look like or exactly where in Davis they are located. But if Terraquaero's income is less than $78,800 expected for a family of four than I think the program is probably a good deal for them.

This is the house where I went to the open house this weekend. It has more bedrooms and more space. Its a 3 bedroom 2 bath home with 1361 sqft. It has a two car garage and storage space in the backyard in the barn like storage unit where they set up a work bench. Under the carpet it has hardwood floors. It has a nice patio in the back yard.

Homes - MLS - sacbee.com

It also has most of the stuff one might need for day to day living with in walking distance in the shopping area at Arden and Eastern. Its an established safe neighborhood with trees and yet there isn't so much traffic on the street you would feel uncomfortable with your kids riding their big wheels.

I know the home is listed right now at 319k, but the listing agent said they were getting to drop the listing price below 300K. The schools in this area are also just much better than in midtown.

My hunch is that when all is said and done, for a growing family of four this will probably fix there needs better than the options that they can afford in midtown.

[back2PDX_10]

I would recommend looking in the Tahoe Park area, for at least buying if not renting (at first). It is about 10 minutes east of Midtown (I just moved from Midtown as a renter, to TP as a buyer), and one can access it from either Hwy. 50, or by coming up lovely neighborhood streets, like T Street, that passes through a lot of big trees and lovely homes just north of the UCD Med Center.

Tahoe Park has a lot of modest, older (my house is 1940s) homes, and medium to some larger lots. It has lots of younger folks and lots of older folks, a "mom and pop" place with regular people, lots of pedestrians. It actually reminds me of outer NE Portland (I used to live up there), say north of Fremont, east of 60th-ish? It is a "regular" neighborhood (TP), though kempt and tasteful. Tahoe Park itself is cute, and for several blocks in all directions from it, there are nice areas to live. Check out listings on Zillow.com in zip code 95820 to get a sense. I bought for ca. 230K, which sounds right up your price range. As others have said, the east sac and curtis/land park 'hoods are closer to starting at 300 and rapidly moving up. As is the "Med Center" proper that is so nicely accessed on foot or bicycle from TP -- the med center is also called "Elmhurst" so that name could be queried in Zillow.

Good luck!

[terraquaero]

Oh yeah and your price is a bit low. To live in Midtown or East sac you might want to increase it to at least 350K...and even that will get you a tiny bungalow.

Thanks citygirl72 - we're probably not going to buy for $350 though... I appreciate your thoughts though.

[terraquaero]

Yep - Davis would probably be nice - but too pricey & it's weird to me to live in a different community than you work in. We earn considerably more than the $78k income mentioned in another post and would not qualify for the affordable housing programs....

Out of curiosity I looked at Davis: there were a few ugly-looking condos (probably rentals that went condo) for $200-300K, mostly bank-owned short sales, aside from two houses that were far outside walkable range of downtown Davis.[/quote]

[wburg]

I just took a brief look at the Oregonian to compare prices. Houses in Northeast Portland are definitely cheaper than midtown Sacramento. Part of this is simply because, even though it's Sacramento and not Los Angeles or San Francisco, it's still California. Many Angelenos or Bay Areans moving to the Sacramento region consider $350K to be a red-hot bargain--in San Francisco, that price gets you a one-bedroom condo in a so-so part of town. On the flip side, our median income is also higher than Oregon (but not Los Angeles or San Francisco.) So be careful not to apply Oregon house prices to California real estate.

Really, if your priority is a place where you can walk/bike/transit to work, odds are your choices are pretty much limited to Midtown or the nearby central city neighborhoods. Most of Sacramento was built around the automobile, and there is no alternative to the automobile in most of the city. The same was true of Portland, they just made the decision to change that earlier than Sacramento has, and applied more commitment to that decision. I have a strong feeling that Sacramento will end up that way in another 10-20 years, but we haven't gotten there yet.

If you make more than $78,000 a year, a $300K home loan is definitely reachable--assuming you don't have any equity or a down payment, at today's interest rates you'll pay around $2000 a month including PMI. That's about one-third of the income of someone making $78K. If you do have equity or some cash to put down, considerably less than that.

[edwardius]

You might want to spend some time playing around with this. Specifically, click on the advance theme tab and look at the owners only affordibility index for the Sacramento MSA. It shows you what percentage of average incomes in a census tract that people are spending to buy into that census tract.

Housing + Transportation : Center for Neighborhood Technology (http://htaindex.cnt.org/map_tool - broken link)

Then look at walkscore map here. The walkscore map does a poor job of covering the Sacramento region outside of Sacramento, but you can look up specific addresses on that site.

Sacramento's Most Walkable Neighborhoods - Walk Score Neighborhood Rankings

A couple of observations. Most of the walkable neighborhoods in Sacramento area selling for well north of 3 times family income for that census code tract.

As wburg pointed out, if you were willing to stretch enough, you probably could get someone to finance you into Midtown. The real question is the amenity of walkable neighborhoods to you versus other amenities?

One last map. You may have to click a couple time this map to bring up tests scores for the Sacramento area.

California School Performance Maps

If you lived in midtown even after financially extending yourself to get into the neighborhood, the schools wouldn't be that good.

In Elk Grove, the neighborhood isn't walkable at all and its much further away from employers in downtown. But in terms of affordiblity, people are spending a lot less of their incomes to buy homes in Elk Grove where they are getting substantially better public schools than in midtown.

If you have kids, you probably want to be able to put aside some money for them to go to college. If you are living in midtown that might be a lot more difficult. You are probably going to need to make some tradeoffs here. How important is living in walkable neighborhood and how walkable is walkable enough? How important is living within your means? How strong of a school do need for your kids?

If you look further afar from midtown, you can find pockets that have walkable elements. Perhaps Fair Oaks Village, the older parts of Roseville or Folsom. Perhaps some of the newer transit oriented developments in Rancho Cordova.

You said something to the effect that schools don't need to be perfect, but serviceable. But is that true for the walkibility component as well? Does everything need to be in walking distance or is it good enough to live near a bus or a light rail line so you don't need to drive to work? Maybe a neighborhood where your kids can walk to school?

[SirJohn]

Try Hollywood Park.