anyone familiar with downtown Roseville (Sacramento, Granite Bay: apartments, condos, crime rate)

[yamarranaz]

I am relocating to Sac and want to be close to my mom who lives in Granite Bay..I'm thinking about downtown Roseville or even areas around Roseville. What do you think of the crime rate and any good streets to live on or avoid. no busy steets. I'm a single woman (no apartments or condos please) need a house. Want to find an old area, maybe a pocket of cute houses. Please help..

[wburg]

Downtown Roseville is basically a left-over artifact from when Roseville was a little railroad town. Vernon Street is the main street, formerly Highway 40. Traffic is busy but it's still basically a two-lane street. There is a large pocket of cute older houses just to the south of Vernon Street and north of Douglas Boulevard, including many Craftsman bungalows and other older styles, in the vicinity of the Roseville Library and Royer Park. North of Vernon Street is the Roseville yards, a major railroad yard, but beyond that and the Old Town Roseville area is another older neighborhood with cute historic homes.

Keep in mind that Roseville is in no way a "big city" kind of place, it's basically a small town with suburbs sprouting up all around the old town core that used to be open fields and farms 20 years ago. It's pretty safe in general.

[fivebuckeyes]

While we're on the topic of housing in Roseville...
Are there ANY houses with basements? I heard (read) that there might be something with a basement in the Sac area. I don't know if I can give up the basement when we move next year from OH.

[dogmom]

Wow, unless you find a very old house you are most likely not going to find a basement. Virtually no one in CA has basements, at least not in the cities I've lived in. I would love one, too...

[wburg]

Most Sacramento "basements" aren't actually below ground, they are because many older houses were built 6-7 feet above ground and many have turned the below-the-house space into storage or even apartments/living space. It is commonly called a "Delta basement" and many consider it a hold-over from the days when Sacramento flooded pretty often. There are very, very few houses with real below-grade basements the way folks from the Midwest think of them, generally only in houses older than 1920-1930, and only in downtown/midtown Sacramento and a very few in some of the surrounding older suburbs.

I don't know if there are any basements in the old parts of Roseville--there are some houses that are old enough, so possibly, but they will be few and far between. Generally in California, the garage plays the role of the midwestern basement as extra storage space.

[edwardius]

Basements aren't necessary in Sacramento and also are a bad idea in Sacramento.

In the midwest and the east coast, its much colder in the wintertime than in Sacramento. When it gets really cold the soil expands and contracts significantly. That can cause a home's foundation to break and or seperate from the soil. In order to prevent that, by code homes have to be dug out pretty deeply to lay out the foundation. Often 4 or 5 feet. The cost to dig a little further to create a basement isn't that much, which is why so many homes back east have basements.

In Sacramento a basement isn't just unnecessary, its a bad idea. Sacramento was founded in a place where two rivers come together. Locally in a lot of places in the region, the water table is quite high. There are pumps constantly pumping water out of I-5 as it passes through downtown Sacramento. When high rises are built in the area, its quite common to see pumping water out of the ground so the concrete pilings can dry.

In the older parts of Sacramento that did build basements, its fairly common to have problems with moisture. In this region, a garage is much better storage solution.

[slinville85]

I live in old Roseville off of Main and Washington and my house has a basement! It isnt a finished one, but it is perfect for storage. We have been through a few storms and have never had a flooding! My house was built in 1928 and the basement does sit below ground. I have talked to other neighbors though and none of them had one!