Take your pick of lists — on any of them Sacramento routinely ranks as one of the least affordable cities in the United States. And any number of polls shows, similarly, that housing affordability constitutes a major concern for residents in the greater Sacramento area who either want to be able to afford to buy a home, or fear that their children or grandchildren won’t be able to in the near future.

While the City of Sacramento was recently named the first jurisdiction in California to earn a Prohousing Designation from the California Department of Housing and Community Development — which will help the city’s efforts to develop more transit-friendly affordable units — for many local residents, buying a home remains out of reach.

Solving Sacramento, a media collaborative of which SN&R is a member, sent seven student journalists (and one student photographer) from Sacramento State and Sacramento City College to report from neighborhoods throughout the area, knocking on doors and stopping people on the street to hear their thoughts on the housing affordability issue. Here’s what they found.

Dr. Richard Pan says he is running for mayor of Sacramento because he wants to tackle the issues of homelessness, economic development, and public safety. 

Pan is best known as a state senator who represented much of the Sacramento region. He famously authored legislation that tightened vaccine exemptions for school age children in an effort to fight a series of epidemics. 

Pan, who is a pediatrician, has said that his background and education in medicine has prepared him to make quick judgements based on facts and evidence. 

Pan recently spoke to Sacramento State journalism students who asked questions on behalf of the News & Review about homelessness, economic growth, safety measures and other issues he would address as the city’s first Asian-American mayor. 

Amid a backdrop of historical disparities, a promising transformation is quietly underway as the wealth of many in Sacramento’s Black community is on the rise.

Adjusted for inflation, the number of Black households in the four-county Sacramento region making $200,000 or more has nearly doubled since 2010, rising from around 2,400 to about 4,600 in 2022, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. Along with income, educational attainment rates have increased significantly while Black homeownership also appears to be rising.

“There has been a real emphasis on entrepreneurship as opposed to looking for another career job,” said David DeLuz, deputy director of the office of civil rights at Caltrans. “I think that the mentality is shifting from a dependence on an employer, or a job, and really focusing on developing your career and a business.”

In the last century university anthropology departments have excavated Native American burials for research purposes. Today, Native Americans are struggling to get sacred items from those digs returned to their communities. Hundreds of thousands of native funerary objects, and human remains, continue to sit in boxes within UC and CSU repositories. Various laws, federal and state, have been passed to redress this since 1990; though universities have only given back a fraction of items as of 2022.

Assembly bills 226 and 389 aim to hold institutions of higher learning accountable for their failure to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

AB 389 was authored by Assemblymember James Ramos and ultimately signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. The bill requires the CSU system to implement systemwide and campus-level repatriation policies and repatriation committees. These policies include annual updates on repatriation progress and procedures for the safe handling of Native American remains, funerary objects and cultural items.