Look to the Sacramento Suburbs to Find Successful Diversity

It’s been a dark month in America. With the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, I had resigned myself to again write a monthly post primarily about violence, the central topic of my post for April. And I do have a couple of thoughts and links to share about gun violence. But first, and primarily, I want to share a very hopeful experience close to home.

Love for North Natomas

On Saturday I dropped my younger son off for a lifeguard training in the Sacramento suburb of North Natomas. On a whim, I brought the dog for a walk. I was glad I did, because I found North Natomas on a breezy early summer morning to be a delight. 

Perhaps it was the multi-square block, cleverly designed, high density apartment (or perhaps condo) complex I first encountered. Yes, it is possible to build attractive high density housing at scale in California! Maybe it’s not as pretty as the stuff we used to be able to build a hundred years ago (see my March post), but there is hope. Perhaps it was the investment I saw in public amenities; the handsome new pool with its varied water features, the extensive new bike and pedestrian trails, the little metal bridges over the ephemeral stream, even the expensive blondish stone on the water culvert. Certainly I was delighted by the bustling farmer’s market, and the way a covered structure appeared to have been designed intentionally for this purpose.

Most importantly though, I felt delighted by the way this part of Sacramento wears its tremendous human diversity so casually. Walking around North Natomas made me feel proud, and hopeful. It made me think that if one wants to find an epicenter for what Yasha Mounk calls the Great Experiment with diverse democracy, it might be right here in Sacramento, and especially in its suburbs like Natomas and Elk Grove. 

A colleague told me recently that the Elk Grove high school where I teach at is the 3rd most diverse in California and the 14th most diverse in the nation. I don’t like to talk about work too directly on this blog, so I won’t cite evidence for this claim, but I will say that just looking around campus I’m not surprised. 

Fortunately, it’s easy to find all manner of other evidence for Sacramento’s diversity. For instance, in setting up for this post I noticed that of the twenty five most diverse zip US zip codes cited by the schools website “Niche” in 2022, a full one in five were in the metro region I chose to move back to in 2003. These zip codes included #24 95838 (Antelope); #21 95835 (North Natomas); #14 95828 (South Sacramento/Elk Grove); #7 95822 (South Sacramento/Elk Grove); and #3 95823 (South Sacramento/Elk Grove). I’m not going to vouch for Niche’s social science methodology one way or another, but again I’m going to say that I’m not surprised.

In 2015, FiveThirtyEight produced this report showing that many of America’s diverse cities are also highly segregated on a neighborhood basis. Not, as it turns out, Sacramento. On a score dubbed the “neighborhood diversity index,” Sacramento came out as the most diverse city in the US. And according to 2021 reporting through the Sacramento News and Review, Census Bureau data shows that Sacramento is tied with Jersey City and Oakland as being the US city above 200,000 where two people chosen at random are most likely to be from different ethnic groups. 

Not every part of greater Sacramento, of course, is all that diverse. My neighborhood, and most of the other leafy, liberal, and comparatively affluent older neighborhoods surrounding the Capitol are not nearly as diverse as suburbs like Elk Grove and Natomas. Similarly leafy and liberal Davis, despite recent progress, suffers from a decades-long cultural commitment to no growth land use policies that act as a brake on both income and ethnic diversity. And despite conservative pro-growth policies that ought in theory to increase diversity, large portions of Placer County remain among the whitest places in urban California. I’ll even take the risk of saying that many locations in the outer reaches of the Sacramento region have always felt to me like places that people from other parts of California want to move to escape diversity, not to embrace it. But, then again, maybe I need to check my urban liberal bias. Folsom, at the base of the foothills, is probably more diverse than urban core neighborhoods like East Sacramento or Land Park. 

But hurrah for North Natomas, hurrah for Elk Grove, and hurrah for other “boring,” spread out, unhip places like Irving, Texas (sorry Irving if I’m being unfair here—I’m just looking at photos). These kinds of newer suburbs seem almost certainly the true avatars of American diversity, much more than my own neighborhood; even more, perhaps surprisingly, than my former neighborhood in Brooklyn, a place synonymous with diversity.

Gun Violence Thoughts and Links

The events this month in Buffalo and Uvalde should be on the minds of every American. They are certainly on my mind. Guns are probably the one culture war issue where I just don’t see that the other side holds valid points, and I’m already on record in this blog as supporting repeal of the Second Amendment. Maybe it’s a hopeless political strategy. Definitely it is in the short term. But, then again, it’s apparently no less hopeless than advocating for better gun licensing standards or an assault weapons ban, and at least Second Amendment abolitionism has the advantage of being fully honest. 

As this article by Walter Shapiro in the New Republic points out, there may be a “long game” political strategy to being openly against the Second Amendment. Or, as this Washington Post article reminds us, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens came out openly against the Second Amendment shortly before his passing. I tend to think he found some deep wisdom or bravery in his old age. 

Many will disagree with me on Second Amendment abolitionism, but may still find this extended video from UC Davis gun violence experts Garen Wintemute and Amy Barnhorst enlightening. In the video Wintemute, who is an ER doc on top of his academic responsibilities, is especially convincing when he speaks about how gun violence places such a severe burden of psychological stress on the most affected communities. A Sacramento Bee Op-Ed on May 29 from Derrell Roberts gives a less academic, more community-based perspective on similar themes. Roberts also focuses on the need to invest in youth, especially in communities like Oak Park, Del Paso Heights, and South Sacramento affected simultaneously by gun violence and the complex legacy of racism. 

Finally, I wanted to include two links to topics more obliquely related to gun violence. One is an excellent and movingly written Sacramento Bee Op-Ed on mental health by Melinda Henneberger. The piece makes a case in favor of Governor Newsom’s proposed Community Assistance Recovery and Empowerment (CARE) courts. I wonder if the CARE court initiative could help with the epidemic of gun suicides? 

Another link is connected to a point I tried to bring out in last month’s post around how perpetrators in mass shooting incidents so often have histories of violence against women. The link is to Vicki Gonzalez’ Capital Public Radio interview with Maggy Krell, prosecutor and author of the book Taking Down Backpage. It’s a fascinating listen, and an inspiring story of legal success against difficult odds. At a time when debates about gun violence seem to be so profoundly blocked, I find myself wondering whether focusing on reducing exploitation of and violence toward women might be a hopeful public policy strategy, a sideways method to reduce gun violence in the near term.