For more than a year, a debate has been brewing in Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood around affordable housing. The debate centers on one intersection but represents a much larger issue: is there such a thing as too much affordable housing in one community?
Residents of a community already filled with fast-food outlets fret at the prospect of another. Paul Towers blogs about it from Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood.
On Saturday, July 17, South Sacramento residents and organizations will celebrate a year’s worth of planning efforts towards building a healthier region through the “South Sacramento Games.” The South Sacramento region faces many challenges, from unhealthy food and lack of health care to inadequate transportation and violence. Residents have banded together to build a healthier community over the next decade.
The Sacramento neighborhood of Oak Park is getting its first farmer’s market, highlighting the need for healthy food in one of the region’s most underserved neighborhoods.
Sitting before a panel of legislators, a Santa Cruz area farmer recently compared the potential fate of California’s strawberry industry to the current state of American automakers. He argued that if agriculture doesn’t innovate, it faces a bumpy road ahead. And, he argued, that the decisions of regulators today will create the roadmap for the future of farming. It’s no easy task–the direction of the state’s agriculture system is at stake. One set of choices sets us down the road of producing food that continues to poison humans and contaminate our soil, water and air; the other turns a corner to widespread adoption of methods that, though they are more sophisticated and foreign to most conventional growers, produce safe and healthy food for all.