ridetilldawn

As a resident of Homestead Road in Sunnyvale for over 10 years, I can confidently say that living on Homestead is comparable to living below a hydro-electric dammed river -at least in terms of noise. The traffic on this 35mph street flows heavily during commute hours, varys during the day, and virtually disappears at night.

Access to shopping is above average; there are shops of every sort along Homestead's arrow-straight ribbon of asphalt from Los Alto: Trader Joe's, Peet's Coffee, 'Green Grocer', etc., to Sunnyvale/Cupertino: 99 Ranch (with surrounding variety of Asian-themed shops), another 'Green Grocer', Sandwich shops and restaurants, etc., to Santa Clara: Ross Dress-for-less, Burger joints, Cleaners, etc.

PG+E uses Homestead Road as an access road to their corporation yard full of heavy equipment, thus increasing the noise level during commute hours.

Another noisy addition to Homestead is the Kaiser Hospital Emergency Department at Homestead and Lawrence Expy. Emergency vehicles love to use Homestead as an alternative to Highway 280, and race down the street with sirens blaring at all hours of the day and night.

The traffic on Homestead Road creates more than just noise pollution. Inconsiderate drivers toss various used food wrappers, empty drink containers, and other trash from their cars. This trash ends up blowing into residents' driveways and yards. Yuck.

I grow vegetables in my front yard, and have to diligently wash road grime off their skins before eating. The air quality is poor. I wash my cars regularly, as do all other Homestead Road residents.

I'm sure the problems of living on Homestead Road closely mirror the problems along any major road, but still warrant mentioning.

I'll end on a positive note. Homestead Road is a great street for people who want to live private lives. Since it is so forbiddingly loud to spend time in your front yard, people generally disappear into their houses and stay there. This is a great neighborhood for people who lock their doors, latch their windows, and watch their TVs every night. It would also be a great place for young commuting people, as it has great proximity to Highway 280, Highway 85, Lawrence Expressway, San Tomas Expressway, and Foothill Expressway.

Safety along Homestead Road is ensured by a combination of five police jurisdictions! As Homestead traverses four cities, it is patrolled by Los Altos Police, Sunnyvale Police, Cupertino Police, and Santa Clara Police. It is also unincorporated in several sections along its length, so the Santa Clara Sheriff patrols the entire route. I have been stopped while walking at night and asked for my ID. The great police coverage makes for incredibly short response times to emergency calls. Bravo!

Watt is one of those streets that people will use for their commute, to reach shopping centers, to get to the freeway on the way out of town, and as a landmark when directing people unfamiliar with the area. If you're getting the idea Watt is a useful street for cars and commerce, you're right where I was leading you.

While Howe Ave. (which parallels Watt to the west) is relatively pretty with its tree lined center medians and nicely maintained apartment complexes, business centers, and shopping malls, Watt Avenue is quite spartan and barren feeling in comparison.

The businesses along Watt seem less interested in appearances as they put huge parking lots between themselves and the street.

Homes and apartment complexes along Watt are mostly hidden behind fences and walls. This makes Watt more of a thoroughfare and a less pleasant drive.

As far as it's usefullness, Watt is very good at handling lots of traffic between Highway 50 and Highway 80 as people commute to and from their homes.

I used to take the Bus to Sacramento State University from the Amtrak station downtown. When I was bored of riding the bus, I started to walk the route (30/31 line on J and L street) after hopping off the bus in midtown near the 20's. I found K street was the best street for pedestrians as the city had decided to cut off traffic starting at 15th street all the way to the shopping mall at 7th.

Although the local residents are a little sketchy as you approach downtown, there are lots of reasons why K Street is a great addition to the flavor of the Sacramento life experience.

K street is a pedestrian friendly passageway from the Sacramento Convention Center to the Capitol Buildings and the K Street Mall downtown. You can get a good meal at one of the multitude of restaurants near K street. If you need a haircut, a shoeshine, your suit pressed, or your heart-strings tugged upon then K street is your best bet.

The mixture of high class business people with penny-less street dwellers makes for a bit of a strange dynamic along K street, but if you're willing to put up with the wafting scent of Chanel #5 combined with flop-sweat then you'll enjoy a stroll down K street.

I cannot comment on the driving sections of K street as it heads into the residential part of Midtown Sacramento other than to say it is unremarkable and probably a good street to live near due to it's services.

If you are interested in the history of Sacramento, Sutters Fort Historical Park and the California State Indian Museum are located on K Street between 26th and 28th street.

Enjoy!

If you visit Old Sacramento and neglect to walk down Firehouse Alley that parallels Front Street and 2nd Street but is faced by the backs of bars and clubs, you will have missed an important piece of the puzzle that explains Sacramento's allure to young people.

Firehouse Alley is predominately used by workers from the businesses operating along Front Street and 2nd Street in Old Sac. The street transforms at night, however, into a boisterous alley filled with the young and the young at heart as they mill around the enterance to their night clubs and the back patios of bars. Those who are going to cause trouble seem to leave this area alone, luckily, as most people who frequent the bars and clubs are having a good time and there is a significant security presence at either end of the alley during heavy use periods.

As with all Sacramento night-life, Firehouse Alley clears out quickly after the clubs close and there's not much in the way of housing in Old Sac so most people get into their cars and leave the area quiet for the workers to clean up and close down.

I'd highly recommend visiting Old Sac if you are in Sacramento and have a couple of free hours downtown.

Check out Firehouse Alley if you are looking for a good bar-hopping experience one weekend night in Sacramento.

As a Sacramento State University student, I was constantly using Howe Avenue both for commuting to and from school and work, as well as for running errands and visiting friends in the various apartment complexes along Howe.

Howe Ave. is a four lane expressway-type street for most of it's distance from Folsom Boulevard at it's southern end to Highway 80 at it's northern end, although it does get a little smaller and slower as you travel north past the Arden Fair neighborhood.

Most people have a positive opinion of Howe Ave. in respect to it's usefulness as a shopping artery, and a place with lots of high-density housing options.

Howe Avenue's only drawback is the amount of traffic that it holds during commute hours. The lights along Howe are long and tedious to wade through when the traffic is heavy. I wouldn't be happy living along Howe if I had to deal with the traffic every time I left home.

Overall, however, Howe Avenue is a very pleasant street to use for light shopping, a bunch of restaurants, car dealerships at the northern end, and connections to all the other main traffic arteries in north-eastern Sacramento.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to mention the shopping mall. There's a shopping mall (Arden Fair) just west of Howe Ave. on Arden Way. Happy Shopping Y'all.

It seems that every city has this type of street in one iteration or another. Folsom Boulevard starts as a two lane residential street and becomes a 40+ mph four-lane expressway that runs along the light-rail line all the way from Business-80 in Midtown Sac to, you guessed it, the city of Folsom.

I like the fact that Folsom Blvd. is such a diverse street in it's uses as it glides through Sacramento. There are sections of Folsom where you'd think it was a nice little residential artery, yet there are sections of Folsom that would convince you you were an industrial section of Los Angeles with quarries, rails, highway overpasses, and heavy truck traffic.

The fact that Folsom Blvd. travels along the Hwy. 50 corridor is a boon to local traffic as you are not forced to get involved with the commuters in order to get to your shopping mini-malls or the Home Depot.

The section of Folsom that parallels the light-rail near Rancho Cordova is great if you need a seedy motel for a one-night-stand or for whatever else you'd need a seedy motel room.

Aside from the decent residential neighborhood where Folsom originates in Midtown Sac, I wouldn't choose to live along this street. There are, however, options for lower-cost housing along Folsom that shouldn't be omitted in a discussion of the street's offerings. There is at least one mobile-home park along Folsom as well as a few larger condominium complexes with entrances on or near the street.

Overall, Folsom Boulevard is a useful artery for getting around central-eastern Sacramento and getting some errands done.

Broadway in Sacramento is a wide and busy boulevard that will take you all the way from 65th to the Sacramento River. I have had many great meals at multiple restaurants along Broadway. The Tower Cafe near 16th street is a rainforest themed American/South American food restaurant with good food at reasonable prices. This is a popular restaurant with the downtown lunch crowd so arrive early or be prepared to wait (although the mist sprayers are a treat in the heat of Sacramento's summer). Also on Broadway, Andy Nguyen's Vegetarian Restaurant will delight your palate with scrumptious food that belies its vegetable origins. If you don't know what T.V.P. is, you'll leave Andy Nguyen's with a new-found appreciation for the wonder of modern food science! (it's Textured Vegetable Protein, if you didn't already Google it)

There's also a silly little restaurant called Pancake Circus on Broadway, but it's only worth the mention for it's novel name. You'd be better served to go for pancakes at an Ihop.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. There's a Uhaul at 65th and the DMV is on Broadway near the 65th end.

Overall, Broadway is a useful street, although not a street on which I'd like to live.

I rented an apartment on La Riv and was happy to be on a street that led directly to Sac State. I found that many of my neighbors were students, or had been students a Sac State. The proximity to the American River levy trail made bike commutes to campus relatively painless. I also rode my motorcycle down La Riv routinely and was pleased with the wide parking lanes which made for good visibility and safety. The speed limit on La Riv is a little high for a residential street (35mph) although the police enforce the limit on a continual basis.

Overall I can recommend living on La Riviera Drive.

J street was part of my commute from the Amtrak station downtown to the Sac State campus on the 30 or 31 bus. I regularly got my hair cut at Eddy's Deluxe Haircuts and got back on the bus to finish my commute. I liked walking down J street due to the amount of people walking, shopping, living, and hanging out on or near J street. If I had the chance to live in Sacramento again, I would like to live in an apartment on J street in Midtown. The community life on J street is evident as there are local shops that cater to the varying micro-social climates as you travel along. You will see the upper middle class houses near the 40's, the working class apartments in the 30's, and the hipster/gay community in the 20's. Those are references to the cross street numbers as they get lower and closer to downtown Sacramento.

I recommend visiting J street and walking down it's length to get a feeling for the diversity in Sacramento.

I lived on this street for a year and have both positive and negative experiences to report. While the neighbors were easy to get along with, there was a bomb scare in a neighbor's garage that required evacuation and a police robot to destroy the potential pipe-bomb! I was forced to wait in the cold for two hours with my roommates while the robot carried the bomb paraphernalia to a concrete wall and shot at it with a robotic shotgun! This is unfortunately not made up.

I was finally convinced to move away from Salmon Falls Drive when my gas tank was siphoned by local thugs. My car was in my driveway! Both my roommates had their gas siphoned at the same time, and I found out from the landlord that it had happened before. I attribute the higher than average incidence of petty crime on Salmon Falls Drive to the high-density low-income housing complexes at either end of the long winding street. There were many cars with 'bling' and loud radios driving at excessive speeds through this neighborhood at all hours. Lots of people walking to and from the "Big Lots" store at one end of the street as well.

Salmon Falls Drive is continually littered with fast food trash from the "Jack In The Box" restaurant at the corner of La Riviera. I picked up litter from my front yard and the street every day.

I can not recommend living on Salmon Falls Drive.

I lived on Cliffwood Way for a year and was always happy to return home to this relaxing community oriented suburb. After living in Sacramento for a couple of years in various locations, I was happy to find the sleepy suburban life offered on Cliffwood Way as a respite from the hectic traffic-laden roads elsewhere in Sacramento. Neighborhood feeling was shared with friendly neighbors and local organizations like the Mormon church at the end of Cliffwood Way.