State of the City Address 2024

Sacramento, CA (Sep. 19, 2024) - Mayor Darrell Steinberg delivered the 2024 State of the City address on September 19 from Aggie Square in Sacramento, CA. Read the full transcript of Mayor Steinberg’s address and watch the livestream of the full presentation.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s State of the City address:

We are gathering at a spot that represents the art of the possible, in large part, because the former Dean of Engineering at Georgia Tech decided to come west to UC Davis. 

Chancellor Gary May took one look at Sacramento and saw its aspirations and energy, and decided it was time to stop just talking about bringing this powerhouse research institution across the river and to actually make it happen. I met with Barry Broome and other Sacramento business leaders in Atlanta with Chancellor May before he came out and I immediately knew that this humble, strong man was the real deal. He talked then about a vision to combine the power of the University, the city, the region, labor and business to create a center of economic energy, research and community.  He and the University have followed through, and our city is immensely grateful.   

We also have the privilege of gathering here because Chancellor May chose Wexford Science and Technology, the nation’s leading curator of innovation districts created in partnership with universities and cities. Wexford has done great and similar projects in a dozen cities around the country. Chancellor May's decision to choose such a proven leader demonstrated to me that this was not just some concept for UC Davis but a signature priority for the University.  

Most importantly, we are here because the community stepped up and insisted that Aggie Square have real and meaningful benefits for the people and neighborhoods that surround this vision. A big round of applause for everyone who got engaged in bringing us here today. 

Welcome everyone. This is my last State of the City after eight years as your Mayor and representing our city over nearly three decades in public office. I will not let up until December 10th. Over the next 82 days, we are working tirelessly on some major downtown initiatives and announcements that will come close to rivaling Aggie Square.  

I will leave that little teaser dangling out there for today… stay tuned. 

This morning I want to take the opportunity to talk about the state of the city in 2024 and what we have done and experienced together these last eight historic years. Call it the arc of change in extraordinary times. 

I never thought the job of Mayor would be easy. But I guess I never expected that anything could be tougher than being Senate leader during the worst recession in 50 years. For not the first time in my life, I turned out to be wrong.  

An old Legislative veteran whom I respect greatly reminded me once about leadership when I complained how hard it was to lead a Senate faced with such unpleasant choices - cut things you care about deeply, raise everyone's taxes, or face bankruptcy. “Hey Darrell,” he said, “you do not get to pick your time – your time picks you.”

The time has once again picked all of us. The crises we’ve faced since 2016 have been different from the Great Recession, but no less harrowing.  As a nation, we weathered the pandemic, a rightful racial reckoning, and a vexing housing and homelessness crisis. But here in Sacramento, we never stopped getting things done, big and small; we kept the city together through unimaginable stresses, and we prepared this city to advance even farther than the excitement and momentum we all felt before that fateful week in March 2020 when our world suddenly shut down.  

The State of our Sacramento is strong, and will continue to be strong, no matter the crisis. Crime is down city-wide by 13.6%. This is on top of last year’s record reduction of 18%. Larceny is down by 6.4%, burglary has decreased by 22%, and vehicle theft is down by an impressive 25%. Thank you to our police department, fire and first responders for working hard every day to make this city safer. Our  2024 unemployment rate is lower than our historic average and well below the Covid height in 2021. 

A state of the city is about so much more than its crime statistics and unemployment rates.  It's about its spirit, its history, its people, its ambitions, and the way it views the least among us. Good times or bad, smooth times or rocky times, whoever picks us, for any era, there are some timeless lessons that in my last year, I want to share with you.  

Lesson number one: If we aren’t willing to risk a few losses and some real pain along the way, we will always settle for less than what the people we represent deserve.  

I’ve won a few prestigious awards in my public life, and then there is the honor of getting lampooned by a political cartoonist. My favorite hangs on my office wall at City Hall. The late Sacramento Bee cartoonist Rex Babin depicted me as the knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who insists he wants to keep on sword fighting even though he has been reduced to a legless, armless torso flailing on the ground.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” he insists.

Rex was parodying a bill I authored 24 years ago as an Assemblymember to make cities and counties share sales tax revenue, instead of the repetitive fighting with each other over who could land the next auto mall or big box store and get more money at the expense of their neighbors. 

Despite working my tail off, I lost the bill big time. The cartoon is a bit of an exaggeration, but I do think my wanted poster was displayed in every suburban post office in California because they thought I was trying to steal their hard-earned tax revenues. 

Seven years later, I tried again as a State Senator but this time with a different approach. In 2008, we passed the landmark SB 375, based on the pioneering blueprint led by our own council of governments, SACOG.  Instead of making cities and counties share sales tax, it offered them the incentive of more transportation and housing money if they worked together to reduce sprawl and build more affordable housing. I followed it up with a permanent funding program, generating billions of dollars for affordable housing built near transit, including millions for Sacramento. 

A big loss one year ultimately led to an even bigger win several years later. Without the first big failure, a full defeat and taking on heavy criticism, there never would have been an ultimate breakthrough with an even better result. 

I have always had one way of doing politics and governing, sometimes with great results and sometimes at my peril. As a young legislator, I vowed to fix the broken mental health system. A quarter-century later, the system is obviously far from fixed. But that promise resulted in a 2004 tax on millionaires that has produced $31 billion and counting of new funding for mental health care, helping hundreds of thousands of people along the way.   

I have always known that if we are lucky enough to get elected to these big positions, our power is always temporary. In the end, what really matters are the actual things we accomplish for others. The greatest risk of all in politics is leaving office having achieved little because the years flew by and we chose to avoid the causes that were uncomfortable, generated controversy, or simply seemed too daunting. 

It was one thing to apply my high-wire philosophy in the California Legislature; it was quite something else to do so at the local level. As Mayor, I was directly accountable to an entire city whose residents are hungry for more, but whose local government has a much smaller budget and has always defined its role and responsibilities in a very traditional way.  

Politics is a tough business. Maybe even more so now in this crazy era.  I’ve learned that part of the job as Mayor, even with its limited authority, is to listen and absorb and at times even to honor the anger and frustration of people who want more and faster progress. I haven’t always liked that part of it. Play it safe and take less incoming anger, or put your all into a BIG goal and see how far you can get, knowing that if you don’t stretch, you won’t get nearly as far. 

I only know one way. So I took the dominating issue of our time, unsheltered homelessness, and campaigned to make a difference. I never promised to solve homelessness, but I know that I gave that impression.  Putting it out there so assertively and not fully appreciating the obstacles and the slower pace for implementation at the local government level made me a lightning rod and target for not having actually solved the problem overnight or even in eight years.  

Was it a mistake to set such high expectations and invest so much effort and emotion on this issue? History and others will judge, but I am sure of two things: There was in fact peril, and there was no real alternative than to address homelessness head on. The peril came from all sides; frustration from the business community who wanted the problem gone, and equal frustration from activists who believed that until we have enough housing for everyone, we should not intervene in the unsafe and unhealthy conditions on our street. I tried everything from an idealistic legal right to housing, to a comprehensive siting plan. We hit many walls along the way.

And yet. And yet… Look at what we have done together. While unsheltered homelessness increased statewide, we scratched and clawed and fought to do more than our city has ever done and achieved a 41 percent reduction in unsheltered homelessness. Let me say that again: While homelessness rose statewide, Sacramento saw a 41 percent reduction. ​​Thirteen hundred more beds than when we started, largely because we led the big city mayors to insist that the state directly allocate homeless dollars to cities, and a whole new city department organized to intervene in encampments and help as many people as possible come inside.   

In 2016, I promised to get 2,000 people off the streets. Today, we have helped 25,000 people go from unsheltered to housed. We have thousands more affordable housing units and are the most progressive city in the country to remove limitations on the number of units built in a single family neighborhood and eliminated exclusionary zoning, allowing the building of quality duplexes, quadruplexes, and other innovative housing types; more affordable home ownership choices for young people in our city who can not envision ever owning a home.  

Problem solved? Far from it. Perfect in implementation and follow-through?  Hardly. But think about how many people have been helped. Think about how much worse it could have been if we had not said yes we can, yes we must, been not afraid to fail, and insisted the city lean in hard to move toward solutions for housing and homelessness. If we had just been fine with business as usual? 

I came back to the city after years of state leadership to do more than just hold the gavel. I had already held enough titles. I ran because I saw a changing city whose residents were eager for more — more growth, more employment beyond government, more sports, more music, more art, more vitality. This generation and future generations of young people who leave Sacramento for college and those who stay close at UC Davis or Sac State – they are going to have choices. Is Sacramento going to be their choice? The answer lies in our hands.  

As Mayor, I have never been more passionate about economic development and growth. From the beginning, I have insisted that the city must find the resources to prioritize investing directly in our growing Sacramento in all ways, with a special emphasis on uplifting traditionally disadvantaged neighborhoods and forgotten commercial corridors. In the midst of hard times, we put more money into the creative economy than any other city in the country. We funded one-time, multimillion-dollar initiatives in underserved neighborhoods from north to south. We made more direct investments in youth and workforce training and affordable housing. And we kept hundreds of small businesses up and running and restaurants afloat during Covid while feeding hundreds of isolated seniors. 

We are here today at Aggie Square because the future of this city lies in our neighborhoods. A good capital city grows and diversifies its economic base starting with its downtown. But a great capital city goes further and makes sure no neighborhood is left behind, especially those cast aside by once-discriminatory and now just traditional ways of doing things. 

I wasn’t born here, but it’s been home for two thirds of my life. In fact it was this week, 40 years ago, that I moved to Sacramento to take my first law job.

I bought my first home not far from here in Tahoe Park. Julie and I started our family in that house. And that’s when I first got involved, starting the Tahoe Park Neighborhood Association, and then as a young, mustachioed City Council member with an almost full head of curly brown hair.  

We lived in Tahoe Park, but my experience representing Stockton Blvd and the Southeast neighborhoods of Avondale and Glen Elder had the most searing impact on my young political conscience. Once proud, integrated neighborhoods, disinvestment and redlining led to segregation, blight and gangs. 

Today we stand near the center of Little Saigon, built by proud refugees who risked everything to become small business owners in their new country. I'm proud of this city for so much; but nothing makes me prouder than the way we welcome and embrace immigrants and refugees, create safe havens and fund legal protections for those who are scared and vulnerable, especially against the backdrop of so much hate and xenophobia in too many parts of our nation. Whenever I speak at a mural unveiling, I never get tired of shouting, we paint walls to bring people in…we will never build walls to keep people out.  

Advocating as a younger leader for these economically distressed parts of town taught me my second life-long lesson about politics and public service. 

Always protect the health and safety of every neighborhood and every person you are privileged to represent. But train your highest energies and attention on the people and places that have been left out and left behind. They deserve a good, healthy life just like those in wealthier neighborhoods, where safety, cool shaded streets, play areas for children, and opportunities for education and economic advancement can be taken for granted.

I chose to deliver my last State of the City speech here at Aggie Square, because it represents everything I believe a city should aspire to.

This is not just another project. It will produce $5 billion annually for the six-county region in new ongoing economic investment. Aggie Square and the broader vision for Stockton Boulevard is the city’s most ambitious effort to uplift a part of our city that matters and hasn’t gotten nearly enough resources and attention. 

A project of this magnitude does not happen by accident. It requires a willingness for many to take a “few flesh wounds” in pursuit of generational change. 

Why is Aggie square so unique and important?

It’s not every day or every decade that a city scores a multibillion-dollar investment, the promise of 5,000 plus jobs, one of the leading research and life science universities coming across the river and locating itself in the heart of three historic neighborhoods, the capital to incubate new clean industries, launch new startups, and provide a place for community members to gather and take advantage of a whole new center of energy and opportunity.

It’s not every day that the project comes with $50 million for affordable housing, including $10 million directly for the people living in the community to pay for home repairs, for help with the rent, or to realize the dream to buy homes in their neighborhoods.  

And it’s not every day that a big project has an actual legal requirement that 25 percent of the high-wage jobs created over time are guaranteed for people who live in the surrounding neighborhoods 

But what makes Aggie Square truly aspirational? It defies the current political belief that you can’t possibly make progress with people and organizations you disagree with. 

This is a hard time to be rah rah about principled compromises. We experience the difficulties of civil dialogue and compromise many Tuesday nights at City Hall. UC Davis and universities throughout the country experienced the same in 2024, as national and international tensions came directly to campus. Division, distrust and dysfunction are far too often the norm in our civic and political lives. I’ve always believed that civility is not a weakness. We can be tough on the issues and easier on the people who see it differently.  

Here at Aggie Square, real conflict didn’t end with dysfunction, it ended with victory.  

That leads to lesson number three: Principled conflict is healthy and necessary for real progress. If it’s too easy, it’s probably not that important. Easy agreements too often result in stagnation or, at best, less than significant progress. We don’t have to agree with one another or even like one another to accomplish something great together.  

If there was an algorithm that could predict the success of Aggie Square based on the pre-existing relationships between the parties to the ultimate agreement, the algorithm would instruct us all to leave these premises at once. The neighborhoods and UC Davis have had a long history of less than complete trust. The service workers union at Davis and other UC campuses have had years of contract, legislative and ballot fights with the University. Sacramento Investment Without Displacement, the community coalition, was formed to challenge the idea that without specific community benefits, the negative consequences of displacement would outweigh all the new growth. And of course there were the lawsuits that threatened to halt Aggie Square before it even started. 

But there was something going on that was so much more important than the positioning and the lawsuits. Everyone, in their own way, wanted Aggie square to happen. There was way too much upside for business, for workers, for the city and community, to let this fail.

My colleagues and I helped lead negotiations that resolved two lawsuits and created a landmark community benefits agreement which guaranteed the housing and local hiring promises. The City agreed to kick in $30 million to pay for project infrastructure and contribute to the affordable housing fund.  

Even if the negotiations and settlements didn’t exactly create a trust circle,  it has bound all the parties together around a set of common agreements and an incredible future together. 

A $30 million investment from the city for Aggie Square was a no-brainer.  But the city’s willingness to step up for its neighborhoods and commercial corridors is not just about the big projects. It also represents the truest test whether we as a city are serious about racial and economic equity. 

Every struggling neighborhood and commercial corridor deserves the dream of a project or vision that will fundamentally change the trajectory of the neighborhood forever. 

For many people who are struggling, these kinds of dreams are secondary to everyday worries like surviving the endless summer heat or simply  being able to walk safely across their streets. 

Long before we were internationally recognized as the farm to fork capital, we were known as the city of trees. City of trees?? I guess it depends where you live. In neighborhoods like Land Park and East Sacramento, more than 35 percent of the surface area is covered by trees. Fruitridge Manor – less than 16 percent. West Del Paso Heights – 19 percent. 

Drive south of here on Stockton Boulevard on a hot day, and you’ll find a lot less shade than you would just north of here in Elmhurst, North Oak Park or Curtis Park. 

The City spends $8 million annually on its trees, the vast majority for repair and maintenance. The bulk of the money goes to the already affluent areas because – you guessed it – that’s where the trees already are. 

It’s not right.  

Our kids, the elderly, and small businesses in North and South Sacramento deserve to enjoy the same leafy tree canopy as everyone else. They need and deserve much-needed refuge from the unrelenting summer heat.  

It’s so often the little things in our neighborhoods that speak volumes. 

There are many indignities that our often left-out and forgotten neighbors  must bear. Some are life and death.

My colleagues have raised the issue of traffic safety as a community crisis and emergency. They are right on. Too many Sacramentans are dying and seriously injured in bike and pedestrian accidents. Every community has been affected from Natomas to Land Park.  The highest rates of death and serious injury occur unsurprisingly in the city's disadvantaged communities, including Marysville Blvd in Del Paso Heights, Broadway Stockton in Oak Park, Florin Rd in Cabrillo Park, and Mack Rd in South Sacramento. Every one of my City Council colleagues has spoken out on behalf of their communities that we must find a way to end these tragedies.  

So even as we celebrate Aggie Square, we have little or no funding for bike, transit, and pedestrian safety. We have good housing developers willing to build more workforce housing on the Stockton blvd corridor, but no local funds for the roadway improvements essential for the projects to work. The same story can be told in so many other places north and south in our city.  

Today, I renew the call for a countywide ballot measure as soon as politically possible to provide billions for affordable housing, safe streets and public transportation. The big roadway extensions from the prior failed measures were not supported by the public. Making sure everyone can afford a decent and affordable place to live and to walk and bike safely in their neighborhoods – that’s a proposition at the right time to take to the voters. And it will win.

A countywide ballot measure is only the beginning. The city can no longer afford to ignore the economic potential and public health and safety pleas of its neighborhoods.

We have a budget deficit. Some will say we can’t possibly add more responsibility or strain to our already stretched financial situation.

I say we need to think differently.  

In West Sacramento, in over 40 percent of the entire city, every time the property tax revenue increases because of a new project, a portion of that growth goes right back into a city-wide economic development and infrastructure fund to help with the next project. We have used the same tool only sparingly in Sacramento with a few projects, but not on a city-wide scale. The next Mayor and Council have the power to change that.  

I've heard the argument against this idea for nearly eight years. We have too many obligations to fund public safety and other vital city services. Our traditional thinking is the classic definition of a self-defeating spiral.  

We can't grow our budgets for public safety and other vital services unless our tax base and tax revenues grow. We can’t afford to invest in helping create more tax paying industries and businesses because our budget is too tight. We therefore can’t increase basic services because we are not growing our tax base and revenues fast enough.  

We sometimes find workarounds when we say it matters. Why do the good things in our city so often require a workaround? Why do we so rarely have the local match to aggressively expand our tree canopy, fix our roads, invest in more job-creating industries and companies, or provide the needed loans for more workforce housing along our commercial corridors?   

I was gone 18 years between leaving the City Council in 1998 and becoming Mayor in 2016. It was already a different city by the time I got sworn in, much of that change for the better. 

I came in as Mayor just a couple years after the City Council voted for a major public investment to save the Kings and build the Golden One Center. I was a big supporter and authored the bill to make sure the Seattle instigators couldn’t stop the project. After I became Mayor in 2017, we unanimously funded the major expansions of our convention center and community center theater, anchoring downtown’s eastern end.   

Where is the same drive and commitment for our forgotten neighborhoods and commercial corridors?  

In 2018, I asked the council and then the voters to approve a full cent Measure U as the original half cent was about to expire. The voters said yes. Their yes vote raised roughly an additional $70 million a year and in the end saved the city from what would have been an unsolvable budget crisis… But I intended most of that $70 million to be set aside for neighborhood-based economic development. Others viewed Measure U as more money for the city enterprise and city services. Most of the powerful business and labor interests in the city had their own projects and priorities. Few embraced the big idea that the city should always have a permanent source of revenue to invest in infrastructure and economic development for all parts of our city. 

Once again, we fought tooth and nail to direct more resources to the neighborhoods, the commercial corridors, the arts, small business and youth, both from Measure U and our $200 million of one-time Covid relief dollars. The residents, especially the young people, fought alongside us, passing Measure L in 2022, a multimillion-dollar set-aside for more youth investments. I was proud to support it.

The question I raised eight years ago remains just as relevant today as the city transitions to new leadership. What are the fundamental priorities of a modern city? To just provide the basic services and traditional public safety, or insist on the financial and organizational capacity to partner and invest with the private sector, non profits, and neighborhoods to grow our city? I think there can only be one answer. 

In our traditional form of city government, a Mayor can articulate a vision, command a council majority, find the resources at the ballot box or at the State Capitol, and make great progress. But there is a wide gap between a Mayor’s accountability to the people and actual authority to implement the direction they promised. 

If we really want an ongoing and permanent commitment to inclusive economic growth, the future Mayor and council need help – a civic and political community that evolves with a changing city. 

Despite all our significant accomplishments, our civic leaders too often act like it’s every person for themselves. A project entitlement is not the only objective of economic development. Collective action will take us further.  We spend a lot of time, energy and resources being for or against a project or initiative instead of the coalition and community building that would extend more opportunity to every corner of our city. Like we all did at Aggie Square.

There is so much good happening in Sacramento. We are building vibrant new centers of economic growth; a great food and restaurant scene, tourism, music, art and culture, health care, life sciences and biotech. These big changes required the forging of new relationships and stepping out from our comfortable corners.  

Like we all did at Aggie Square, find the genuine intersections between the activists, the neighborhoods and business, and business and labor. The city will thrive. 

It's almost time for me to pass the torch. I have done my best and put my head and heart into trying to change the arc of our city in extraordinary times. The progress speaks for itself. The La Familia Opportunity Center, Aggie Square in South Sacramento, complete streets for Franklin Blvd, the 102 acres South of Meadowview, a renewed vision for Del Paso Blvd, the dream for Northgate Blvd to become the vibrant and diverse cultural hub for locals and tourists alike, vibrant, diverse food scene where locals and tourists come for tacos, burritos, pupusas, beautiful art and more; a city of festivals drawing crowds of hundreds of thousands, renewed energy in the creative economy like never before, so much more – all while reducing crime, getting more people housed and treating our 5,000-plus city workers with recognition and respect. It's not been perfect, but the city is more than standing after a pandemic and these most difficult years.  

My own flesh wounds are already healing!

My fervent hope is that our city does not retrench. That we continue to be bold. That we continue to try – and not be afraid to fail. That we commit, unequivocally, to racial and economic equity. That we create real, long-term funding solutions for our streets, public transportation and affordable housing. That we help bring to life every corner of our city so that they become destinations for the people of our city and beyond. That we never settle for another generation of “wouldn’t it be great if we could just…”

If we have not finished the task of solving all the complex challenges before us, I hope these years have gotten us closer to achieving them. Sometimes a leader’s job is to redefine the problems, to discern the better questions that need to be answered before we can actually solve all the riddles.  

Sacramento is on the national stage. Money magazine said we are one of the top cities to live in the country because we are ‘built around thoughtful policy, civic engagement and community – making us “the blueprint for the future.” In 2023, Forbes named Sacramento the best place to live in California. Other national observers have listed us as one of the top 3 foodie scenes in the country. Midtown Farmers Market was recently voted as the No. 1 farmers market in California and now ranks 3rd in the nation. The accolades will keep coming.  

From wherever I sit in the years ahead, I can not wait to see where we are going – how the state and nation will continue to showcase us, how many more people will move here, what we will lead and create, and how this kind of accomplishment will be repeated in different ways in every corner of this city.

Thank you.