Stand at the kitchen window of an older house on the Broderick side of West Sacramento and the view is mostly a wall of dirt. It runs the length of the block, higher than the back fence. That wall is the levee, and on the other side of it the Sacramento River is doing its thing. I have stood at a lot of those windows and it still takes me a second. Haha.
Let us talk about the older river-side parts of West Sacramento, and what is different about a house there when it comes time to sell. The short version is that the city is younger than most of the houses in it, and the neighborhood names are older than both.
YOUR HOUSE CAN BE OLDER THAN YOUR CITY
West Sacramento incorporated on January 1, 1987. Before that there was no city here. There were three communities that had grown up separately as their own towns, Broderick, Bryte and West Sacramento, plus the Southport area. The one carrying the current city name was originally just the strip north of the port canal and south of the railroads.
The river is the other boundary here, not just the view. It separates West Sacramento and Yolo County from the city of Sacramento and Sacramento County, so a house on this bank has always been in a different county from the state capital across the water.
Run the arithmetic on the dates. A house built in the 1950s on the river side of town is more than thirty years older than the city government that now issues its permits. So the river side is not a neighborhood that got added to a city. It is the part that was standing before there was a city to be added to.
THE OLDEST LOTS ON THE RIVER SIDE WERE SOLD OFF IN 1849
In 1846 a man named James McDowell bought 600 acres from John Schwartz and settled the area we now call Broderick, with his wife Margaret and their three daughters. In May 1849 he was shot and killed in a barroom argument.
That October, Margaret hired a land surveyor to map out 160 acres. It was divided into forty one blocks, and she sold the lots individually, naming the plat the Town of Washington. The first lot went to a buyer named August W. Kaye. The town was later renamed Broderick, for Senator David C. Broderick.
This is why I do not guess at lot lines out here. When a parcel was drawn up by a surveyor in 1849, before anyone was thinking about modern setbacks and coverage rules, the lot is what it is, and a survey is a survey. I am not a surveyor and I am not going to pretend to be one from the sidewalk.
THE DAIRY FARM THAT BECAME A NEIGHBORHOOD
Mike Bryte came to California in 1849 to try his hand at gold mining. He did not make a fortune in gold, but he bought a dairy farm with what he did find. When the California Steam Navigation Company arrived, he used the steamships to carry dairy products to markets around the region, and the profits let him buy several thousand acres. He was elected to the Yolo County Board of Supervisors, and he later served as sheriff. In the twentieth century his land was divided, and the community that came out of it took his name.
So Broderick is named for a senator who never lived here, and Bryte is named for a dairy farmer who did. Between 1900 and 1920 the population of the area doubled, from 1,398 to 2,638, and the West Sacramento post office opened in 1915. After 1900 the three communities were collectively called East Yolo.
Two names, two completely different stories, one address line.
HALF THE CITY IS A DIFFERENT PLACE
Southport is about half of the city’s land area. It began as rural homesteads and small neighborhoods in Arlington Oaks and Linden, and it grew through housing booms in the early 1990s and the early 2000s, which added Bridgeway, Gateway, River Ranch and Newport.
That means a West Sacramento address covers a house that went up while the ground around it was still farmland and a house in a subdivision added in the 2000s. The two have almost nothing in common except the city name. When I am looking at the river side, I am looking at the first group.
THE PORT IS WHY THE RIVERFRONT LOOKS LIKE THAT
In June 1963 the Port of Sacramento opened to deep sea traffic when the Sacramento Deep Water Ship Channel was finished. Congress authorized the project in 1946 and construction started in 1949 on the west side of the river. It is the Port of West Sacramento now. Its main imports include cement and its exports include rice.
That channel is why the river side of town is a working waterfront rather than a row of houses looking at water. The Clarksburg Branch Line Trail follows an old railway branch through the city. A house near all of that sits near rail, truck traffic and a working channel. Whether any of it matters depends on where the house sits relative to it.
WHAT THIS MEANS ON THE DAY YOU SELL
Older houses here mean condition and paper, not just character. What I look at is the age of the structure against the age of the additions, what the latest round of work actually was, and what the lot is. A house on this side of town has usually been through more than one round, and the paperwork for the earlier rounds is often thin.
None of this changes what you give up by selling as-is. If you take a direct offer on a house like this instead of listing it, you will probably be offered less than a strong listing would bring, because whoever buys it is taking on the repairs and the unknown. That is not a sales pitch, it is the trade. What as-is actually means on our side of the table is here.
What you get for that difference is not having to fix anything first, and not having to guess what a buyer’s inspector is going to say about a house that predates the city. Every step where you can still walk away is on the process page.
We buy in eleven cities across the region, and West Sacramento is one of them, which is how I ended up reading about a dairy farm on a weekday afternoon.
Question for you: when you tell somebody where you live, do you say West Sacramento, or do you say Broderick, or Bryte, or Southport? The answer says something about how old the house is, and most people who live there have never had to think about it.
