This Sacramento native is walking every street on the grid

Lacy, a Sacramento native, has endeavored to walk every street on Sacramento’s downtown and midtown grid. She started walking in the winter of 2024, and started documenting this process on her Instagram page in March of 2025, encouraging people to be more curious about their community. According to her map, which she keeps in a journal and marks down the streets she’s walked in red, she only has about 10 more streets left.

She’s requested to withhold her last name due to privacy concerns. CapRadio joined her on her walk of the entirety of 27th street. 

Interview highlights

Why did you start doing this?

I’ve lived downtown for quite some time, as an adult and as a child. I lived down here for a little bit of time when I was like six years old or so. There were a lot of parts of the city that I just never saw. You get really used to going your certain routes and things like that. There’s just blocks that I knew I had been missing. 

I was looking at a map one day and our city is like almost a perfect grid. I was like, you could just walk one side to the other and see the whole street. So I figured, why don’t I just start doing that?Just start seeing what I’ve been missing.

Lacy's map showing the streets she's already walked as on Sacramento's grid as of Monday, May 4 marked in red.Courtesy of Lacy

Do you have a methodology? Is there a method to the madness?

There is a little bit. So I have a couple, I wouldn’t call them rules, but like loose rules, I suppose. I start at one end of the street and go all the way to the other, just on one street. Just go straight. I have the boundary of the freeways. Again, not hard rules. I do make exceptions. 

Sometimes, you just have to go past them and see. But I try to stay within the grid of Midtown. Once I finish that, who knows where I’ll go.

What are some of your favorite discoveries that you’ve made?

Oh my gosh, there’s so many different things… I think that just every part of the city is so much more lively than you think. There’s some little corners where people have warned me like, ‘oh, don’t go over there alone. It’s scary over there.’ People are always worried about me walking around, but we have a really friendly city in every corner of the city. There’s just people living in their houses and minding their own business…  We just don’t always see that when you just are on your normal daily commute. 

What are some of the weirdest things you’ve seen?

I’ve been doing this for [a long] time. I think that’s one of the surprising things is there’s nothing super crazy that I’ve really seen.  It’s really just people going on about their lives and just people at home on their porch or going for a walk.

We have a lot of unhoused neighbors who are sometimes in the streets, but I mean, even they are super nice. They keep to themselves. They’re just living their life too.

The corner of W Street and 27th Street, where the walk on April 30, 2026 began.Ruth Finch/CapRadio

What have you learned about the city as a whole since starting this project?

I started doing this before I started recording it. I think that people really, since I started posting, I feel like people are really involved and want to see more of their community.

I think people want to be a lot more involved in the community than they really are. I think people really want to get out there and see different things, but I think maybe they’re just like a little bit too stuck kind of in their day-to-day where they don’t get out and see different neighborhoods. 

I think people are a lot more curious about it than I thought for sure. When I started doing this project, I figured it’s cool for me, nobody else really cares. But once I started posting about it everybody was like, ‘wow, I didn’t know that street was there, or that there was like residential streets like that downtown…’ People are just really, really curious about what’s around them.

You said you’ve lived downtown for quite a few years, but how long have you lived in the Sacramento area in general?

I’ve lived in Sacramento my whole life. I grew up here and I was in the suburbs kind of for a little bit. I have lived here eight years continuously.

As a Sacramento native, and someone who’s walked as much of Sacramento as you have, are we the City of Trees or Farm to Fork?

It’s definitely City of Trees. It’s not Farm to Fork. I mean, we definitely have a lot of good food, but I don’t think it’s Farm to Fork. I think there’s other places definitely more deserving of that title. But I mean, look how much shade! 

If you ever see the city from up high … if you go to a top of a parking garage or you’re on a high-up balcony or something, you can definitely tell it’s the City of Trees for sure. 

I promise I’m not asking this for my own sake, but how long do these walks usually take?

It depends! A street like this probably will take us maybe 45 minutes. It’s a lot shorter than you kind of expect, but also longer than you expect. Usually the numbers are a little bit shorter than the letters. So the numbers are about like a mile and a half. And the letters, I think K Street was the longest one. That’ll be the next one that I post. That’s definitely the longest one.  It’s like over two miles I believe, and that’s just the part like, 29th to Front Street on the river. That takes a little over two hours. 

What street surprised you the most?

There’s a lot more to P Street than you would expect. You could probably just live on P Street and never have to leave. Honestly, they’ve got a little bit of everything. It’s a really good mix of houses and commercial buildings, and they have a lot of those big beautiful tall downtown buildings on P Street. 

What do you want the biggest takeaway from this project to be?

The biggest thing I want to do with this project is just inspire people to go out and explore what’s around them. You never just take a different street that you normally wouldn’t. Or when you go on a walk, just go in a straight line.  Or another thing that I like to do is do color walks, where if you see blue, you turn left where that blue is, or different things like that to get outside of your comfort zone and outside your normal area.