In 1986, the B Street Theatre opened as a simple touring theater for children. Since then, it has grown to be one of the West Coast’s premier children’s theaters, producing 19 shows per year and serving 300,000 people annually. But the two-theater playhouse had outgrown its original space and sought options.

Now in the middle of the summer months, energy usage throughout California inevitably has become a significant issue on the minds of millions of residents. Underscoring this reality will, of course, be the sticker shock that many Californians will experience when they open those summertime utility bills.

Comstock’s monthly look at the business news in the Capital Region. So what happened in July (and the tail end of June)?

With Californians paying some of the highest gasoline prices around, it is no surprise that fuel efficiency ranks as one of the top considerations for purchasing a new vehicle. Miles per gallon or “MPG” is the metric buyers use to estimate how much it will cost to fill up their tank for their daily commute. But transportation isn’t the only major purchase with long-term energy costs: homes have them too.

Just off of the historic Lincoln Highway, Old Town Galt is getting a second chance at life as revival efforts bring new events and businesses to the downtown streets. The newest addition, The Coffee Shop Bakery, embraces small-town pride, classic cars and coffeecake.

The Sacramento Area Council of Governments reported that between 2013 and 2021, the region needs to build about 105,000 housing units to meet demand. Dividing that number by the nine years means almost 12,000 units per year.

According to numbers from the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, the region needs to be building an average of 12,000 homes per year to meet demand. Here are five projects in the works: 

Darryl Rutherford, executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance, says there’s no easy answer to the Capital Region’s housing crisis, but here he offers some possible solutions being explored.

One of the most pressing topics right now in housing is low inventory. Frankly, there just aren’t enough homes for sale in the Sacramento region, and it’s a problem. If you’ve bought or tried to buy recently, you certainly know this.

The departure of long-established but undocumented Mexicans from California is a signal — along with other government data from the southwest border — that the flow of unauthorized immigration is shifting direction, perhaps dramatically.

Students at UC Davis are building a house. Not just any house, but a solar-powered house, one with the potential to be as affordable as it is innovative and, above all, energy efficient.

The winding down for California’s baby boomers may end up boosting their home cities.

While the project has support from city officials, some residents and special interest groups continue their attempts to stall it. Regardless, plans for the casino move forward. 

As the cost of daily life tests the bounds of gravity in San Francisco, a beneficiary has emerged 90 miles away.

This year marks the deadline for California’s 10-year bet on solar roofs. In 2006, the state launched the “Million Solar Roofs” vision, pumping $3.2 billion into incentive programs. The plan was to build one million solar roofs, or the equivalent thereof, generating 3,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2017.

If you imagine a humming city as a living body, the conventional alleyway might be the large intestine. It’s a lonely grey loading zone, a collection point for garbage, and a covert space for drug use and violence. But as U.S. cities grow denser, urban passageways that were once ignored and crumbling are enjoying a renaissance. Alleyway activation is a designer buzzword for modernizing utilitarian corridors into well-lit public spaces.

Kimberly Garza, a landscape architect and director of ATLAS Lab, offers her insight into how underutilized urban spaces can be transformed.

Communities in the Capital Region are struggling with the increasing numbers of homeless in their streets and parks and have realized that the problem has to be addressed. Local programs help by providing meals and winter shelter. But the primary need is year-round, permanent supportive housing, because living in tents or on park benches is not a sustainable way of life.

Through the first four months of 2017, our industry has completed an impressive 1,888 new home sales. Underscoring the uptick in the homebuilding industry’s economic fortunes, in March we sold more than 500 — 527 to be exact — homes in a single month for the first time in a decade.

San Francisco, which in recent years had the biggest home-price gain in the U.S., was the country’s weakest market in the first quarter, with values falling for the first time since 2011.