15 Years Ago, a Sacramento Dad-to-Be Asked a Question. Now He’s a Leading Advocate for Safer Streets.
Isaac Gonzalez, a local Sacramento advocate and speaker at the upcoming Strong Towns National Gathering.
“January 13, 2022, is a day I will never forget,” Sacramento resident Isaac Gonzalez wrote on July 2023. On that day, like every weekday, Lupe Jimenez was standing at the corner of 60th and Folsom Boulevard, waiting for her 6th-grade daughter to be dismissed from the same school Gonzalez’s daughter attended. On January 13, 2022, however, Jimenez was fatally struck by a car.
“In the aftermath of the crash, I found myself besieged by a whirlwind of emotions: grief for the loss of a parent, regret that more wasn't done to prevent this tragedy, anger at the inconsiderate speeders who race past the school every day, and helplessness knowing that the conditions leading to this calamity would persist,” Gonzalez said.
Folsom Boulevard had a reputation for being dangerous. Nobody enjoyed crossing it. Drivers were chronically exceeding the posted speed limit. Of course, the road’s design was far from Gonzalez’s responsibility or discretion, but he was unwilling to let Jimenez’s name silently join a growing list of victims. She shouldn’t have died in the first place, but at the very least, he wouldn’t let her die in vain.
He and a growing collection of parents, neighbors, and locals sprang into action. “It wasn’t easy, but in eight months, we got about $5.5 million dollars to fix that road.”
By 2022 when this took place, Gonzalez knew how to act, where to focus his energies, and how to mobilize his community. Yet, that wasn’t always the case.
Come hear Isaac Gonzalez speak at this year’s National Gathering! Get tickets and learn more here.
Where It All Began
Gonzalez’s first experience with advocacy dates back nearly 15 years when he organized a neighborhood cleanup. “When my wife and I discovered we were going to start a family, I thought, well, I want my kids to have the same opportunities and benefits that I had in this city,” he told me. He recalled that, during the Great Recession, municipal budgets, like that of the parks department, shriveled. “And so, our parks started looking really shabby.”
Even so, he didn’t know where to begin. Initially, he figured why not host a meeting to plan out how to beautify the community. In order to get as many people involved as possible, he pasted flyers everywhere. “Nobody showed up,” he recalled, laughing. “And that’s when I decided I’m just going to plan it myself and hopefully people will show up on the actual cleanup day.” People did. A lot of people did. And several offered to help with the next one.
In the ensuing years, Gonzalez would organize countless cleanups, eventually joining the neighborhood association board as the chair of beautification, but already in this first attempt, he learned a valuable lesson. “Just do the damn thing,” he said. “Whether you’re trying to put together a traffic safety forum, a neighborhood walk, a cleanup day—don’t spend too much time worrying about getting it perfectly right. Just plan it as best as you can and be the spark that pops the thing off.”
He concedes that, in retrospect, he would’ve conducted those first few cleanups differently. At the same time, that hindsight is only available to him because at some point, he identified a problem and asked, “What’s the next smallest thing I can do to make this better?”
Asking that simple question turned out to be a gateway to more than just a tidy park. It prompted Gonzalez to question why the city’s budget was so volatile, why public space was the first to suffer when funds ran dry, and, ultimately, why so many people were dying on Sacramento’s streets.
In the Wake of Tragedy, Advocates Push for Change
In January 2012, teenager Michelle Murigi was killed while crossing Fruitridge Road, just minutes from where Gonzalez lived. Murigi was in an unsignalized crosswalk, trying to get from the school building to the bus stop after tutoring younger students at Mark Twain Elementary, adjacent to her high school. At the time, Sacramento police reported that the car in the far eastbound lane closest to Murigi had stopped to allow her to cross, but the car in the inner eastbound lane continued through the crosswalk and struck her. The second driver alleged he was unable to see Murigi because of the stopped car.
At the time of the tragedy, Gonzalez was working as a communications consultant, teaching students how to create and leverage media to tell stories about their community. “Her death was a big deal,” he said. “It happened in an underserved community and on a notoriously terrible road that we’d now call a stroad.”
It wasn’t just the loss of a community member that incensed Gonzalez and his students. It was the city’s reflexive inertia. “The city wasn’t saying that they wouldn’t fix this—rather, that this intersection was number 20 or so on their list in terms of priority,” Gonzalez recalled. “And if they install one traffic light a year, maybe 20 years from now, this intersection would see change.”
For everyone touched by Murigi’s death, this was unacceptable. And so her classmates, relatives, and local pedestrian advocacy organizations coalesced to keep the pressure on Sacramento’s elected leaders and city agencies. A year and a half later, the city and school district mustered up the money to fund a traffic light, Gonzalez recalls.
The pace was a testament to the power of advocacy. By keeping Murigi in the spotlight, a handful of ordinary citizens were able to compel the city to install a traffic light less than two years after her death, rather than twenty. In the future, those fighting on behalf of Murigi could only hope that the city would be proactive and not reactive.
“The issue of this light has been on the agenda for a decade,” her mother told the news in 2014 while walking to the intersection where her daughter was killed “To me, I keep seeing that Michelle was a sacrifice.”
It’s Time To Slow Down, Sacramento
Having witnessed firsthand how effectively public pressure can foster change over a decade ago, Gonzalez devoted his life to advocacy. In the ensuing years, he worked with a medley of nonprofits and local organizations on everything from sanitation to storytelling to safety. Today, normalizing a proactive response is where he’s focusing his energies with Slow Down Sacramento.
At its core, Slow Down Sacramento recognizes that high vehicular speeds are incompatible with city streets. The concept is foundational for Strong Towns, but nevertheless a hard sell for even those touched by traffic violence. What Gonzalez uses to his advantage when it comes to advocating for change is his reputation. For over a decade, he’s not only built credibility with his actions, he’s become a reliable face and force in community matters. To put it simply, he’s always shown up.
“So by having a known reputation for being a person who wants to and will work to fix things, who will put in the sweat, equity, and the time to actually be a part of the change to fix things… I think that helps when I bring up new ideas,” Gonzalez shared.
However, his reputation is only part of the equation. “There’s this old proverb: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
These words underpin how Gonzalez has actually materialized the change he’s championed. “I still want to achieve radical things,” he explained. “But I don't want to alienate my neighbors who aren't there yet. In order for this to work, I need to bring them along with me.”
It’s not about compromising his values or ideas to appease his neighbors. It’s about meeting them where they’re at and affording others the patience he was given when he was just beginning his own journey:
“One thing I like people to know about me is that I didn’t go to college. I don’t have technical expertise or fancy degrees or letters to add to my name. I'm not going to pretend to be the expert in the room when it comes to, say, traffic engineering. But I can speak authentically to the fact that there's a need for changes in a community and that the reality is out of sync with what people want.
For those that have letters behind their names, more power to them. I’m just against the gatekeeping that tells us that, ‘no, you can't do this unless you are this type of person.’
To make change where you live, you don't need to be qualified by degrees. You're qualified because you’re a neighbor. You're qualified once you start doing the thing. You’re qualified once you make that observation. It’s not the doctorate on your wall, or lack thereof, that qualifies you.”
Gonzalez couldn’t have foreseen a decade ago that he’d be one of the leading advocates for safer streets in his home city. “But once you notice it, you can’t un-notice it,” he points out. “And if you realize you can do something, you have to.”
Did You Buy Your Tickets to the National Gathering Yet?
At the 2024 Strong Towns National Gathering, Isaac Gonzalez will be leading a session Wednesday morning, titled: “Getting Started as an Advocate: Pick a Focus and Find Your Wins.” Gonzalez will share knowledge based on his years of experience in community organizing, public relations, and working alongside elected officials. Open to anyone from the seasoned advocate to the elected official to the person who just learned of Strong Towns through a YouTube video.
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.