Sacramento's On Broadway affordable housing community celebrates its grand opening Thursday at 1 p.m., two and a half years after a three-alarm fire destroyed one of its two buildings while it was still under construction. The 140-apartment project at 19th Street and Broadway is being framed by its developers as what KCRA describes as a comeback story, marking the end of a rebuild that followed one of Sacramento's more dramatic construction-site disasters.
Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty is expected to join local and state housing leaders, community groups, and project developers at Thursday's celebration, according to KCRA. The development sits in Sacramento's Central City near the Tower District, where EAH Housing lists the property address as 2401 19th St. and describes two buildings offering 140 one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments, along with community centers, outdoor courtyards with play areas, and transit access via SacRT's Blue Line.
The Fire That Nearly Derailed the Project
The blaze broke out on March 26, 2024, while the site was still mid-construction, and Sacramento Fire Department crews battled flames that consumed one of the two five-story buildings on the property. The fire was intense enough to melt the sides of cars parked across the street and damage crossing arms and lights along nearby light rail tracks, per KCRA's reporting.
Construction superintendent Shawn Eldredge told Fox40 in earlier coverage that work halted entirely in the fire's aftermath: “We stopped work for 30 days.” Fox40 reported that one of the two buildings burned to the ground during construction, and that the cause of the fire was still undetermined at the time.
That determination never changed. The Sacramento Fire Department has reported that the cause of the fire was never determined, and fire investigators who reviewed construction-site surveillance video found no sign of human activity around the time the blaze started, according to KCRA. That account echoes earlier reporting by the Sacramento Bee, which said investigators combed through footage from at least 13 cameras and couldn't see any “human activity at all around the time of the fire,” while fire officials said the cause of the devastating blaze remained undetermined.
Who the Apartments Are Meant to Serve
Reports have differed on exactly how many of the project's units are reserved for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Fox40 reported that 37 units would be set aside for that population, with support services on-site, while the CapRadio described one quarter of the project's 140 apartments as reserved permanent supportive housing for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness who have mental health problems. Neither figure has been resolved against the other in available reporting.
Earlier project reporting from Fox40 said rents for income-qualifying applicants would range from $723 for a one-bedroom unit up to $2,000 for a three-bedroom unit, though those figures were reported in a May 2025 report and are not confirmed as current rates.
A Deeper Housing Shortfall in Sacramento
On Broadway's opening lands against a backdrop of acute need. A California Housing Partnership report published in May, cited by CapRadio, found Sacramento County faced a shortfall of nearly 56,000 affordable homes for its lowest-income renters. Separately, a Sacramento Area Council of Governments analysis reported by the Sacramento Bee found the region needs to make room for more than 16,000 units of affordable housing this decade to meet demand.
On Broadway isn't the only project trying to chip away at that gap. CapRadio has reported on Mirasol Village, a River District project expected to eventually include 427 new affordable, workforce, and market-rate housing units on 22 acres, and on Sonrisa, a 58-unit affordable housing community at 13th and O streets. Compared with those efforts, On Broadway's 140 units represent a sizable, if still partial, answer to a shortage measured in the tens of thousands.
For now, Thursday's ceremony marks the symbolic close of a two-and-a-half-year detour nobody involved in the project wanted. What started as a routine affordable-housing build became, for a month, a halted construction site and a fire investigation with no answers — and now, per the developers' own framing relayed by KCRA, a comeback story.
