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Antelope is between West Roseville and North Highlands. North Highlands is probably one of the places your friend mentioned having higher crime... You would be fine working in Antelope and could find a great place in West Roseville. There are a lot of new developments and w/ this housing market, you could probably find a good deal. If you're looking for an apartment, you'd probably want to look east, further into Roseville

Thanks for your information. I really appreciate it.

Roseville isn't too far from there, It borders the City of Antelope so you could even take the streets and the schools and shopping are newer.   

65 percent of the levees finished...which means 35 percent of the levees unfinished, I'd assume? Doesn't sound too good to me...a friend of mine at DWR has some bad things to say about much of the levee-reclaimed area up in that direction.

The Antelope area is basically a safe-but-boring cookie-cutter suburb. It was open fields until about a decade ago, when people felt confident enough that the unexploded bombs that rained all over the neighborhood in 1971 (the result of a munitions train explosion that leveled the original town of Antelope) were all found (although they did find a couple more in subsequent years.)

The Elverta/Antelope area is outside of the city of Sacramento by quite a stretch, as mentioned, between North Highlands (an unincorporated area around the former McClellan Air Force Base) and Roseville. It's fairly safe, if boring. It's close to Roseville, where there are plenty of patrician things to do, and driveable to Sacramento.

Sacramento isn't really that bad crime-wise. If you're used to San Francisco levels of hinkiness it's really nothing to worry about: I walk around late at night in downtown Sacramento, where I live, and feel perfectly safe, but I wouldn't feel too safe doing the same around Market Street, or the lower Mission, or Hunter's Point.

One thing about Antelope is that there is almost no public transportation: there are one or two buses that run during peak commuter hours and that's it. You'll need a car.

Oh yeah, Antelope isn't quite in the foothills but it's above the worst parts of the floodplain.

Natomas is in legal limbo right now...until ten years ago it had 10 year flood status (it was expected to flood every ten years.) But then they got that upgraded to 100 year flood status (floods once a century) basically by convincing FEMA to change the status on paper because it didn't flood for eleven years--even though there weren't that many improvements to the actual levee.

Now they've downgraded the levee. Flood insurance is required in many parts of Sacramento, including much of downtown, and it's recommended pretty much anywhere in the city. The new rules, that the city is fighting tooth and nail, require any new construction in Natomas to be built on a three-foot berm, although I hear part of FEMA wants a 10-20 foot berm.

Elk Grove is ten miles south of Sacramento or thereabouts, and basically identical to Roseville except it's flatter and even less exciting. It's technically "safe" except the kids there have pretty much nothing to do and they're forming gangs because they're bored. It would also be really darn silly to live in a suburb south of Sacramento and commute to a suburb north of Sacramento through the worst traffic in the region, when one could live in a suburb north of Sacramento that is at least close.