‘I came from nothing.’ Steve Hansen’s unlikely path to run for mayor of Sacramento | Opinion

Editors note: This is the second of four profiles of the main candidates running for mayor of Sacramento that will be published ahead of a mayoral forum The Bee Editorial board will co-host with KVIE on January 31. There, the hopefuls will be questioned about their qualifications and the issues important to voters. In this profile and the others, the goal is to give readers a stronger sense of who the candidates are as people. These profiles are not endorsements but personal stories detailing the work the candidates have done in Sacramento and what drove them to run for mayor. Ultimately, our board will endorse one candidate on February 5, the day ballots are mailed to voters.

Steve Hansen could be the first openly gay mayor in Sacramento history. He was the first gay person elected to the city council a decade ago. Neither distinction defines his candidacy or explain who he is or what drives him for the city’s highest elected office.

His motivation is informed by a sometimes traumatic life that Hansen didn’t reclaim so much as build, largely on his own, from a very young age. Soliciting votes and endorsements in a mayoral race would have been unimaginable based on where Hansen started and where he’s been on the rough road that led him to Sacramento.

“I come from nothing,” Hansen said recently. “I’m still that kid who feels so lucky to have done better than my parents. In my life, I’ve had very clear moments of realization where I’ve had to face things. “

Opinion

Growing up, Hansen experienced poverty, family trauma and casual homophobia administered by people around him. He was on his own when he was still a minor and had no point of reference for the life he leads today as a mayoral aspirant attempting a political comeback after being voted out of office four years ago.

All of that is true, but so is this: Hansen recently announced that he has raised a half million dollars in his race for mayor.

On the issues and complexities facing Sacramento, Hansen is as knowledgeable about what the city is up against as any of the four main candidates running for mayor, if not more so.

At 44, Hansen is a Democrat (as are his three main opponents: epidemiologist Flojaune Cofer; Assemblyman Kevin McCarty and former State Sen. Richard Pan). More than any other candidate, Hansen is supported by Sacramento’s business establishment.

An outsider in his past life in St. Paul, Minnesota has become the choice of insiders in his adopted home of Sacramento.

Hansen has achieved this as a newer version of the centrist Democrats who have held sway in Sacramento for a very, very long time. In generations past, a mayoral candidate in Sacramento who was endorsed uniformly by business interests and public safety unions would have earned such support by ascending to office from an established neighborhood or through longstanding personal or family relationships. This has not been Steve Hansen’s path.

Hansen estimates that he and his family moved eight to 10 times by the time he was ten and said that he and his late mother lived in a shelter for a time.

“We were on welfare ... when we were moving around,” Hansen said. “We were just trying to survive.”

“If I wanted to go to college, my parents and my family didn’t have a way to pay for that,” he said. “I didn’t know myself then, and when I look back, I realize other kids knew I was gay before I did. In fourth grade, these kids would chase me around, calling me AIDS Boy. This was 1990. It was a different world then.”

Like many kids from underprivileged backgrounds, Hansen joined the military as a way up. He said it was in the Army National Guard that he gained confidence he had never had before.

“I came back a transformed person,” he said.

A Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship landed him a spot at Gonzaga University.

“I drove my dad’s 1987 Ford Ranger from Minnesota to Spokane, Washington,” he said. He thought of being a diplomat or joining the Peace Corps until a government fellowship brought him to Sacramento in the summer of 2002 at 22 years old.

He never left. Hansen got involved in politics and policy. Like some of us who move here from somewhere, he felt like he belonged in Sacramento. He felt welcome and part of something larger than himself.

When he was elected to the Sacramento City Council, Hansen was the youngest person on the dais. His upbringing and military background imbued him with a desire to fix things and find order.

“I’m a policy person,” he said. “I like systems. When systems fail, things break (and) people fall through the cracks.”

Hansen was one of the more effective members of the council, but he lost in 2020 when he sought a third term in his former downtown district to current Council Member Katie Valenzuela, who is further to the left of Hansen on the political spectrum.

Members of Sacramento’s business community missed Hansen’s voice on the council. He had been a supporter of Sacramento’s public subsidy which helped seal the deal to build the Golden 1 Center downtown. That deal kept the Kings in Sacramento.

Hansen had been a champion for increased housing in the downtown core. He was a supporter of city police and not in the “defund police” movement. Once he was off the council, he lamented the loss of downtown businesses and an erosion of public safety. So when he decided to run for mayor, Hansen found support in business leaders and public safety unions alarmed at the proliferation of homelessness in Sacramento in recent years.

That’s how the outsider became the insider. The kid who was on welfare and moved constantly became a successful man who now shares a home with his partner and two small children.

“What we need are people who don’t care about titles,” he said. “We need people who are willing to put it on the line for their city and not just do what is good for their careers.”

“Sometimes it takes someone from the outside to come in and help you understand what you don’t see. And we’ve seen so many people move here that are part of the lifeblood of the city because they see something that people who grew up here don’t see: They see a place worthy of love (that) is worth fighting for.”