Most mornings, the loop starts the same way. Out the gate, past the pool, onto the paved path that climbs the levee behind the neighborhood, and east toward the dog park at Sutter's Landing. It feels finished. It has felt finished for years. It is not.
Between the spring of 2024 and the spring of 2025, that stretch of levee became the meeting point of three separate city projects, a rare stretch when all three moved in public view within about a year of each other. None of them touch McKinley Village's own streets or clubhouse. All three touch the walk almost everyone in the neighborhood already does without thinking about it.
The Walk You Already Know
The route itself is well documented outside the neighborhood, not just inside it. AllTrails catalogs it as the Levee Path, 3.4 miles, flat enough to log only 45 feet of elevation gain over its length, and rated 4.2 stars across 283 community reviews. If you keep going past the dog park to the little beach at the river's oxbow bend, Paradise Beach, a full out and back from Sutter's Landing clocks in around two hours and 8.24 kilometers on logged routes.
At Sutter's Landing itself, the daily-use amenities are specific enough to be worth naming instead of describing generically. The off-leash dog park runs 2.5 acres with separate fenced sections for large and small dogs. There is a full basketball court and a half court, three bocce ball courts under a shade canopy, and the 28th & B Skate Park, a covered facility that draws skaters from well beyond McKinley Village.
That is the park as it exists today, and it is the version most residents assume is the permanent one. It is actually one stage in a build-out that has been moving, in fits and starts, for well over a decade.
Why the Ground Is Moving
The city broke ground on Two Rivers Trail Phase II in spring 2024, a project that will lay more than two miles of paved, protected path along the south bank of the American River between Sutter's Landing and H Street, near Sacramento State. Mayor Darrell Steinberg and then-councilmember Jeff Harris both attended the groundbreaking. The project's engineer, Adam Randolph, described it at the time as the result of over 13 years of staff effort and coordination to stitch the region's shared-use trail network together.
Thirteen years is the part worth sitting with. The path that already feels permanent to McKinley Village residents is itself a relatively recent link in a system Sacramento has been assembling since well before the neighborhood existed in its current form. Phase II is the piece that finally connects Sutter's Landing eastward, giving the neighborhood an off-street, car-free route toward Sacramento State and River Park that did not exist as a continuous paved trail before.
Three Projects, One Stretch of Levee
What makes that year and a half different is not that construction happened. It is that three distinct, independently funded projects landed on the same short run of levee within months of each other, something the city's own project pages describe separately but that a resident walking the trail would have experienced as one long, overlapping disruption to a walk they thought was settled.
Two Rivers Trail Phase II is the eastward link that broke ground in spring 2024, joining Sutter's Landing to H Street.
Two Rivers Trail Phase III is the westward counterpart, extending the trail roughly one mile from 28th Street around the old city landfill loop before crossing the Union Pacific Railroad tracks to meet the Sacramento Northern Trail. The city gathered public input on route alternatives through September 2024, with project staff noting this phase would close most of the remaining gaps in the system. Updates on this phase were shared again at a December 2024 open house, which means the planning has continued well past that initial survey window.
The ADA River Access Trail is a separate, smaller project on the river's south side, funded in part by the Wildlife Conservation Board, adding an accessible trail, a non-motorized boat launch, habitat restoration, and interpretive signage. As of the most recent public update, in February 2025, the city was still gathering feedback on the preferred alignment. One planner working the project put the tradeoffs plainly:
"The design team is looking at different options and will make their recommendation based on factors like cost, impacts on the river, utilities, public feedback, support from agencies, ease of access, and environmental concerns."
Funding for construction on that trail had not yet been secured as of that update. It is a reminder that not every piece of this system moves at the same pace, even when they sit within a hundred yards of each other.
The Amenities Are Getting Rewritten Too
Separate from the trail work, the park's day-to-day amenities are also mid-revision. In December 2024, the city's parks department held a community open house to walk through updated concepts for a full site plan update and future amenities guidebook for Sutter's Landing. More than 800 responses came in on the community survey that fed into it. Senior planner Dana Repan framed the goal as building a park that reflects "the needs and vision of our community for several decades," which is a longer horizon than most park updates get.
Closer to the ground, the 28th & B Skate Park went out to bid for Phase 4 improvements in February 2025, covering concrete demolition, new paving, fencing, and bird deterrent spines on the structures, the kind of unglamorous line item that only shows up in a construction bid document but that anyone who skates there regularly will notice the day the fencing changes.
None of this was dramatic on any single morning back in 2024 and 2025. But add it up: an eastward trail extension that broke ground, a westward extension still being routed, an accessible river trail still seeking funding, and a full amenities rewrite already informed by resident feedback, and the park McKinley Village borders looks less like a finished amenity and more like a project that gets rebuilt in overlapping pieces every few years.
What Was Here Before the Levee
It is worth knowing what the ground under that path has been before it was a trail. The site was Nisenan settlement land before European contact. John Sutter landed there in 1839, before he built the fort that still carries his name a couple of miles south. Through the mid-1800s, soil excavated from the site to build the city's levees left behind pits that were later filled with the city's own waste, and the land served as Sacramento's primary landfill for decades before the city designated it a future park site in 1984. It took until 1989 for the name Sutter's Landing Park to stick, and until 2003 for the city to adopt the master plan still guiding development today.
That timeline matters for one reason. A park built on a former landfill, converted over four decades of incremental planning, is not going to arrive at a final form all at once. The trail extensions and amenity updates of 2024 and 2025 are simply the latest chapter in a pattern the site has followed since 1984, not a departure from it.
What This Means for the Walk Itself
None of this changes what McKinley Village residents do on a Saturday morning. It changes how they should read the signs of work along the way. A detour near the H Street end of the levee traces back to Phase II, which broke ground in 2024. A route survey posted near the old landfill loop was Phase III, working out its alignment west toward the Sacramento Northern Trail. New fencing and repaved concrete at the skate park follows from a bid solicited for Phase 4 in February 2025. And if the trail on the river's south side eventually gets a name and a ribbon cutting, that will be the ADA River Access Trail finally clearing the funding gap it was still facing as of last year's update.
The walk out the gate will keep feeling the same for years yet, gravel underfoot, the dog park on the left, the river somewhere past the willows. What's worth knowing is that the ground itself has been getting decided in overlapping pieces since 2024, and that McKinley Village happens to sit at the exact point where those pieces meet.
If you're curious what else is shifting in the neighborhoods around McKinley Village, from East Sacramento to Land Park, Caviard Realty Associates keeps a close eye on the ground-level changes that don't always make the headlines. Reach out to Pierre Daniel Viard for a neighborhood consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what's next.
