Steve Hansen Running for Sacramento Mayor

When former Sacramento City Councilman Steve Hansen lost his bid for a third term in March 2020, there was some question as to what he might do next. Whether he’d plot a council comeback, seek a different office, or just focus on his work with Lighthouse Public Affairs, which he’d joined in 2018, remained to be seen in the months he served out his term. All Hansen would say when I ran into him in Midtown during that time was “I’ve got a lot of work to do.” 

Finally Hansen’s next move or moves have become clear. First, after he left office in late 2020, Hansen, the first openly gay person to serve on Sacramento City Council, adopted his second son with his long-term partner. The family recently moved to Sacramento’s South Natomas neighborhood.

And in late May, Hansen became the fourth person to announce they are running for mayor of Sacramento, following Darrell Steinberg’s announcement that he won’t seek a third term. A fifth candidate, former California State Senator Richard Pan has since joined the race.

“I love this city,” Hansen told California Local in a 30-minute interview. “It needs a lot of things right now. And so I decided I could sit on the sidelines and watch or I could put myself back in the fray.”

A Difficult Background

The story Hansen tells of his early life is one of poverty, trauma and, ultimately, a hard-fought new life thousands of miles away from where he grew up.

Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1979, Hansen’s father was a Vietnam veteran and forklift operator. When Hansen was five, his parents divorced. The ensuing years for Hansen and his mother were very unstable. 

“We were often moving from house to house, or unhoused sometimes and living with a relative,” Hansen said, noting that the instability led to his older brother, who is autistic, having to move into a group home when Hansen was seven.

Hansen and his mom weren’t just dealing with housing challenges or his brother’s health in those years, though.

“My mom would get beat up by her boyfriends all the time,” Hansen said. “And sometimes I tried to intervene and I would get beat up.”

'I decided I could sit on the sidelines and watch or I could put myself back in the fray.'

Eventually, Hansen went to live briefly with a great-grandmother who was in her 90s. Later, he lived with his father, who Hansen described as a good, hard-working and blue-collar man who was likely autistic.

“Nobody asked for a difficult childhood,” Hansen said. “Nobody asked for the traumas that happened to me. It made me a really hard worker. Because when you come from nothing, you realize you need other people to care about you.”

Coming out was, as it is for many LGBTQ people, a gradual process. “I realized—probably when I was like seven, maybe eight—that I was different. I didn’t always know what it meant.”

Hansen began to tell people of his sexual orientation after returning from attending basic training for the Minnesota Army National Guard prior to his senior year of high school in 1997. Though he had an ROTC scholarship to attend Gonzaga University, he was ultimately discharged from military service.

'Every time I talk to somebody, people are worried about not feeling safe in the city.'

“When I went to college, I realized that it was gonna tear me apart if I had to deny who I was as a gay man and pursue something I was very committed to, which was to serve my country, to fulfill my commitment,” Hansen said. “And ultimately, the military wasn’t the right place for me, because I wasn’t willing to inflict more trauma on myself.”

Hansen graduated from Gonzaga in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in international relations, moving to Sacramento that year. He’s since added a juris doctorate from McGeorge in 2011 and a certificate from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2014, two years after his election to council.

Hansen points out that his campaign has already made history: He is the first openly gay person to run for Sacramento mayor.

What Hansen Would Do as Mayor

Hansen, a Democrat, sometimes can say or do things that make him sound centrist, even right-leaning and at times, it’s earned him pushback. In 2018, he was one of three local leaders kicked off the central committee for the county’s Democratic Party after endorsing former District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, who was then a Republican.

In his interview for this article, Hansen offered some middle-of-the-road ideas. He reports that public safety is the No. 1 issue he hears about from friends and other people he talks to. When he announced he was running for mayor, Hansen told the Sacramento Bee that he was basing his campaign around public safety.

“Every time I talk to somebody, people are worried about not feeling safe in the city, things that have happened to them,” Hansen told California Local. “There’s just been a lot going on.”

'The conditions on the street have gotten worse and worse.'

Beyond this, like every person running for mayor of Sacramento, Hansen can’t escape discussing homelessness, with the number of unhoused people in the city having exploded in recent years. “Homelessness is one word for a thousand problems.” Hansen says.

Hansen’s says he will reevaluate where money is being spent on this problem and reassess what’s effective.

“We’ve gotten historic amounts of money to do work in the area of homelessness,” Hansen said. “It doesn’t feel like we’ve made any progress. In fact, just the conditions on the street have gotten worse and worse.”

A related focus is cost of living or housing. “We really get less per capita of our share of state and federal housing funds to build affordable housing for all,” Hansen says.

Beyond this, Hansen said he cares about growing the creative economy and helping deliver projects that provide economic benefit, such as the continued development of the Railyards, which is the largest infill project west of the Mississippi River.

“We need to have a plan that continues to make our local economy resilient and vibrant,” Hansen said.

Hansen joins a crowded mayoral field for the March 2024 primary. Aside from Pan, other candidates include progressive community activist Dr. Flojaune Cofer, California State Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, and prosecutor Maggy Krell. If Hansen is sweating the competition, he didn’t let on, though.

“I feel very strongly that we’re going to win this race,” Hansen said. “And just like anything else in life, this is what I feel I’m called to do.”