Safest Neighborhoods in North Highlands, CA

Madison Woods is the big central block of North Highlands, the piece that touches nearly every other neighborhood in the community, from the college-adjacent streets in the southeast to the McClellan-era tracts to the north. Because it covers so much ground, it is less a single look than a stitched-together mix: long runs of midcentury single-family homes broken up by condominium and apartment clusters, including the Madison Woods condominiums the area is partly named for. ... See Full Page

The neighborhood that carries the community's own name sits in the southwest, the older working core of North Highlands closest to the Watt Avenue commercial spine and the Interstate 80 corridor. This is where the area's origins show plainly: compact 1950s and 1960s tract blocks, a heavier share of apartments and rentals than the outer pockets, and the everyday retail of Watt Avenue along its western reach. ... See Full Page

The southeast corner of North Highlands runs right up against the American River College campus, and that proximity shapes River College Square. This is a compact pocket of older single-story tract homes on quiet interior streets, close enough that the low-slung campus and its parking fields form an open, green edge on one side rather than another wall of rooftops. ... See Full Page

McClellan Meadows sits in the north part of the community, and its story is written into its name. These are the tract homes built in the early 1950s in the shadow of what was then McClellan Air Force Base. The result is one of the more consistent stretches of housing in North Highlands, block after block of single-story ranch homes from roughly 1951 to 1953, on regular lots with no homeowners association to answer to. ... See Full Page

Overbrook is one of the smaller named pockets on the east side of North Highlands, a quiet grid of single-story houses that takes its name from Overbrook Way running through the middle of it. It sits just east of the American River College area, next to the River College Square streets it borders, and shares their flat, older, unassuming character. ... See Full Page