The atmosphere inside the Terracina Gold community center was warm and lively last week as two-dozen children did homework, practiced sign language and presented "vision boards" of their hopes and dreams.

On the playground, social worker Sergio Garcia ran a basketball drill with boys who live at this affordable housing complex in North Natomas.

The scene epitomizes the city's vision of North Natomas as a place where people of all income levels can live together, with a helping hand extended to the families struggling to improve their lot.

That vision is being tested.

Property crime in North Natomas has been on the rise, and it recently took a violent turn. In a three-week period in June, robbers pulled off 15 home invasions and 14 street holdups in North Natomas and neighboring South Natomas. Handguns were used in all the home invasions and most of the street robberies, police said.

There have been no home invasions this month, but street robberies continue. A gunman tried to rob someone Wednesday night on Truxel Road, police said.

By last week, police had arrested 12 people ranging from ages 15 to 20 for the robberies. Most live in North or South Natomas, said Police Capt. Dan Hahn.

Some residents, looking for answers, have focused on affordable housing complexes. They say such a concentration of poverty creates a fertile environment for criminal activity.

"Being poor doesn't mean you're a criminal, but we all know there are many correlations between poverty and criminal behavior," said Angelique Ashby, president of the Creekside Neighborhood Association in North Natomas. "You can't have it overwhelm the community, which is what it's starting to do in Natomas."

Springing from former farm fields north of Interstate 80, North Natomas is the first major addition to the city built under Sacramento's inclusionary housing ordinance, which requires that 15 percent of housing in new growth areas be affordable to low- and very low-income people.

The debate over affordable housing in Natomas has implications for the rest of the city, as the City Council considers extending the ordinance to new construction in all neighborhoods. Currently, it applies only to new growth areas and the railyards in downtown and Curtis Park.

Community activists in Natomas say low-income housing should be mixed in throughout the neighborhoods, not grouped in apartment complexes of 200 units or more.

"Inclusionary housing means to include them in your neighborhood; it doesn't mean building three-story apartment complexes where 100 percent of the units are inclusionary," said Tristan Godt, a Natomas Park resident.

More than its share?

Figures compiled by the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency show that 8.5 percent of the 15,161 housing units built in North Natomas are designated as affordable.

That percentage is higher than in other suburban-style Sacramento neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes. In the Pocket, 2.2 percent of the units are designated as affordable; in Land Park, 3.8 percent.

City neighborhoods also contain an unknown number of low-rent housing units that weren't built under the city's official program. Many of the apartments in neighboring South Natomas fall into this category.

Fargo and other city officials now say they made some mistakes in designing Natomas. In retrospect, Fargo said, the city should have required developers to spread out the affordable housing, rather than building apartment complexes, many of them grouped near one another.

But Fargo said the city is unlikely to rethink the 15 percent affordable housing target.

Low-income residents, she said, "are part of the mix, and they need to have a place to live, too."

Police caution that focusing solely on low-income apartment complexes as a potential source of problems is simplistic.

"If all you're worried about is affordable housing, you'll be profiling down the wrong path," Hahn said.

Hahn said apartment complexes can be a greater source of problems than single-family homes, simply because so many people are concentrated in one place. If the complexes are managed poorly, bad actors tend to multiply.

Call The Bee's Mary Lynne Vellinga, (916) 321-1094.