Everyone wanted to come to California – it was the generational context of my parents and grandparents. Then, in the 1950s, housing was so abundant that a family of rural Norwegian immigrants could bring together $ 8,500 to buy (Yes, buy, not rent) The bungalow in Glendale where I spent a large part of my childhood.
Now, according to Zillow, this house would probably report 1.5 million dollars.
For 1,800 square feet. In Glendale.
It's crazy, so people leave – for other states, yes, but also just enough in California to find affordable housing. This migration may not draw the “Solid exodus of California!“The headlines, but that implies a similar amount of upheavals and anxiety for families forced to uproot themselves from their communities.
I see him in the school of my children in Alhambra, where many parents speak of looking for houses not in Nevada or Texas, but in places like Glendora or Pomona.
Or Ontario, where a family with a son from the school of my children recently settled.
Well, “set” can overestimate their move; They always send their son to the Alhambra school, who was previously at a mile or two of their home, but now 35 years old. They always work at their work nearby. You could even say that they still live in Alhambra, but they sleep in Ontario.
It is because they never wanted to leave the city where their life is deeply rooted. The two parents grew up here, went to school here, met and got married here and had a son here. But when they had to leave their duplex recently and find a new house, a parent told me that living in Alhambra had no financial meaning. She said that her family had applied to a downward assistance program to buy a place here, but with two income, they failed to qualify.
Paradoxically, they earn too much money to qualify for help, too little to afford a house in the suburbs of the working class where they grew up. Welcome to the life of the middle class at
She said their daily round trip of around three hours helps teach their fourth year son the importance of time management. They also try to think about the hours they spend crawling along Highway 10 in rush hour traffic like family time.
However, she said, one can have the impression of trying to hang on to a life that they can no longer really live.
When they walked away from Alhambra for the first time, she said that she had become depressed, adapting to the reality that she and her husband could not raise their son where they wanted.
It is not Santa Monica or West Hollywood; It is not even Hollywood or Eagle Rock, both of the districts ideally located for a long time as having a “potential” before the full force of gentrification in the early 2000s.
It is the Alhambra, whose most famous resident lived in a false hill mansion until it is sentenced to prison in 2009 For murder (although more residents of Boosterish tell you that Betty White has lived here as a child, Hillary Clinton's mother graduated from our eponymous high school and the The food here is incredible).
This infamy apart (and what community does not have a little dark and hyperlocal tradition?), Ours is a safe, diverse and dense suburb with beautiful neighborhoods – a middle -class holdout leading to a part of the richest cities in the county of the. More than half of all students enrolled in the local school district come from low -income households.
But as the test of a family shows, the rare offer of affordable housing means that Alhambra exceeds his middle class, even among those who have deep roots in the community.
This has serious consequences, especially for the most critical of all community resources: public education. Registration in the unified school district of the Alhambra does not decrease regularly, from almost 18,000 to 18 campuses just before the Pandemic Covid-19, less than 15,000 today.
A large part of this drop can be attributed to an overall decrease in the population in Alhambra (corresponding to the trend in a large part of California). But I suspect that something else has been at stake since I started sending my children to local public school seven years ago: if you can afford to pay $ 900,000 for a house (almost the Alhambra average, according to Zillow), you can probably afford to send your children to private school.
A similar story took place in Pasadena nearby, where the average prices of houses have almost doubled since 2016, but the registration of public schools is collapse. There, the district has closed four campuses since 2019, cause a discrimination trial.
Without doubt, the family that has moved back to the Alhambra by keeping their son at the public school here. They show more dedication to their hometown than the new richer arrivals who engage in wars in tenders on modest bungalows and send their children in the neighborhood in private schools.
Too bad it becomes financially impossible for families in the middle class as they live in the community they enrich.
