Everyone wanted to come to California. That was the generational background of my parents and grandparents. And in the 1950s, housing was so plentiful that a rural Norwegian immigrant family was able to scrape together $8,500 to purchase the Glendale bungalow where I spent much of my childhood ( Yes, it’s a purchase, not a rental.)
Now, according to Zillow, the house will likely sell for $1.5 million.
For 1,800 sq.ft. At Glendale.
This is so insane that people are moving to other states, but also leaving interior California to find affordable housing. This migration may not cause a “mass exodus from California.” However, it is equally confusing and unsettling for families forced to leave their communities.
I see it at my children’s school in Alhambra. Many parents there are talking about finding a home in places like Glendora or Pomona rather than Nevada or Texas.
A family recently settled in Ontario whose son attends my child’s school.
Well, “settled” may be exaggerating their move. They still send their son to school in Alhambra. It used to be a mile or two from home, but now it’s 35 years old. They still work nearby. You could even say that they still live in the Alhambra, but it is Ontario that is asleep.
This is because they did not want to leave the city where their lives were deeply rooted. My parents grew up here, went to school here, met and married here, and had a son here. But when they recently had to move out of their vacation home and look for a new home, one parent told me it didn’t make financial sense to live in Alhambra. She said her family applied for a down payment assistance program to buy a home here, but couldn’t qualify because both of them worked.
Paradoxically, they earn too much to qualify for aid, but not enough to be able to afford a home in the working-class suburbs where they grew up. Welcome to middle class life in LA
She said her daily commute of about three hours round trip has helped teach her fourth-grade son the importance of time management. They also try to think of the time spent crawling down the 10 freeway in rush hour traffic as family time.
Still, she says, it sometimes feels like she’s trying to hang on to a life she can no longer truly live.
She said that when she first moved from the Alhambra, she became depressed as she adjusted to the reality that she and her husband would not be able to raise their son where they had intended.
This is not Santa Monica or West Hollywood. It’s not even Hollywood or Eagle Rock. Both are ideally located areas that were long considered to have “potential,” even before full-scale gentrification occurred in the early 2000s.
This is the Alhambra. Its most famous resident lived in a faux-castle mansion on the hill until he was sentenced to prison for murder in 2009 (though more zealous residents may suspect that Betty White was the (I would say that Hillary Clinton’s mother graduated from the higher education institution that bears our name, lived here in the early 1900s), and the food here is amazing).
Our notoriety aside (and what community doesn’t have a little dark hyperlocal lore?), our community is a dense suburb with safe, diverse, and nice neighborhoods, and is part of Los Angeles County. It is a middle-class resistant area adjacent to some of the wealthiest cities in the world. More than half of all students enrolled in local school districts come from low-income households.
But as one family’s ordeal shows, a lack of affordable housing is creating a growing middle class in Alhambra, even among those with deep community roots.
This has especially serious implications for public education, the most important of all community resources. Alhambra Unified School District’s enrollment has been steadily declining, from nearly 18,000 students across 18 campuses just before the coronavirus pandemic to less than 15,000 today.
Much of this decline can be attributed to population declines across the Alhambra (consistent with trends in much of California). But ever since I started sending my kids to our local public school seven years ago, I suspected there was something else at play. If you can afford to pay $900,000 for a home (the average price in Alhambra, according to Zillow), you probably can. I can afford to send my child to a private school.
A similar story is playing out in nearby Pasadena, where average home prices have nearly doubled since 2016, but public school enrollment has collapsed. The district has closed four campuses in the district since 2019, leading to discrimination lawsuits.
So perhaps the families who moved are doing the Alhambra a favor by continuing to send their sons to public schools here. They show more dedication to their hometowns than the wealthy newcomers who bid for modest bungalows and send their children to private schools from their neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, it is becoming economically impossible for middle-class families like these to live in affluent communities.
