Everyone wanted to come to California — that was the generational backdrop of my parents and grandparents. Then, in the 1950s, housing was so abundant that a family of rural Norwegian immigrants could scrape together $8,500 to buy (yes, buy, not rent) the bungalow in Glendale where I spent much of my childhood.
Now, according to Zillow, that house would probably fetch $1.5 million.
For 1,800 square feet. In Glendale.
This is insane, so people are leaving — for other states, yes, but also just far enough inland within California to find affordable housing. This migration might not draw the “Mass exodus from California!” headlines, but it involves a similar amount of upheaval and angst for families forced to uproot themselves from their communities.
I see it at my kids’ school in Alhambra, where many parents talk about looking for homes not in Nevada or Texas, but in places like Glendora or Pomona.
Or Ontario, which is where one family with a son at my kids’ school recently settled.
Well, “settled” may overstate their move; they still send their son to the school in Alhambra, which used to be a mile or two from their home but is now 35. They still work at their jobs nearby. You could even say they still live in Alhambra, but they sleep in Ontario.
That’s because they never wanted to leave the city where their lives are deeply rooted. Both parents grew up here, went to school here, met and married here and had a son here. But when they had to leave their duplex recently and find a new home, one parent told me living in Alhambra made no financial sense. She said her family applied to a down-payment-assistance program to buy a place here, but with two incomes they failed to qualify.
Paradoxically, they make too much money to qualify for help, too little to afford a home in the working-class suburb where they grew up. Welcome to middle-class life in L.A.
She said their daily round-trip commute of about three hours helps teach their fourth-grade son the importance of time management. They also try to think of the hours they spend crawling along the 10 Freeway in rush-hour traffic as family time.
Still, she said, it can feel like they are trying to hang onto a life they can no longer truly live.
When they first moved away from Alhambra, she said she became depressed, adjusting to the reality that she and her husband would not be able to raise their son where they intended.
This isn’t Santa Monica or West Hollywood; it’s not even Hollywood or Eagle Rock, both ideally situated neighborhoods long seen as having “potential” before the full force of gentrification hit in the early 2000s.
This is Alhambra, whose most famous resident lived in a hilltop faux-castle mansion until he was sentenced to prison in 2009 for murder (though more boosterish residents will tell you Betty White lived here as a child, Hillary Clinton’s mother graduated from our eponymous high school, and the food here is amazing).
That infamy aside (and what community doesn’t have a bit of dark, hyperlocal lore?), ours is a safe, diverse, dense suburb with nice neighborhoods — a middle-class holdout abutting some of the most affluent cities in L.A. County. More than half of all students enrolled in the local school district come from low-income households.
But as one family’s ordeal shows, the scarce supply of affordable housing means Alhambra is outgrowing its middle class, even among those with deep roots in the community.
That has serious consequences, especially for the most critical of all community resources: public education. Enrollment in the Alhambra Unified School District is steadily declining, from nearly 18,000 across 18 campuses just before the COVID-19 pandemic, to fewer than 15,000 today.
Much of this decline can be attributed to an overall population drop in Alhambra (matching the trend in much of California). But I’ve suspected something else is at play since I started sending my kids to the local public school seven years ago: If you can afford to pay $900,000 for a home (roughly the average in Alhambra, according to Zillow), you can probably afford to send your kids to private school.
A similar story has played out in nearby Pasadena, where average home prices have almost doubled since 2016 but public school enrollment is collapsing. There, the district has closed four campuses since 2019, prompting a discrimination lawsuit.
Arguably, then, the family that moved away is doing Alhambra a favor by keeping their son in public school here. They show more dedication to their hometown than the wealthier newcomers who engage in bidding wars over modest bungalows and send their kids out of the neighborhood to private schools.
Too bad it’s becoming financially impossible for middle-class families like them to live in the community they enrich.
