Alison Grady and Ernest Brown made a spreadsheet of places they wanted to live a few years ago, and Oakland came out on top. Within a day of moving to The Town, Brown found a salsa dance class near Lake Merritt that he said was “truly diverse, not ‘hashtag’ diverse.”
The politically active couple, who grew up in the South, fell in love with the city. But they knew they were living on borrowed time.
“You can’t go to a party or a house or a bar with twenty-somethings” without the high cost of housing coming up, said Brown, who chaired the board of the pro-housing YIMBY Action organization. “Because however much fun people are having, there’s a low sense of dread constantly that this party can end at any moment if there’s a rent increase.”
Same goes for people who need more space to start a family. That’s where Grady and Brown are now.
Both are 30 years old and hold solidly paying health care jobs, but felt the financial pressure of living here. They were paying $1,500 a month to split the bottom unit of a two-story duplex in downtown Oakland with another couple. They love the location and their roomies, but Grady said, “We’re 30, and it’s so silly to be living with housemates.”
Brown is African American and Grady is white, and Brown said part of the appeal of staying in Oakland would be that they could raise a child in a place with a “meaningful Black population.”
But ultimately, they couldn’t make it work. They just moved to Atlanta, where they can buy a bigger place in a similar downtown neighborhood for half as much.
They said the final straw came last year when California voters rejected Proposition 15, which would have raised property taxes on commercial property to help schools and local governments. Its rejection made the couple wonder if the public school system would ever improve.
“The decision to under-invest in the public infrastructure that is particularly important to families raising children in California makes (living here) such a hard bargain,” Brown said.
Other young, middle-class couples are facing the same decision, he said.
“What that leaves behind are just people who couldn’t afford to move, or who have so much money that they can ride it out, kind of no matter how bad things get,” Brown said.
“We are not a sob story,” said Grady, a former head of East Bay Young Democrats. “Like, I’m genuinely excited to be moving to Atlanta.”
But they wanted to stay.
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
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April 18, 2021 at 06:03PM
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California Exit Interview: Housemates in Oakland, or a home for a family in Atlanta? - San Francisco Chronicle
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