![]() ![]() She moved into and out of Baxter Street several times while she raised kids and completed college. Patricia Reece would spend most of her adult life struggling to leave for a home of her own. The Reeces entered the house in 1976 as renters and bought it two years later. John Reece was a retired master chief petty officer in the Navy who spent five years saving for a down payment by living in a trailer park with his wife, Barbara, and baby daughter, Patricia. That inflation all but defined the lives of the Reece family, which moved into 5120 Baxter a decade after the Coats family moved out and stayed there until last year. As the Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson wrote in “Crabgrass Frontier,” his seminal history of America’s suburbs: “No society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.” A Very Different California In other words, the pressure to remake neighborhoods like Clairemont is due not to some sudden shift in what people want out of a home but rather to the sweeping social changes that have already played out inside them. households are multigenerational - up from 12 percent in 1980 - as families grapple with the cost of living. Members of the millennial generation continue to lag their parents in homeownership, and 20 percent of U.S. Today inequality is much starker, and the fertility rate has been cut in half as adults remain single longer and have fewer or no children after they pair up. Coats’s family of six moved to Baxter Street was a more middle-class country, where women had about 3.5 children on average. The implications go way beyond geography. But the process will be long and difficult, as single-family neighborhoods are America’s predominant form of living and homeowners broadly enjoy them. Reforming it is key to any number of existential problems, including reducing segregation and wealth inequality or combating sprawl and climate change (transportation accounts for about a third of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions). Coats’s family bought into has become the American housing system. The one I’m going to tell you is about the house’s place in California’s spiraling affordable housing crisis and the state’s efforts to halt it. The house at 5120 Baxter Street has been home to three families and contains any number of stories. “But what about the American dream of living in a single-family neighborhood?” “They say they’re doing this so everyone can have the American dream,” he said. ![]() He invested on a single-family block 25 years ago with the expectation that it would stay that way. “People would pitch in: Somebody would bring beer, somebody would bring hamburgers, somebody would bring hot dogs, and we would just all gather.”Ĭary Gross, 63, who owns a tile company and lives next to Ms. “That was where everybody congregated on the weekends,” Ms. This afforded them the relative affluence of a four-bedroom house with a yard that was bigger than any of their neighbors’. Coats’s father, Paul Shannon, was an aeronautical engineer who had left the Navy to work in private defense. ![]() (Clothes still had to be dried on a line.) Most of the residents were young families with parents who worked a mix of trade and professional jobs that had roughly the same paychecks. Neighbors in Clairemont Villas picked from a selection of four ranch houses that had the same cabinets, similar floor plans and an option to add a washing machine. This was in 1957, back when the surrounding Clairemont neighborhood was booming with new subdivisions and mass-produced suburbs were still a national experiment. The family paid $13,250 for Lot 118 and a year later moved into 5120 Baxter Street. Her father drove the six of them - two parents, four sisters - to a weekend showing where in her teenage naïveté she asked a salesperson if the furniture was included. Sixty-five years later, Margie Coats, 79, still remembers the tour. ![]()
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