BERKELEY — The fog lifted early Friday over the flatlands of Berkeley where a diverse mix of homeowners and renters had gathered for a block party the night before to watch Kamala Harris on a big screen accept the Democratic nomination for president and deliver a shout-out to her childhood neighborhood. “We lived in the flats,” Harris said from the convention stage in Chicago Thursday night, “a beautiful, working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers — all who tended their lawns with pride.” This is the kind of middle class neighborhood and people, she said, she would fight for if she beats former President Donald Trump in November.
But much has changed in this pocket of the Bay Area since the 1970s, when Harris’s mother, a UC Berkeley grad student, raised her two daughters in an upstairs apartment on Bancroft Way. Nurses and firefighters who may earn more than $100,000 a year would be unlikely to afford the average $1.2 million homes here, including the hefty down payment, without financial help from family.
A typical 2-bedroom apartment, like the one where Harris spent her elementary school years, would likely rent for upwards of $3,500 a month — a hefty cost even for an average tech worker living on one salary. For the average California construction worker, whose median wage was less than $62,000 in 2020, the rent would be impossible. “I find it tragic that the high cost of living in Berkeley today makes it that much harder .