This will be a shorter column this month.  By the time this is posted, my mom (see my column about her from a couple months ago) will be moved into an assisted living/memory care facility.  As I write, I am in the thick of preparing to move her.  It’s a lot (just one side note that I’ve been repeating lately is that we, as a society, suck at taking care of our elders), especially since she doesn’t want to move.  The house she lives in now – the one that I grew up in – has been her home for almost 50 years.  So, apologies, but most of my column writing bandwidth is going into the move.  

In the midst of this move and in the midst of me not fully addressing all the emotions associated with it, my brain is fixating on weird things.  One thing that’s sticking in my mind is that in 1974, my mother – as a single woman with a young kid (i.e., me), working as a nurse at Valley Medical Center in San Jose – was able to buy a house in West San Jose for a little bit more than $25k.  This is, according to the BLS inflation calculator, roughly equivalent to $170k in 2024 money – for a house that, today, would sell for more than 10x this amount.

In today’s Silicon Valley, buying a house for $170k is near unfathomable.  But just think what this would mean for working class families, especially for single parents (like my mother, back then), and for their children (like me, back then)… what the financial and psychological stability that homeownership would provide.

So, while I mourn the loss of my mother’s independence and memorialize her transition from the house I grew up in, I also think about the opportunities that she had—that I had—that are no longer available to people who are similarly situated to us 50 years ago. This massive, region-wide loss of housing affordability is a loss of opportunity and a loss of well-being, the scale of which is hard for me to wrap my head around.  

There are different narrative threads I could build from this regional loss of housing affordability – ways to talk about racism in housing and how there was only this small window of time (from the late sixties to the mid-seventies) in our Valley when homeownership was both affordable to working-class folks and open to people of all races – to make a case for some form of reparative housing justice in our region.  Or to make a case for robust support of all forms of affordable housing, including affordable homeownership housing.  Or for robust support of alternative ownership/collective stewardship models like land trusts and co-ops.  And all of this case-making is legitimate.  Arguments that I can and probably will make in the future.  But, in this moment, I’m not really feeling it.  I’d rather sit with this feeling of loss for a little bit longer.  And, in the midst of loss, to find a sense of appreciation of the value of the home that my mom worked so hard to provide and, perhaps, a rededication to the idea that this sense of home – this core sense of stability – is something that everybody deserves (even if, like all things, it is impermanent).