How Kamala Harris’s Berkeley neighborhood is a greater struggle for the Middle Class

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 for someone like Kamala Harris’s mom to afford to live here,” said Abby Friedman, who helped organize the block party in her neighbor’s side yard on Browning Street, around the corner from Harris’s childhood home.

Vernita McCray lives across the street from it. She was born here in 1956, a year after her father, a hod carrier who delivered bricks and lumber to construction sites, bought the modest corner house. He could afford the $134 monthly mortgage and raise his three daughters while his wife stayed home. They were some of the first Black residents to move into the mostly White neighborhood back then, she said, and kids across the street sometimes threw rocks at their house. In the 1970s, when Harris was school-age here, the neighborhood was mostly Black.

The homes with long, narrow lots along Bancroft Way look much as they did in the 1970s, including the two-story yellow house that Harris grew up in. Instead of Regina Shelton’s day care beneath the Harris apartment where the sisters stayed after school, there is a Montessori preschool now.

But as housing prices skyrocketed and the neighborhood gentrified over the next decades, the ZIP code that includes about 17,600 people is mostly White again, making up nearly half the population, according to the 2020 Census. The Black population has fallen to about 15%, followed closely by Hispanics and Asians at about 14%.

McCray, 68, who spent years working for Bank of America and now works in child care, says there’s no way she could afford to buy her own home now.

“Oh no,” she said, “not in my wildest dreams.”

Harris has made helping the middle class a central theme of her candidacy, a demographic that Trump largely appealed to in his successful 2016 presidential campaign. In a campaign video released Friday, Harris promised to create an “opportunity economy,” for middle-class families “like the one I grew up in,” she said, “where everyone has a chance to get a car loan, buy a home, start a business.”

In her Thursday night speech, she also pledged to build three million new homes and “end America’s housing shortage.”

What she didn’t mention, however, is that Democratic policies and local “not-in-my-backyard” sentiments have often thwarted opportunities to build new housing, and Democratic-sponsored rent control programs that make some units affordable for the middle class also discourage development.

As Trump put it in a post on his Truth Social site, “She’s talking about the Middle Class, but she’s the one who broke the Middle Class, and made it UNSAFE AND UNAFFORDABLE!”

Still, Harris’s message resonates in this Berkeley neighborhood not far from the university campus called “Poet’s Corner,” for the street names of famous poets like Browning and Chaucer.

“Like all of Berkeley, Poet’s Corner has gotten radically more expensive,” said Marilyn Garcia, a real estate agent who’s worked in Berkeley for two decades. “It’s definitely affected who can afford to live there… I don’t think that a teacher could afford to buy a house in that area these days.”

There are still educators, therapists and working class retirees who live here, however, and attended the livestream of Harris’s speech as the sun set Thursday night. But many of them either bought their homes decades ago, have taken in renters, or are renters themselves with roommates.

Celine Bonfils, a French immigrant who conducted postdoctoral research in climate science here, and her husband, also a scientist, rent a two-bedroom with their two children.

Like Harris, her children are the offspring of two scientists and “we’re renting. So we are middle class,” said Bonfils, who helped set up chairs at the viewing party. “It’s not easy to buy a house.”

Pramish Thapa, a Nepal immigrant, and his wife, Annie Powers, purchased their two-bedroom house across from the old Harris home for more than $1 million. But even with low interest rates when they bought the house and their tech salaries — he’s an economist and she works for an AI start-up —  they still needed family help to buy it.

They’re happy to be here, and take pride in living across from Harris’s childhood home. When Harris spoke about her days here — that Mrs. Shelton who lived below “became a second mother,” and that their neighbors taught them “how to make gumbo, how to play chess” and instilled the values of treating others with “kindness, respect and compassion” — Thapa believes that spirit still lives on.

He missed the block party, where neighbors ate handfuls of popcorn and slices of cake with frosting that said “Kamala 47,” and where Friedman’s 11-year-old daughter,  Elia Schifrin, made hand-painted T-shirts that said “Keep calm and vote Kamala.”

Despite the challenges to afford living here — or maybe because of them — Thapa says he’s felt the same sense of community that Harris talked about.

“When we first came here, we received a cake from some of our neighbors and fruit,” he said, “and random acts of kindness.”