About thirty years and change ago, there was an impromptu “block party”—two blocks, actually, in the tony Oakland neighborhood in which I then lived. A younger couple chatted me up, and early on asked “how long have you lived in the neighborhood?” “Oh,” I replied carelessly, “it’s been a dozen years since I first rented the place.” They literally turned away without another word and went to talk to real people.

By way of historical context, that district of Oakland was what Bay Area writer Alice Kahn had in mind—yes, really—when she coined the term “yuppie” in a local alt-weekly in 1983 (The LA Times picked it up the following year, during the Hart campaign, and it went viral).

Home prices in the Rockridge were already stratospheric when I was squeezed out in 1993; at present they’re closer to the heliopause. Hell, I couldn’t afford The Crumbling Manse™ at today’s tariff,* and although the area has been “gentrifying,” it’s still fairly gritty measured against the sedate and sylvan streets of my old stomping grounds. We were, in 1999, part of the early third-wave of gentrification of what had formerly been a rough and run-down precinct: first the Chinese, than the gays, then the yuppies, although we had sort of aged out of that demographic by then. When the Food Hole opened its doors down the street eight years later, this both validated and accelerated the trend, but although a couple of thousand units of high-end housing have recently opened/will shortly open within a quarter mile of here, they are all high-density and overwhelmingly rental, aimed at the tech spillage from San Francisco.

cordially,

*Oakland’s evil reputation served as a brake on the rise in home prices so that, just as my personal finances had stabilized to the point at which I could contemplate joining the landed gentry, this place was (barely) within reach.