A House of Our Own

When we left Angel Island we moved to what we Islanders called the Main Land. We rented an apartment on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, one of my favorite neighborhoods in the world. The first heavy rains the roof leaked in our bedroom and they fixed it and it leaked again and they fixed it again and again. Then in July a year after we had moved to Lakeshore, Suzette’s 17 year old son Arom moved back to California and to live with us. Suzette found us a house on Humboldt Ave in El Cerrito. It was a good house in a nice neighborhood, close to things on a bicycle and even a few places to walk to. We were planning to go to Spain in a year and the landlord was planning to sell the house in a year. That worked. Then Suzette reconsidered Spain and the landlord was selling the house. We found another house in Hilltop Green, a wonderful neighborhood with a park except it was in a dell below a freeway.

When the landlord raised the rent 10% after the first year we looked around and realized we could afford to buy a house and began looking. By 2015 the financial and real estate crash of 2008 had evolved into an overheated market and the East Bay was crazy. A small apartment called a condo in Berkeley was selling for twice what we could afford. Another house in Berkeley we could barely afford was across the street from where the local leisure class hung out in front of liquor store.

We bid on one house in Richmond on a nice street in a poor neighborhood and were outbid. We had started in May and after three months we were still looking. One more bid in the Dimond we nearly got and then we looked at a house in the flats of East Oakland near Mills College. It was almost in our price range and we overbid for it and got it.

5615 Fleming Avenue was on a good street below the 580 freeway and above Foothill Avenue. East Oakland is the hard part of town but our neighborhood was a 1920s development a little more genteel than the area is known for. It had gone through covenants and restrictions to block busting to gentrification nearby. The neighborhood had changed color a couple of times but after a hundred years it was still genteel. When we moved there the diversity of the neighborhood was solid and still is and the neighbors turned out to be the best part of our new house. Shortly after we moved in Bettina and Gary Larsen moved in. Bettina quickly became the neighborhood social director and godmother to all the children. We met all of our neighbors and Pastor Clarence of the Mills Grove Christian Church. It wasn’t long before we felt at home.

A month after we moved in Adam started kindergarten at Escuela Bilingüe Internacional in Rockridge, 15 minutes away. The second through eighth grade is in Emeryville, again 15 minutes away. From our neighborhood everything in Oakland is about 15 minutes away.

The house is 1200 square feet, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a backyard and a small front yard. It’s more than adequate for us. The backyard is well fenced and in 2017 we got a dog, Bella, the Rescue Dog. I don’t do yard work and the landscaping is au naturel. We’ve lived here for 8 years and it’s home. We’ll probably stay until Adam graduates from high school when I’ll begin to look for digs in a cheaper geography.

I used money I inherited from my parents for the down payment and so far it has been a good investment. For a few years we watched the value of the house increase rapidly and since the Pandemic it’s at a plateau well above what we paid for it. At first the payments were hard on our budget but we refinanced and reduced them by 15% and our income has increased with the Cost of Living Allowances of Social Security and CalPers. Buying a house has done what we needed, fixed our housing costs. Eight years later we can afford it. It’s a good house for us in a good neighborhood with a good dog.