Skyrocketing home prices and their impact on affordability are often cited as reasons for net domestic migration out of California. In the early 1960s around 250,000 Americans moved to California each year. In 2020 close to the same number left. Is this the beginning of a mass exodus from the Golden State or a more temporary phenomenon?

The answer lies in the relative price of housing.

To understand the economic forces at work, let’s consider an example far less emotionally fraught than housing. With Hawai‘i open again, I am thinking about heading to Maui to consume, among other delicacies, iconic shave ice. Should I choose the rainbow or the coconut flavor?

If the price is the same for each, I choose the one I like best (coconut). I’ll even pay a little more for it. But at some price the difference between the cost of the two will tip the scales to rainbow. If too many people prefer coconut, the vendor will make it more expensive, relative to rainbow, to prevent running out of syrup.

Shave ice is much cheaper than housing. But the same economic forces—involving relative prices—are at work in the shave ice and housing markets. We must better understand relative prices if we want to understand California’s housing challenges and for how long they might contribute to the reduction in California’s population due to out-migration.

There are two kinds of prices we consider when making a home purchase: absolute and relative. The absolute price is the out-of-pocket cost, and it limits the set of homes a buyer can consider. For example, your budget might make a $70 million Malibu beach house out of reach, but would not exclude all potential homes.

Among the homes whose absolute prices you can afford, you will then have a choice, and this is where the relative price of homes becomes important. You might consider a number of factors beyond price, including location, schools, and other amenities. In the end, you will weigh those factors against their relative cost: the price of one home on your list versus another. (The New York Times runs an occasional feature that deftly illustrates this process, following a home purchaser considering three different homes within their budget.) This kind of comparison takes place whether you’re choosing between two homes within one city—say, Los Angeles—or whether you’re choosing between two homes in different cities—say, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Relative prices tell some of the story of California migration. Starting in the 1880s, developers here lured buyers from the East with advertisements offering affordable land with a healthy climate and, according to one brochure, the absence of “cyclones and blizzards”—sparking a land boom and, in 1886, the first of a series of speculative bubbles. It was the beginning of the more than 120 years of California land and homes commanding a premium over similar homes in the East. Of course, it was not only California’s salubrious weather that brought immigrants from other states. Employment in Hollywood, in aerospace, in tech, and in agriculture and the like were, and remain today, powerful attractors.

Migration of large numbers of people into and out of the state, of course, impacted housing demand. Over time this migration has been more heavily into the state and in the absence of more rapid home building, has pushed prices up. And as the relative price of housing soared, the less attractive California became for those contemplating a move. From World War II to the late 1980s, when California homes were priced not too much higher relative to homes elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of Americans moved to the Golden State each year. In 2020, 240,000 Californians went the other direction.

Some who left cited job opportunities or the pace of life in growing cities such as Phoenix and Austin. But the cost of housing was also given as a reason. Often leavers would say, “I can purchase a home there and not in L.A. or San Francisco,” or “I get so much more for my housing dollar outside of the state.” In other words, relative prices pushed people away. If the price of homes in Phoenix compared to Los Angeles is low enough, it will drive migration to Phoenix. And then, over time, that shift in demand ought to increase Phoenix home prices relative to Los Angeles home prices just as the migration to California pushed relative home prices up here. When the California premium becomes small enough, home price migration should cease.

To examine the impact of migration on relative home prices, let’s consider Austin, Dallas, Las Vegas, Seattle, Miami, Phoenix, and Boise—all cities where Californians are moving.

The standard measure of home price affordability uses median prices. However, the median home sold—that is, the one where half the homes sold were more expensive and half less expensive—changes from year to year depending on which homes are sold. Here, to smooth out that variability, our starting point will be a single base year median home for these cities. This analysis uses the year 1990 as a base year. The results are not sensitive to the choice of year. Looking at pairs of cities—one in California, the other elsewhere—we can compute the ratio of the California city’s home price to the competing city’s home price to create a measure of the relative price between the two cities.

For example, in 1990, the median price of a home in Los Angeles was about three times the median price of a home in Austin ($213,000 versus $70,000). Between then and now, Los Angeles home prices increased by 333% and in Austin they increased by 534%, dropping L.A.’s relative price ratio of 3 to 1 down to 1.66 to 1. Houses are still cheaper in Austin, but relatively less so. 

During the last ten years, home prices increased in Boise by 294%, in Las Vegas by 232%, in Phoenix by 204%, in Austin by 169%, and in Seattle by 166%. Each of these increases is greater than the price increases of 148% in San Francisco, 138% in Los Angeles and 105% in Orange County. And the median home prices in Boise, Austin and Miami are now not too different from Sacramento and Riverside. The relative price of these California cities has fallen, and their relative affordability has increased.

It is still the case that you can sell a home in California and buy a larger home in one of these other cities, but it will be a smaller or a less well-appointed home than the same transaction would have brought a decade ago. The change in the relative price should make it less attractive to move out of California for reasons of housing affordability.

These six cities are properly characterized as up-and-coming; they were relatively small until people began pouring in. Austin’s population grew by nearly 30% over the last decade and Phoenix’s by 18%. What about the evolution of relative home prices when we compare California to cities that were more mature in 1990, such as Dallas and Atlanta? In both of these cases, Los Angeles’ relative price over the last decade has remained more or less constant—and net migration has slowed to a trickle. Between 2014 and 2018, just 6,000 fewer Texans moved from Dallas to L.A. than Angelenos moved to Dallas. And from 2011 to 2015 the net migration from L.A. to Atlanta slowed to 391. The relative price appears to have settled into an equilibrium that has not induced significant migration one way or the other.

Clearly, changes in job opportunities, amenities, government regulations or the lack thereof, and local lifestyles can upset this equilibrium. And they frequently do. But the point is that relative prices matter.

As cities grow and mature, the relative cost of housing stabilizes to reflect the relative attractiveness of the cities. And the one-way migration process induced by housing affordability comes to an end—in very much the same way as a price differential between shave ice flavors pushes one to choose rainbow over coconut. What we are seeing is not the end of the California dream with a mass exodus to points east, but rather simple supply and demand at work, adjusting to relative price differentials.

So, while California housing may be becoming less affordable, it is becoming relatively more affordable.

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This scenario seems to be playing out in Atlanta, where acolytes of former president Donald Trump are calling for the affluent, predominantly white enclave of Buckhead to secede from the city.

Proponents of secession say the timing of their effort simply reflects concern about a recent spike in crime in the area, but it also serves a broader strategic purpose, as part of the national Republican Party’s efforts to regain its footing in Georgia after its surprising stumble in the state’s 2020 presidential and senatorial elections. GOP leaders have already pushed through legislation calculated to suppress minority voting in this year’s gubernatorial and congressional midterm contests in Georgia. Yet they also face a need to rekindle the partisan loyalties of traditionally Republican metropolitan whites, which appeared to lapse nationwide in 2020—especially in places like Buckhead, where Donald Trump claimed only four precincts in 2020, compared to nine in 2016.

The stated case for Buckhead’s breakaway is not wholly lacking in substance. For some time, residents of the area have expressed concern about how much safety their substantial tax payments really buy them. The outcry has intensified in recent months. Buckhead secessionists point to a 44 percent jump in homicides in 2021, with all shooting incidents up by 31 percent and aggravated assaults up by 20 percent. Meanwhile, the city of Atlanta’s efforts to combat a citywide surge in violent crime have suffered from the departure of roughly 1 in 5 of its police officers over the last year in the face of former mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ hard-nosed response to incidents in which police appeared to use excessive force. Predictably, the key plank in the Buckhead Cityhood Committee’s (BCC) secessionist platform is the promise of the highest-paid and most carefully screened police force in Georgia—including 175 active patrolmen, which would purportedly quadruple the number of officers on duty per shift.

Although the percentage increases in Buckhead’s crime rate seem striking, the 44 percent rise in homicides reflects an absolute increase from 8 in 2020 to 13 in 2021, while the area’s police zone recorded substantially fewer violent offenses than the average in Atlanta’s other zones last year. Even so, secession proponents have declared Buckhead a “war zone,” where “the killing never stops.” Such calculated hyperbole is a favorite device of career political subversives like longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who rely on it to shock their followers into actions whose consequences they may not fully comprehend. In this sense, the Buckhead secession movement seems like something straight out of Bannon’s playbook, which envisions hard-right voters seizing control of the Republican Party “village by village, precinct by precinct.”

A great many Buckhead residents are against secession, including the two Democrats who represent the area in the state legislature. In both houses of that body, the sponsors of bills to enable the withdrawal vote are Republicans whose districts lie in other counties, one 50 miles away, and another 100. Not all of the state’s prominent Republicans have openly endorsed the measure, but one who has is former U.S. Senator David Perdue—another non-Buckheader who, with Trump’s endorsement, is now challenging incumbent Brian Kemp in their party’s upcoming gubernatorial primary. Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a frequent guest on Bannon’s podcast, has also praised the efforts of the Buckhead Cityhood Committee (BCC) and its CEO, Bill White. Greene doesn’t represent Buckhead either. But she has found a kindred spirit in White, a fellow conspiracy theorist who has raised copious sums for Donald Trump, rallied support for the “Stop the Steal” movement, and lauded the “patriots’” who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Further evidence of the partisan allegiances at work in the secession campaign emerged from a BCC poll showing 86 percent of Buckhead’s Republicans favoring the pullout, compared to only 38 percent of its Democrats. The presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, Stacey Abrams, has declared her opposition, as has the newly elected Democratic mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens. Proponents of the secession initiative insist that their campaign is colorblind. Still, the number of Black leaders who have lined up with Abrams and Dickens to denounce the effort, combined with BCC-er Bill White’s re-tweet of disparaging comments about Black-majority cities from a white nationalist website, attest to the pronounced racial overtones of the secession campaign. Some 74 percent of the proposed new city’s population, estimated to be in the neighborhood of 100,000, would be white. Without Buckhead, the black share of Atlanta’s population would rise from just over 50 percent to just under 60 percent.

This aspect of Buckhead’s departure is particularly ironic in view of the circumstances that led to it becoming part of Atlanta in the first place. Historian Matthew Lassiter has explained how Buckhead became a strategic pawn in Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield’s plan to sustain both his city’s post-World War II economic boom and its reputation for racial stability.

A pragmatist of the first order, Hartsfield prided himself on maintaining a close working relationship with the conservative leaders of the city’s well-established Black middle class. Yet population trends in the mid-20th century suggested Black people would soon outnumber whites in Atlanta, and Hartsfield believed that the prospect of dealing with a Black governing majority would discourage corporate managers from making major investments in his town. Warning that Atlanta was “finished” as a city if it could not expand, he managed in 1952 to push through a legislative annexation plan that tripled its geographic area while adding some 100,000 whites from the Buckhead community lying just to its northeast. The infusion immediately reduced the Black share of the city’s population from 41 to 31 percent.

Hartsfield meant to maintain Black-white relations through moderation, rather than sheer strength of numbers, however, lest he put the lie to his own claim that Atlanta was “Too Busy to Hate.” The prosperous, self-assured, racially tolerant, pro-business white denizens of Buckhead proved critical to this mission. They backed him in 1960, when, with Atlanta schools facing court-ordered desegregation, Hartsfield and allies like prominent attorney and Buckhead resident Griffin Bell thwarted demands to cut state funding for any public school system complying with integration efforts.

In return, Hartsfield’s strategy for school integration in Atlanta minimized its impact on his well-heeled white supporters in Buckhead. The small, carefully selected cadre of Black students assigned to transfer into schools in their neighborhoods in 1963 boasted higher average test scores than their new white classmates, while the numerical brunt of integration fell on the white working-class neighborhoods south and west of downtown.

And much as the mayor had promised, after annexation Buckhead became an economic dynamo, awash in high-income consumers and free-flowing investment capital. When Buckhead’s gleaming, futuristic Lenox Square opened in 1959, it was billed as the South’s largest shopping mall. There would soon be other, smaller, but no less fashionable shopping plazas, as well as a proliferation of steadily higher-rising office towers and a bustling restaurant and bar scene. A Buckhead address, residential or commercial, became synonymous with wealth and power. Not by chance did Tom Wolfe make Charlie Croker, the hard-charging, relentlessly entrepreneurial protagonist of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, a resident of Buckhead.

Today’s Buckheaders who trumpet secession the loudest don’t seem to have spent much time pondering the practicalities of getting what they say they want. Funding an expanded police presence in an independent Buckhead today shouldn’t be a problem, the BCC insists, citing a feasibility study that foresees the new city’s massive tax base generating a budget surplus in the neighborhood of $114 million annually. But this figure fails to account either for standard municipal expenditures like waste removal and street maintenance or for Buckhead’s substantial portion of Atlanta’s billions in bond and employee pension obligations. A December city council move means nearly $200 million in bond repayment would come due in full 12 months after Buckhead’s official departure.

Another loose end the secession proponents don’t seem keen to discuss is the fate of some 5,500 Buckhead pupils currently enrolled in the Atlanta Public Schools system. While Georgia law is friendly to the creation of new cities, the state’s constitution forbids the creation of new independent public school systems. Who would educate the Buckhead students whose parents can’t afford or don’t choose to send them to one of its ritzy private schools?

Broader fiscal consequences of Buckhead’s withdrawal would be unavoidable. The proposed boundaries of the new city contain all or part of three of the four richest zip codes in Georgia. The richest, 30327, boasts an average household income of $285,000, with 40 percent of its homes valued above $1 million. With its high-dollar commercial properties thrown in, Buckhead’s departure would strip Atlanta of some 40 percent of the total assessed value of its taxable property, and more than half of the budgeted revenue for its public schools. So much for the city’s credit rating—and ultimately, perhaps, that of other Georgia cities that might see their tax bases decimated by similar desertions should Buckhead’s come to pass. (There are already copycat movements in places like Athens, where there is talk of the upscale Five Points neighborhood withdrawing from the city.)

For some supporters, the secession drive seems to be more about wounding Atlanta than benefiting Buckhead.  Fox News host Tucker Carlson was so taken with the prospect of punishing “woke” leaders of a Black majority city that when the BCC’s Bill White appeared on his show, he grew animated in urging White and his cohort to “leave immediately. That’ll be a lesson to the rest of the country.”

The substance of that lesson may prove less to their liking than Carlson and other Buckhead Cityhood proponents envision. Efforts by white conservatives to hold Atlanta’s political influence in check have been a fixture in Georgia politics for more than 150 years. But pushing the city that accounts for roughly two-thirds of the state’s GDP to the brink of receivership hardly promises to sit well with executives of the 29 Fortune 1,000 companies who currently call it home, or other mega-investors who might now think twice about joining them.

There are indications that enthusiasm for what some Atlantans call “Buckxit” is on the wane, but even if the deeply partisan venture ultimately fizzles, it has already shown that the same political mentality that stirs vindictiveness and division in national affairs stands to be no less toxic when it surfaces in matters of more local concern.

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Today, a short walk from my house, memorials to the two men—Union Major General James B. McPherson and Confederate Major General William H. T. Walker— still stand where each officer fell. The monuments, upturned cannons on pedestals typical of the Victorian era, go mostly unnoticed. Neither is in great shape. Walker’s is particularly sad. It sits aside an onramp to Interstate 20, a major freeway bisecting Atlanta, next to a Texaco convenience store. It has been hit by automobiles, many times. It’s cattywampus—crooked—on its foundation.

My neighbors and I want to restore these monuments. We’re a diverse group, of different races, ages, genders, and political ideologies. We want to fix up the McPherson and Walker memorials because they’re one of the few remaining records of Atlanta’s past. There are many layers of history here in East Atlanta—from the Indians to the pioneer farmers to the Civil War to civil rights. Reclaiming all of them is crucial to understanding our place in American history.

The Walker Monument, orange and next to the Texaco star, sits on Glenwood Avenue where General Walker fell at the westbound entrance ramp to I-20. Photo by Henry Bryant.

When my wife and I first moved to the neighborhood in September of 1980, we didn’t know any of this. We just wanted to renovate an old house in an area that we could afford and we had finally found one—a 1906 home with a Victorian cottage floor plan—that fit the bill. One cold and rainy day that fall, a man showed up on our front porch with a metal detector, asking for permission to explore our front yard. This was where the Battle of Atlanta had happened, he explained, and he wanted to see if he could find any souvenirs—swords, belt buckles, grapeshot balls, and the like. I politely told him that if anyone was going to find anything on my property it was going to be me.

Thus I learned that I lived on a battlefield—and the realization launched a decades-long quest to learn everything I could about East Atlanta, and to understand a piece of our history that many people in this city, both black and white, have been too willing to forget. I became involved in local politics, joining a neighborhood organization that worked on planning and quality of life issues. At the time, a lot of groups like ours were hosting home tours to fund redevelopment efforts. We wanted to be different. We had one asset no one else did: the Battle of Atlanta in our backyards.

The actual fighting fields had long been supplanted by urban development and a grid of residential streets. Geographic features and the paths of old trails were still evident, though, so that our committee could research and locate landmarks and sites of the conflict. We hosted festivals to commemorate the battle, and created a van tour designed to tell people the story—a tale of accidents and miscalculations.

The McPherson Monument. Photo by Henry Bryant.

The Union army had begun fighting its way south from Chattanooga, Tennessee in late November, sure it could reach Atlanta by Easter. But they hadn’t experienced a Georgia winter or spring. We have ice. We have rain and floods. And in addition to the natural forces that delayed them, the Union soldiers also had to face the Confederates, who didn’t
win many battles but were successful in delaying the Union’s approach to Atlanta. It was July, steamy and hot, when the forces finally made it to the city.

The ill-fated generals were killed before troops had fully reached their positions. Walker was first. He and his Confederate soldiers had gotten lost on their way to the battle, mired in muck on the banks of a 35-acre mill pond. Walker set off across a creek, on a big white horse, seeking a better vantage point—unaware that Union sharpshooters were tracking him from their perch on a nearby hill. When he re-entered the clearing to return to his men, the riflemen fired, and he fell. The Union forces were also on the move, filling gaps in an attempt to slow a surprise attack. McPherson, the more important military leader of the two, also died before the actual battle had begun, shot from his horse by a group of Confederate infantry who caught him off guard behind his front lines, on the Old Wagon Road.

A t-shirt featuring Generals McPherson and Walker at Kaboodle in East Atlanta. Photo by Tony Crump/East Atlanta Community Association.

After the war, in 1877, federal soldiers stationed in Atlanta built McPherson’s memorial; Walker’s memorial followed in 1902. East Atlanta grew and transformed itself around the monuments. The mill pond was drained. The trails soldiers had followed during the battle were paved over. Developers dotted the area with houses and schools and business districts; in the 1960s, the federal government built Interstate 20, which bisects Atlanta.

Atlanta’s black middle class began to grow soon after the end of the war, and over the decades the city became the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King was born here, in 1929; the city elected its first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1973. Today our city is a mecca for African-Americans, who have thrived politically, economically, and culturally.

There have been times when some of our black neighbors in East Atlanta and throughout the city have questioned the utility of dredging up the war’s painful past. Our group’s mission has always been to explore American history —not just the Confederacy and not just the Union. It’s not a story of black and white, but a story that is shaded with a wide range of tones. We want to tell the whole story, not just one side. Our events have long featured programming about East Atlanta’s civil rights history as well as its Civil War history. In a city like ours, which is always tearing everything down in the name of progress—the Falcons’ 25-year-old Georgia Dome, for instance, is scheduled for demolition later this year—we wanted to provide a tangible bit of history to make the neighborhood proud.

East Atlanta has gentrified. These days, pushback to our battle-themed events can easily come from young progressives, who tell me they “don’t expose their kids to violence.” (Although some millennials recently embraced an East Atlanta t-shirt that featured the images of the generals, who both wore long beards, with the tagline “East Atlanta—Hipsters since 1864.”) But ours is a peaceful message. There’s nothing that inspires peace like the horrors of war. When you understand the alternative, you want peace even more.

A rendering of plans for the restoration of the McPherson and Walker Monuments. Image courtesy of BATL and Pimsler & Hoss Architects, Inc.

The Battle of Atlanta can be the beginning of a conversation about race. The restored McPherson and Walker monuments will be an integral part of our effort to tell East Atlanta’s history. We’re on track to raise the nearly $200,000 it will take to restore the sites. We also have plans on the drawing boards to create a trail to connect them. It would wind along city streets and pass through unused rights of way. There’s a creek along the path, too, where we want to create a green space. There we’d like to place historic markers that will tell East Atlanta’s story —all of it, and not just the tales of the blue and the gray.

As it happens, the hill where the Union sharpshooters gunned down Walker is now home to a high school. It was one of the first in Georgia to be desegregated, in 1961, when nine black students began attending classes at four all-white schools. It brings things full circle, having a major Civil War site next to a major civil rights site.

The post In Atlanta, Honoring Two Civil War Generals Opens a Discussion on Race and History appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was born there in 1978, less than a mile from the house where King grew up. As a schoolchild, I like others, visited Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue—the street where King was born, worked, died, and is honored. To see King’s neighborhood, and the home he was born in, humanized him for us children, letting us know that he was once young like us, wrestling with classes and playing with siblings. We went to the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King declared, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” and to the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization he led until his death in 1968. We visited the King Center built by his widow to spread King’s nonviolent doctrine, and saw the eternal flame that burns near his tomb and reminds us that his work endures.

My grandparents—native Floridians who first came to Atlanta as college students in the late 1930s—and my mother tried to shield my brother and me from the indignities they suffered during the era of Jim Crow. They did this mostly by trying to give us a better life; I seldom spoke to them about the racism they endured. But the living history was everywhere in Atlanta, and the frequency with which I saw King’s lieutenants and associates on television reminded me of both the progress we’d achieved and the work still left to be done. John Lewis, for example, was leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he was gassed and beaten badly on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, during the start of a march to the state capitol that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” But he went on to represent Atlanta as a U.S. congressman and has fought for decades to preserve the Voting Rights Act he, King, and hundreds of foot soldiers helped usher into law.

Whack with John Lewis

When I became a journalist, I found myself gravitating toward telling the stories of black people, and focusing specifically on the legacy of the civil rights movement. As a college student, I got my first reporting job at the Atlanta Daily World, a black newspaper first published in 1928. The office was on Auburn Avenue—the same street I’d first visited as a child. I was working blocks away from where King worked.

By taking on civil rights as a beat in Atlanta, I not only had a front row seat to history, but the ability to ask those who lived it how they felt about current-day racial struggles. It was an extraordinary opportunity.

Even though I have left Atlanta, I carry all this history with me. This fall, almost a half-century after the enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act that King supported, I spent a few weeks in Ferguson, Missouri, as a reporter for Fusion covering the Michael Brown shooting and the ensuing protests.

From the day I arrived, the parallels between the Ferguson context and that of King’s struggles were everywhere.

Even though segregation is no longer legal and discussion of the civil rights movement has appeared in textbooks for decades, I still found neighborhoods in Ferguson so divided along color lines that I thought I had stepped into those black-and-white TV images of the 1960s I had seen. In the same way Bull Connor referred to King and other protesters as “outside agitators” in Birmingham, authorities and some residents in Ferguson referred to “outsiders” and the “negative influence of the media” on the African-American community—as if this community had no grounds to be unhappy of their own volition with the status quo before August 9, 2014. I talked to people on both sides of the racial divide who did not know each other’s daily lives.

The way the police deployed tear gas, dogs, smoke bombs, and riot gear certainly reminded me of stories I’d been told by people like Lewis. Images of clashing police and protesters in Ferguson—and the real-time reactions on social media—reminded me of the nation’s horror at the sight of water hoses, clubs, and snarling dogs 50 years before.

A rally in Ferguson, Missouri

The Ferguson rallies, both there and elsewhere in the country, were full of young people—much like those during the civil rights movement. But there were important differences, too. Unlike the masses who rallied around King in Alabama, there was no single leader of the protests I covered in Ferguson night after night. The shooting of Michael Brown had been the catalyst, but inequality—and specifically unequal treatment of black people in the criminal justice system—was the real subject, one with many stories to tell.

During the 1960s, the black church had a central role, serving as the moral foundation of the movement. In Ferguson, churches served as the site of several rallies and meetings, and preachers could regularly be seen keeping the peace on the front lines during protests. But the burgeoning movement was neither started nor maintained through the church.

And while the protesters on West Florissant Avenue were mostly peaceful demonstrators, there were some who would have disappointed King—looting, committing arson, firing guns.

There are some who think of the events in Ferguson as an isolated incident, simply a moment in time. But to me it seemed like part of the continuum in the struggle for progress in our country. When I interviewed King’s aides, they were always quick to mention that the civil rights movement didn’t die with King; it’s ongoing. While our nation has made racial progress, we still have far to go before we achieve full equality among America’s citizens. The reaction to what happened in Ferguson exposed that chasm anew.

The post In Atlanta, Every Day Was MLK Day appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fast-forward 15 years, and I’m now sitting in my sister’s living room in Atlanta researching the housing market here. How did I end up leaving L.A.’s perfect weather, vibrant mix of people, and once-beloved concrete jungle behind me? In a word: kids.

The town I grew up in, Morganton, lies in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, just a couple of hours northeast of Atlanta. My parents worked opposite shifts to raise the five of us (four girls and a boy). We always had big gatherings on the weekends that included every imaginable family member near and far. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be 40 to 50 people in our backyard, each and every one of them somehow related to me. As a kid, every adult was Auntie this and Uncle that, or Grandma this and Grandpa that. My parents still live in the house we built and my brother stays in nearby Charlotte, while my three sisters moved to the greater Atlanta area.

When I moved to L.A. in 2001, I found families of a kind based on common interests. My favorite things to do always involved lots of people: volleyball, picnics at the park, hiking the Hollywood Hills, trying out all kinds of different foods, going to the beach. I was even lucky enough to meet my husband, who grew up in Japan and then Gardena, at one volleyball outing. Most of our friends were, like myself, transplants who left their hometowns looking for something new and exciting.

When I became pregnant in 2010, we bought a gorgeous townhouse in Harbor City with grand dreams of one day raising our kids in the city: going to outdoor movie fests at the local park, hitting every farmers market within a five-mile radius (would we see any celebrities in Torrance?), tasting our way through our neighborhood with its eclectic blend of Japanese/Mexican/Korean/Pacific Islander restaurants, and taking them to our favorite people-watching spots on the weekends—the Del Amo Fashion Center mall, Little Tokyo downtown, and every beach between Malibu and San Pedro. I left movie production and took an advertising job. I started working from home just before baby was born, thinking I’d be able to play doting mom during breaks from work.

Reality hit us like the proverbial ton of bricks when our first child was born in mid-2011. While our lives were wondrously filled with diaper changes, midnight feedings, and little corn toes, we were facing an unbearable squeeze on our time and money. After weighing our few childcare choices, we opted for a part-time nanny three times a week and asked my husband’s mom, who lived nearby, to help out the other two days to save money. Since we could only afford childcare on two incomes, staying in L.A. meant both my husband and I would need to keep working, and work we did.

Visions of going to the park at lunchtime and frolicking in the sand during work breaks were quickly dimmed and replaced with endless Excel reports, conference calls, and late nights at my computer. I could barely lift my eyes from my computer long enough to eat lunch, much less take a long enough break to actually play with baby. I often worked from early morning until all hours of the night facing tight deadlines.

Someone else was with baby all day, something that hurt my heart to the core—I had become a bystander in his life. I hated not being the one who caught the first smile, the first rollover, the first wobbly steps. I hated not kissing my son goodnight because of looming deadlines. I knew I wouldn’t get this precious time back.

We limped along this way for a couple of years, living paycheck to paycheck and saving what we could. But we hit the breaking point when we had baby number two. Now I was missing out on firsts for two kids. And, comparing the rising infant and toddler costs to what we earned showed we could quickly go into a debt we couldn’t recover from if we weren’t careful. Preschools in our neighborhood ranged from $800 all the way up to $1,200 per month per child. And then there was the state of the L.A. Unified School District schools, which is where our children would have gone. We kept hearing about how they’re constantly plagued with money problems and dissatisfied teachers. We thought about moving to the better school districts but couldn’t afford it—housing in those areas averaged at least $100,000 more than our current townhouse; there would be the hassle and costs of moving, plus new up-front fees on a new mortgage. Add to that the looming costs of college and gas, food, and utility bills.

The more we thought about it, the less it made sense. We were essentially working to live, which I felt was no way to live at all. Plus, we hadn’t had a nice date night in four years.

I had always teased my husband about moving to Atlanta to be closer to my three sisters. It was a running joke between us. In Atlanta, we could buy two houses with twice the amount of land for the same price we paid for our townhouse! Gas is only $3 in Atlanta compared to over $4 in L.A.! Preschool is free there! We could live off one income, and I might even be able to stay at home in Atlanta to raise our kids! In time, all of these jokes turned into the core reasons we decided to leave L.A.

Moving to Atlanta also offered another vision for how we would spend our time. Staying in L.A. would mean our kids would have to go without same-age friends to grow up with. Sure, we had friends with kids, but they lived long, traffic-filled drives away, and we didn’t see any of them regularly. Atlanta, however, would provide us with a giant community of aunts, uncles, and cousins for daily play dates. And grandparents were just a few hours’ drive away. While it was nice to have a nanny we loved and trusted, nothing could replace having a large family nearby. I didn’t want to deny my kids the gift of growing up the same way I did: surrounded by family and unconditionally supported through every endeavor. My family can be embarrassing sometimes, but they have always been my loudest cheering section. Also, hello, free babysitting and the return of date nights!

We finally looked at each other last summer and said, “Let’s do it.”

Atlanta has been our home for just over three months now, and I’ve been able to stay at home full-time. We miss L.A.—the great friends we left behind, the weather, and the food, to name a few things. But we’re seizing the opportunity to start fresh here and build the life we couldn’t have on the West Coast. We’re looking for a nice, big house in a great school district, watching the kids grow up with their cousins and grandparents, and even getting to know each other again as individuals and not sleep-deprived parents. And we still get to enjoy some of the things we loved about city living. We went to an outdoor movie last week with the kids for the very first time. And get this: They had free food!

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