Urban Adventures

Starting Sunday in the San Gabriel Valley section, The Times will begin an occasional, first-person series on one couple’s unsettling experience searching for a house and settling in Northwest Pasadena, a gentrifying neighborhood.

Staff writer Berkley Hudson and his wife, Milbre Burch, newcomers from New England, bought a house in January in an area not considered one of Pasadena’s best addresses. But with residential real estate prices in Southern California among the highest in the nation, fewer than one in five families in Los Angeles County can afford to pay the median resale price of a single-family house.

First-time home buyers as well as those who want to trade up face decisions they never faced before. In the process, tremendous economic and ethnic changes are occurring in neighborhoods like Northwest Pasadena.