Californians Head Inland for Homes

The golden dream of buying a home on the California coast slipped out of reach in the ‘90s for all but the well-to-do.

Demand pushed home prices up and forced the poor and middle-income people to look inland.

The problem is that the number of households rose 10.8% in California during the 1990s while housing climbed only 9.2%, census figures show. At the same time, healthier senior citizens hung on to their homes, more people lived alone and immigrants entered the housing market.

The result: In a state with 900 or so miles of Pacific splendor, from the Mexican border to the ruggedly beautiful northern counties of Humboldt, Mendocino and Del Norte, many people have had to give up hope of living anywhere close to the surf and sand.

“Families have gone inland,” said John Landis, professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. “Ten years ago, a middle-income family with one wage earner could probably find an owner-occupied house, probably within five miles of the [San Francisco] Bay or the coast.”

Now, with the median price of a house $394,000 in the Bay Area--and $524,000 in San Francisco as of February--buying a place here takes two good incomes or one great one.

The same phenomenon occurred in landlocked Silicon Valley, though there the trend came courtesy of a wave of technology jobs. Median house prices in Santa Clara County passed the half-million mark in 2000.

“I can’t afford to live here. I’m not a dot.com millionaire,” said Michael Roberriques, who moved well inland four years ago to Los Banos and now commutes two hours and 15 minutes each way to his job in San Jose. On the other hand, he paid $125,000 for his small single-family home.

In Corte Madera, in ultra-expensive Marin County just north of San Francisco, only three members of the 20-member fire department even live in the county.

The pay is good, around $60,000, but it doesn’t come close to covering the mortgage in a town where the median house price is $600,000.

When off-duty firefighters are called in, it can take an hour or two for them to arrive, Fire Chief Robert Fox said.

Michael Cronin, police chief in nearby San Rafael, has 66 members of his 110-member department living outside the county. “The thing that we’re most concerned about is what happens when, not if, we have a big earthquake,” he said.

Marin County, home to the rich and famous such as director George Lucas, faces the same obstacles to building more housing as the rest of the state--environmental regulations; builders going for high-end, more profitable houses; and a tax system that encourages cities to go after retail developments, such as big discount stores.

Charles Rynerson, a demographer with the San Diego Assn. of Governments, looked at the figures and spotted an odd trend: Population is falling in established neighborhoods of single-family homes and rising in areas where there are more apartments and condos.

“It was as if the households that were built for families were being occupied by singles and couples and the housing that was built for singles and couples was being occupied by families,” he said.

In coastal Monterey, for example, the setting for John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” average household size fell from 2.26 members in 1990 to 2.13. Meanwhile, in Salinas, 19 miles inland and a destination for Hispanic immigrants, average household size grew from 3.21 to 3.66.

Doug Shoemaker of the National Nonprofit Housing Assn. of Northern California said he has seen classic Victorian three-bedroom apartments in San Francisco with a family in each bedroom.

The trend on the California coast has confounded demographers, who had predicted a slack housing market as the relatively smaller Generation X began buying homes from the baby boom set.

Now even once-affordable places, like Oakland on the San Francisco Bay, have climbed into the high-price bracket.

Oakland elementary school teacher Charles Wilson would like to buy a home in the city where he teaches but has been renting in San Francisco. Wilson and his partner make around $90,000 together, a good income but not enough in a market where the median house price is more than $200,000.

“The irony is that anywhere else in the country, we’re actually upper class,” he said. “Here, [we’re] not.”