The California Dream series is a statewide media collaboration of CALmatters, KPBS, KPCC, KQED and Capital Public Radio with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the James Irvine Foundation.



#CADream

It was within reach. That was the lure of the California dream.

"The highest possible life for the middle classes," is how the late historian Kevin Starr described the promise of the Golden State.

By the mid-1970s that dream was in peril. Housing prices and property taxes spiked. Homeowners worried they wouldn’t be able pay their bills. In 1978, voters backed Proposition 13. At its core, it was a vote to preserve the California dream of owning and keeping a home.

Forty years later, that election continues to shape the state.

Prop. 13 changed the formula for funding schools, libraries and other public programs. It influenced the building of houses and commercial properties. To this day, Prop. 13 plays an outsized role in who can afford to live here and what it costs to own a home.

So did Prop. 13 save the California dream or spoil it? To answer this question, we focused on a single block in a middle-class neighborhood in North Oakland.

That’s where we found stories you could hear on almost any block, almost anywhere in the state.