You May Ask Yourself, “How Did I Get Here?” - September 2004

If you told me years ago that I’d be living in Brentwood, I’d tell you to get your head examined.

I moved to California 17 years ago with my first husband. We settled in Dublin because my husband worked at Chevron and we moved east from San Francisco until we could afford something. Back then Dublin was affordable for someone making less than $40,000 a year. But that was also back when VH1 played music videos, and not pop culture nostalgia shows like “Hey! Remember Last Week?”.

So things change. In the next few years, I had publication called The Nooner -- Fun Reading for Valley Business People (it’s not how sounds! It was about general goings-on in the Tri-Valley area.). I crashed and burned on that, ultimately got divorced, worked in the corporate world as a web producer for 8 years, and remarried.

But after I got laid off from my last corporate job, and our daughter was born, we were being squeezed out of my condo. It’s amazing how much stuff a newborn can accumulate without credit. So we moved to Brentwood last year for the same reason I originally ended up in Dublin -- we moved east until we could afford something. We made the calculations many folks who live out here have made. We could buy something in Pleasanton, both worked full-time, and all of our money would go toward the mortgage and day care. So that would leave our cats having to go back to work. Or we could buy a newer and larger house in Brentwood for $100,000 less, and have money to buy luxuries like toilet paper.

I’d actually never heard of Brentwood until my in-laws moved here. Before that, the only Brentwood I knew of was near Hollyweird where O.J. Simpson lived. (By the way, I love having to explain to people outside the area, “No, I don’t live in THAT Brentwood, and no, I haven’t seen The Glove!”)

When we moved here, I was pleasantly surprised. Our neighbors were friendly, and kids played outside. It seemed like a wonderful place to raise our daughter.

Everything boomed more after that. Slatten Ranch opened. Home Depot opened. And, lo and behold, a drive-thru Starbucks! It’s almost like -- GASP! -- a real city!

But, the secret of Brentwood is out, and people from all over the Bay Area are ditching their half-million-dollar houses and flocking to the quality schools, bucolic setting and tight community that they’ve dreamed of for their families. Now, because we have all these amenities, many of our houses are now half a million dollars.

At this rate, we will probably end up retiring in the middle of the Mojave Desert, where it will just be a matter of time before they open up a Starbucks.

Karen can be reached at kmoss@mosswebpro.com