"I grew up in Redwood City, and then they sold the house that we lived in. And so we moved to East Palo Alto, and when I moved out of my parents’ house, I moved to Menlo Park with my husband. [Renting in Menlo Park] was really good until the owner sold the apartment complex in January... Starting June, our rent is gonna go up 400 dollars every 2 months until we reach 2500...

[We have to stay] at least for one year. Just because we do have small children, and so relocating them -- my daughter is gonna be a senior next year, so taking her out of the school that she’s been going to for the last 3 years, and taking her away from her friends that she’s had ever since kindergarten, doesn’t seem fair... And my daughter going to school here, she might get home in time to babysit her younger siblings. So here she walks home from school; she’s home by 4. She can watch them and we can do what we have to do. And right now, the neighborhood that we live in, all three of the schools are very close to where our kids can get to school and back home very easily. And we don’t know that we would have that same luck if we had to move somewhere else...

The biggest change [in the neighborhood] is Facebook coming in... And so I was talking to my coworker about, you don’t see people in the neighborhood walking with their kids, going to the park. It’s more you see young adults with their dogs and stuff, so that’s been a little weird to not see as many children out in the street, and to see more younger adults that are kind of to themselves -- and they go and walk their dog, and they go into their home... The block that’s right around the corner from my house, a lot of the African Americans have moved out. So where it was a street where we used to have maybe six or seven African American families, now I think there’s one or two... So I think that in the last 12 years, that’s a very drastic change."