This story is part of How We Get By, a KQED series exploring how people are coping with rising costs in the Bay Area and California. Find the full series here.
Last year, Ms. Hernandez’s son began to ask her where he would attend high school.
His curiosity brought forward a bigger question looming in her mind: Was their family going to be able to stay in San Francisco at all?
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“I’m sorry, baby, but I don’t know,” she told her middle-schooler. “I don’t know if we’re going to continue to be living in the city; things are going to be too expensive here.”
At the time, the San Francisco Unified School District paraeducator and her husband had lived in the Bay Area for two decades, mostly in the city. For the last 10 years, they’d shared a two-bedroom apartment in the Outer Mission, paying about $3,000 a month in rent.
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