How 1 Oakland Woman Is Building Community in an Increasingly Unaffordable Bay Area

Taken together, these stories reveal a region where many people are no longer trying to get ahead — they are trying to stay put.

Outside of the Rockridge branch of the Oakland Public Library, an unhoused man named William usually sits in the shade. Everything he owns travels with him. A wheelchair serves as a storage unit. Several carry-on suitcases are strapped to it. A bulging white trash bag rises above the luggage like a sail. The carefully balanced collection resembles a small movable room — the visible evidence of a life deciding what can be carried and what must be left behind.

On a recent afternoon, Morton stopped to talk with William. She asked how he was doing. She offered to wash his laundry. I wave at William just about every day on my way home from BART. Most people walk past him.

The Bay Area’s affordability crisis is usually measured in dollars — home prices, rents, grocery bills and retirement accounts. But affordability shapes more than bank balances. It influences who stays, who leaves and how much people are willing to invest in one another. Morton has responded to those pressures by opening her home to friends, unhoused people and refugees, hosting dinners and pressing city leaders on housing and public safety. In a region where rising costs increasingly isolate people from one another, Morton has chosen a different response: She has doubled down on community.

I first met Morton when she invited me to dinner in 2016, back when I was a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Our typical conversation is about politics, life and books. I still can’t believe we disagreed about The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett’s novel about colorism, identity and the choices people make to survive. Like most conversations with Morton, the disagreement remained friendly.

She is a Rockridge fixture, always up for coffee at Im Moment Kaffee or Hudson Bay Cafe, where she occasionally meets dates. She participates in events at the Local Economy community space on College Avenue and rarely misses an opportunity to connect with people.

On a recent evening, pork sizzled on the stove inside Morton’s home while thick string beans softened in a pan nearby. Cheesy potatoes sat beneath foil. Sherbet waited in the freezer.

Morton moved through the kitchen in socks, checking the oven while carrying on our conversation. That night, we talked about retirement, housing and what it means to grow older in one of the most expensive places in America. We talked about core strength, too — the kind developed through exercise and persistence.

That conversation set the foundation for this story. Because when I think about Morton, I think about someone constantly exercising a different kind of muscle: the willingness to remain engaged in a city where many people feel exhausted, priced out or disconnected.

For 35 years, Morton, 78, has lived in the same Rockridge house. Every morning begins with the same command to Alexa.

“Play KQED.”

Morton is comfortably settled. She owns a home in one of Oakland’s most desirable neighborhoods and spent decades working in financial services and nonprofit finance. She plays bridge and is approaching Life Master status. She sometimes wears silver glitter nail polish because, as she likes to say, “your hands are always in front of people.” She follows local politics closely, attends lectures and performances and still drives the same car she bought in 2008.

Years ago, someone hit it on her way to yoga and drove off. Then, a few months ago, a man living in his car with his family offered to pound out the dent in a Home Depot parking lot. Morton later tracked him down and paid for a hotel room for his family.

“I’d rather do that than give to charities where I feel like the executives make all the money,” she said.

Morton understands that affordability is about more than money. Like many Oakland residents, she is concerned about public safety. She spends time on Nextdoor, where the trending topics often involve crime, missing pets, suspicious activity caught on door cams, spam phone calls and requests for help from neighbors.

“The comments make me so angry,” she told me.

Crime is down in Oakland. Violent crime, including homicide and rape, fell 22% during the first quarter compared with the same period in 2025. Homicides alone dropped 39%. The impacts remain uneven.

For many residents, concerns about quality of life extend beyond crime to include housing costs, homelessness and the growing sense that the Bay Area is becoming harder to afford and harder to navigate. Those concerns surface frequently in Rockridge.

Last year, plans for a 200-unit apartment building drew criticism from residents who argued the seven-story structure would be too tall. Years earlier, neighbors opposed a proposal to redevelop the former California College of the Arts campus with 600 homes, including a 19-story tower.

Now another debate looms over College Avenue. The Trader Joe’s that anchors one of Rockridge’s busiest commercial corridors could eventually be replaced by two residential towers containing 400 senior housing units. Supporters see desperately needed housing near transit. Critics worry about scale, traffic and neighborhood character.

Morton follows the arguments closely.

“I tend to see myself more as a moderator than an activist,” she said. “I want to hear from the people who support these projects, too. Why do they want them? What am I missing?”

That instinct to understand people before judging them has shaped much of her life. Morton grew up in Pasadena, where the Tournament of Roses paraded through town every New Year’s Day. As a teenager, she saw the Beatles perform in Glendale and later attended a Rolling Stones concert in Sacramento. Neither memory impresses her very much today.

“I’m not that into that kind of music,” she said. “I’m into protest music. I’d much rather go see Joni Mitchell.”

After college, she spent five months traveling through Europe before returning home, convinced she could not spend the rest of her life in Pasadena. There were no glamorous opportunities waiting for her. She waited tables at Denny’s. She worked temporary jobs in Oakland. She accepted a position with an airline that folded before training ever began.

Eventually, she answered a newspaper ad for a house parent for girls who were wards of the court. Some had survived abuse. Others had been abandoned by their families.

“I was 23 years old and suddenly responsible for five girls,” she said.

The work overwhelmed Morton, and she left after a year. But the connection endured. One of those girls still keeps in touch decades later.

The through line is hard to miss. Morton has spent much of her life finding people who need someplace to land. Years later, that instinct resurfaced when she began opening her home to refugees. One was Messia, a woman from Afghanistan. Thomas, whom Morton met while volunteering at Crossroads Transitional Shelter in East Oakland, now lives in the backyard she-shed.

The arrangements have not always been easy. Helping people rarely is, but Morton continues doing it.

One day, she was driving through an alley near the Wendy’s on Broadway when she ran into Michael, an unhoused man she knows from the neighborhood. Morton had $19 in her purse, and she needed $10 later that day to play bridge. She gave Michael $9.

“He said, ‘Do you want me to take care of William?’” Morton said. “And I thought, this is why I like this guy, because he’s going to give something to William.”

The scene captured something Morton has spent much of her life practicing: people survive because other people decide they matter.

The thing people can’t afford to lose is one another.