Why I’d Never Move Back to the Town I left as a Child

Why I’d Never Move Back to the Town I Left as a Child

I would never move back to a town that I left as a child.

Not Pittsburg, CA.

I hated Pittsburg. And that’s not a word I use lightly. I hated it.

I remember being a kid and our home was burglarized 3 times. Three. You stop feeling safe after the first. After the third, you stop feeling like it’s home at all. I remember the Pittsburg police officer who came out. He didn’t say “I’m sorry this happened to you.” He said Pittsburg would “get better.”

And what he meant was: they would get rid of a lot of poor communities and add more housing for families.

Not help the families that were there. Not protect the kids who were there. Replace them. Push them out. Build over them. Call it progress.

That stuck with me.

Pittsburg was different. It was hard. It was heavy. And Antioch? Antioch was always off limits for Blacks. You knew it. You felt it. You didn’t need a sign. The looks did the work. Concord, CA — I grew up hearing the stories. They used to hang Blacks there. That’s the history they don’t put on the welcome sign. Then the Mexicans moved in, and the target just shifted. Same playbook, different name.

Then the housing projects in inner cities like Oakland and SF closed. Or got “redeveloped.” And poor people — my people — had to find cheaper places to live. Got pushed to the edges. To the Pittsburgs. To the Antiochs that didn’t want them. To the towns that only got “better” when we were gone.

So no, I would never move back to Pittsburg. I wouldn’t move back to that part of California at all.

And honestly? I don’t think I would ever move back to California, period.

California is beautiful. Let’s be clear. The ocean. The redwoods. The sun that hits different at 7pm in June. It’s beautiful.

But poor government has destroyed that state.

They let crime sit. They let housing become impossible. They let schools fail and call it equity. They let addiction spread and call it compassion. They let cities burn and call it protest. They let the poor get shuffled from city to city like chess pieces and call it revitalization.

And I did it away from there.

I don’t hate California’s dirt. I hate what was done to it. I hate what was done to us in it. I hate that a cop could look at a burglarized Black family and say the solution is to get rid of “poor communities” instead of protecting them.

I’ll visit the ocean. I’ll visit the redwoods. But I won’t live there.

Because healing doesn’t happen in the house that hurt you, if the house never said sorry.

And Pittsburg never did.

**cathryn m harris,