The house at 5120 Baxter Street has been home to three families and contains any number of stories. “But what about the American dream of living in a single-family neighborhood?” “They say they’re doing this so everyone can have the American dream,” he said. He invested on a single-family block 25 years ago with the expectation that it would stay that way. “People would pitch in: Somebody would bring beer, somebody would bring hamburgers, somebody would bring hot dogs, and we would just all gather.”Ĭary Gross, 63, who owns a tile company and lives next to Ms. “That was where everybody congregated on the weekends,” Ms. This afforded them the relative affluence of a four-bedroom house with a yard that was bigger than any of their neighbors’. Coats’s father, Paul Shannon, was an aeronautical engineer who had left the Navy to work in private defense. (Clothes still had to be dried on a line.) Most of the residents were young families with parents who worked a mix of trade and professional jobs that had roughly the same paychecks. Neighbors in Clairemont Villas picked from a selection of four ranch houses that had the same cabinets, similar floor plans and an option to add a washing machine. This was in 1957, back when the surrounding Clairemont neighborhood was booming with new subdivisions and mass-produced suburbs were still a national experiment. The family paid $13,250 for Lot 118 and a year later moved into 5120 Baxter Street.

Her father drove the six of them - two parents, four sisters - to a weekend showing where in her teenage naïveté she asked a salesperson if the furniture was included.

Sixty-five years later, Margie Coats, 79, still remembers the tour.

Studio one pitch shift