My childhood home in Glendale cost US$8,500 in 1954. What it’s worth now is madness

A home on the market in Glendale, Los Angeles County in 2011. – AFP

A favourite family tale goes something like this: In the early 1980s my uncle, the son of working-class Norwegian immigrants, was nervously heading home to Glendale for the first time with his girlfriend, also a child of immigrants, but ones of considerable self-made wealth.

My uncle likes to joke that his rich girlfriend (now my aunt) surely felt deflated when, after driving past lovely Craftsman and Victorian homes, they pulled into the driveway of a squat off-white stuccoed bungalow overflowing with multigenerational humanity.