STOCKTON — Jared Rusten saw the tide turning.
He had been renting a warehouse in San Francisco’s Mission District, where he worked and also lived with his then-girlfriend and another tenant, when they got their first rent increase in 2014: It doubled. The next year, his landlord wanted to increase the rent by another 30 percent. Rusten could see what was coming.
“We didn’t want to move to West Oakland to be there for three years and get priced out and have to move further east,” said Rusten, a furniture maker. “I have tens of thousands of pounds of equipment and wood. … We just decided to look for something to buy.”
Chance brought Rusten and his now-wife, Emily Oestreicher, to downtown Stockton in 2015. They were dropping her brother off at the train station, and everywhere they turned, it seemed, there was one abandoned warehouse after another, exactly the type of space growing scarcer every day in San Francisco and Oakland.
It was a city they had dismissed as downtrodden and crime-ridden, but now all they saw was potential. Stockton was close enough to maintain ties with his clients and suppliers and offered a historic downtown that would surely be on the rise, Rusten thought.
He was right.
As thousands in search of cheaper housing descend on far-flung cities such as Stockton, Lathrop, Tracy and Merced to the east, they’re changing the northern part of the vast Central Valley from a region with a distinct identity to a vast suburb of the Bay Area, whose economic and cultural life is inextricably linked to the vibrant locus some 60 to 120 miles west.
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