You can’t go home again.

“It is really expensive to live in this area. I graduated from MVHS in 2014, and a bunch of my friends are already moved out of the area. They now live near Oakland and San Jose. Since I go to De Anza, my parents still have a reason to stay, but once I go off, to a UC or something, they have no reason to stay. It’s just too expensive to stay here. The property tax is too high. [There’s no] reason to live here unless it’s for the schools, to be honest. And the schools are really high pressure, which is not always a good thing. At De Anza, there are a lot of international schools and from the Bay Area, who take buses from other places, like Fremont, and there are also kids from Cupertino who still live at home. There’s always home nostalgia. Nobody wants to come home from a college to a completely new area where they have no friends. But it’s still so hard to live here. Some of my friends look for apartments around here, but even with a full time job rent is too high. I used to work, but working’s not enough. At Target [but] that pay is not enough. Even if you rented with four people, you’d still have to pay something like 600 dollars a month.”