Kamala Harris' Berkeley: 3 homes that shaped her early childhood (2024)

Editors’ note: The homes in this story are still occupied. Please be sensitive and respect the privacy of current residents.

The nation’s eyes are on Kamala Harris this week as the Democratic presidential nominee is celebrated at the party’s convention.

Born in an Oakland hospital, Harris lived in Berkeley from her first days to nearly age 1, before her family moved to the Midwest to live in three different college towns.

At about age 5 she came back to Berkeley with her mother and sister. When she was 12, her mother moved the family to Canada. While her father lived in Palo Alto and her mother in Oakland during her undergraduate years, there is no readily available record of Harris living in the Bay Area again until she returned after college to attend law school in San Francisco.

While in Berkeley, she and her family lived in at least three different locations, all rentals. All three buildings remain today. Two of these can be directly documented as connected to the Harris family, and the location of the third — reported here for the first time — is indicated by a family photo.

2531 Regent St.

Harris was born on Oct. 20, 1964, at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in north Oakland. On the campaign trail, Harris describes herself as “a daughter of Oakland.”

Her parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, were immigrants. Her mother had come to the U.S. from India and her father from Jamaica, both as graduate students. They had married 15 months before Harris’ birth, while they both were still pursuing their studies at UC Berkeley.

The hospital building where Harris was born has been demolished, though there remains a Kaiser medical complex surrounding the now vacant lot.

Harris’ first residence in Berkeley was at 2531 Regent St. (between Dwight Way and Parker Street), listed on her birth certificate as the address of her mother. (The standard format for birth certificates from that era asked only for the mother’s address.)

There’s a family photo of Harris, being held by her father, apparently taken in spring 1965. He is standing in what looks like the entry court of 2531 Regent. Another family photo shows Harris with her mother on the steps of what appears to be the same building.

As UC Berkeley enrollment rapidly expanded after World War II, many of the older houses on the block were demolished and small- to mid-sized apartment buildings, often catering to student tenants, were constructed on the lots.

Harris’ first home at 2531 Regent was one of those earlier apartment buildings, built around 1946 on a block located just east of the Telegraph Avenue commercial district. It’s a narrow, two-story, L-shaped, wood-frame building, with a stucco exterior and two floors of apartments above street-facing garage parking.

Harris’ early life was “happy and carefree,” she wrote in her memoir — her home filled with conversations about South African apartheid and the U.S. civil rights movement and the sounds of her mother singing along to Aretha Franklin and the Edwin Hawkins Singers and her father playing albums from his “extensive jazz collection.”

“I have young memories of a sea of legs moving about, of the energy and shouts and chants,” she wrote.

1945 Milvia St.

Harris’ mother, Shyamala, received her doctorate in physiology from UC Berkeley in January 1964, the year Harris was born, and then began postgraduate work at the university. Her father, Donald, received his doctorate in economics in 1966.

In 1965, the family made a big move, heading to the Midwest, where Donald Harris began climbing the “tenure ladder” towards a full professorship. He would hold, successively, academic positions at three different universities — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison — with Shyamala securing research jobs at each of those universities as well.

This began an often overlooked, non-Bay Area, interlude in the early life of the future vice president. Overall, about four of the first five years of her life were spent in the Midwest. Her younger sister, Maya, was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

Harris’ parents separated around 1969 and her father stayed for a time at the University of Wisconsin, while her mother brought her and her sister back to Berkeley. Her father later moved back to the Bay Area for a job at Stanford and her parents’ divorce was finalized in August 1973.

Kamala and Maya Harris lived mostly with their mother but would spend some weekends and two months during the summer with their father, usually in Palo Alto. Their father also took them on trips abroad, including to his hometown of Brown’s Town, Jamaica.

During the rest of the year, Harris lived with her mother and sister in Berkeley from 1969 until early 1977, with her mother working as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Berkeleyside hasn’t been able to reach anyone in the Harris family or campaign to confirm where the Harrises first lived upon their return, but Harris included in her memoir a photo of her standing with her mother and sister on a Berkeley sidewalk, and a caption in the book describes the picture as taken outside their apartment on Milvia Street.

The apartment building — a small corner of which is visible in the photograph — can be identified as 1945 Milvia St., at the southeast corner of Milvia and Berkeley Way on the edge of downtown. It’s the only apartment on the block with a Milvia Street address.

It’s a four-story-high stucco box, with a rooftop penthouse and a ground-level parking garage, of a mid-century design typical of apartments built in Berkeley from the 1950s to the early ‘70s.

The archival photo shows a small tree sapling, a magnolia, on the street. The same tree appears to still stand on that corner, grown much larger today.

The Harris family likely lived at this apartment building until the beginning or middle of 1971.

1227 Bancroft Way

Harris’ mother then moved the family to a new rental home in West Berkeley, on Bancroft Way, between Browning and Bonar streets.

This neighborhood, later dubbed Poet’s Corner because of several streets named for literary figures, is now regarded as a gentrifying residential district, with single-family homes, small apartment buildings and bungalow courts lining the relatively quiet blocks around Strawberry Creek Park.

In the 1960s it was much more of a working to middle class neighborhood. Santa Fe Railroad freight trains still rumbled past on tracks that crossed Bancroft Way a block east of the Harris apartment. Strawberry Creek Park, built along the old railroad right of way, did not yet exist.

In 2019, while Harris was first running for president, I located the exact address of the Bancroft Way home — 1227 Bancroft— based on a photograph of the family in front of the house and archival records, and the Harris campaign confirmed the location for Berkeleyside.

“It was a close-knit neighborhood of working families who were focused on doing a good job, paying the bills and being there for one another,” Harris wrote in her memoir, describing how her mother would make her and Maya a cup of Carnation Instant Breakfast in the morning before work.

Most accounts — including Harris’ in her autobiography — refer to the 1227 Bancroft building as a duplex. That’s understandable. It’s a small, two-story building with separate upstairs and downstairs spaces, both accessed by their own exterior entrances. The Harris family lived upstairs, entering via an outdoor staircase.

But it doesn’t appear the building ever had more than one apartment unit.

The building looks today like a relatively recent structure, but it’s actually the oldest building on its block and one of the earliest in its immediate neighborhood. It was built around 1910 as a modest “raised basement” Victorian-era wooden cottage. There were scores if not hundreds of similar homes built in Berkeley and many of them survive today, some of them quite substantially altered.

Through the mid-20th century, the small house was home to a succession of immigrant families, some of them owners, some renters. In the 1930s a single-car garage was inserted at ground level under the residence, a typical modification for many older houses in that era when cars could not be parked overnight on Berkeley’s public streets.

In the late 1960s, the house was bought by two families, and members of one of those families still own the 1227 Bancroft building today.

The house underwent an extensive remodel in late 1970 and early 1971, shortly before the Harris family moved in. Most of the Victorian details and architecture were removed from the exterior, which was stuccoed over. The building was apparently also raised about two feet to accommodate a full-height ground floor.

During the remodel and just before the Harris family’s time in the home, the ground-level garage was eliminated and converted into space that would accommodate the day care business of Regina and Arthur Shelton.Harris remembered the day care as “small but welcoming, with posters of leaders like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman on the wall.”

“When Maya and I finished school, our mother would often still be at work, so we would head two houses down to the Sheltons’ … with whom we shared a long-standing relationship of love, care, and connection,” frequently visiting their home two doors down the block, Harris wrote in her memoir. “Regina Shelton, originally from Louisiana, … and her husband, Arthur, an Arkansas transplant, owned and ran a nursery school — first located in the basement of their own home, and later underneath our apartment.”

Today, the Sheltons’ former day care space houses the Berkeley International Montessori School.

From the Bancroft Way house, Harris went to church in Oakland with the Sheltons; took piano lessons from another nearby neighbor; learned ballet from Madame Bovie, a world-famous ballerina; frequented the Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center that would help shape her political imagination; and, after attending kindergarten at the private Berkwood School, caught the school bus to first grade at Thousand Oaks Elementary School during the third year of Berkeley’s integration program.

“I only learned later that we were part of a national experiment in desegregation with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other,” she wrote in her memoir.

She attended Thousand Oaks in north central Berkeley for at least three years.

The Berkeley school district confirmed that she then went to Franklin School on San Pablo Avenue — later, the site of the Berkeley Adult School. In that era the Berkeley Unified School District often split the six elementary school years between Grade 1-3 and Grade 4-6 campuses. (This year, the old Franklin campus is accommodating Longfellow Middle School students after their building was declared unsafe.)

Through the years, Harris stayed in touch with her first-grade teacher, Frances Wilson.

“Mrs. Wilson had a profound effect on all of us and was deeply committed to her students, a diverse group — ranging from kids growing up in housing projects to the children of people working at the university,” Harris told Berkeleyside in an email in 2019.

The end of Harris’ Berkeley years came when her mother took a research job in Montreal, Canada. The family moved there in early 1977.

In the 1980s, her mother, Shyamala, would move back to the East Bay and once again take a job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Kamala Harris would also return to the Bay Area after high school in Montreal and college in Washington, D.C. She attended and graduated from law school in San Francisco (Mrs. Wilson was in the audience at her graduation) and later lived in an Oakland condo while working as an Alameda County prosecutor and a San Francisco condo when she was elected district attorney there. Her sister, Maya, would graduate from UC Berkeley.

Steven Finacom is a community historian who writes a weekly newspaper column about Berkeley’s past for the East Bay Times. He is a member of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission and in 2021 did research for a possible landmark application for the Bancroft Way residence but paused that proposal after learning the property owners felt public attention from landmarking would be too disruptive to the neighborhood. He thanks Jill Johnson, as well as the staff at the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, for their research assistance.

Correction: It was previously reported that Kamala Harris attended Berkwood Hedge School. Harris attended Berkwood School. In 1975, Berkwood School and Hedge School merged to become Berkwood Hedge School.