The American dream remains elusive in the valley that inspired East of Eden

‘This will be a valley of great richness one day,’ Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden. ‘And happy people will live here, thousands and thousands.’ Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Monterey countyView image in fullscreen‘This will be a valley of great richness one day,’ Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden. ‘And happy people will live here, thousands and thousands.’ Composite: Rita Liu/The Guardian/Getty Images/Monterey countyCaliforniaThe American dream remains elusive in the valley that inspired East of EdenJohn Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas is the least affordable city in the US for the middle class, a recent Brookings Institution analysis found

Nestled between two mountain ranges at the crook of central California’s coastline sits a valley known as the “salad bowl of the world”.

Farm workers stoop over neatly lined rows of crops off Highway 101 to harvest more than half of the nation’s supply of lettuce and nearly a third of its strawberries. The soil here is so rich that author John Steinbeck made the Salinas valley the promised land in his literary depictions of people chasing the American dream: immigrants, farm workers, westward-moving hopefuls, hungering for a better life.

It’s a story that continues to capture the American imagination: Netflix has adapted Steinbeck’s 1952 blockbuster novel, East of Eden, into a limited series starring Florence Pugh, released 1 October.

“This will be a valley of great richness one day,” Steinbeck wrote of the farmland in East of Eden. “And happy people will live here, thousands and thousands.”

View image in fullscreenThe Salinas valley in California. Photograph: Pgiam/Getty Images/iStockphotoBut Steinbeck also understood just how difficult it can be to achieve that elusive American dream. Even after some his characters found their way to Salinas and other parts of California’s agricultural valley, many remained stuck in low-paying jobs, making barely enough to scrape by, let alone own their own land.

That reality persists in the Salinas of today – an area at the sharp edge of a national affordability crisis that is reshaping politics across the US, and much of the rest of the world.

A recent Brookings Institution analysis found that Salinas is the least affordable city in the US for the middle class, defined as the middle 60% of income earners. Nearly 60% of the middle class in the Salinas area – which spans households making $38,000 to $193,000 – can’t afford basic necessities, double the national average, according to the analysis. And for Salinas’s Latino middle class, which make up 40% of all middle-class households, three-quarters struggle to afford everyday life.

Residents specifically say that homeownership, the modern symbol of the American dream, is out of reach. It’s an issue that is playing out across the country: half of all renter households and about a quarter of homeowner households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, according to the latest data from the US census.

“It really calls in question: what is the middle class?” said Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings who oversaw the study. Many towns like Salinas that served as havens for the middle class are now out of reach. “People go to Salinas as a reprieve from San Francisco and some of these high-priced cities, but in actuality, they’re finding it more difficult to live,” he said.

Solutions are not easy to come by. The rising cost of living has torn Salinas apart. New housing has grown at a snail’s pace, and a rent-stabilization policy has bitterly divided residents.

If life in places like Salinas becomes too expensive for American families, where do they go next?