The solution of the ’70s wouldn’t have been possible in California without a few carrots in the pile of sticks, at least for white settlers. Asset ownership in the form of appreciating houses and stocks was an alternative path to wealth, and coming to own land is what settlers are good at. White working-class homeowners began to identify as white and homeowners more than as members of the working class, and not without reason. If their human capital was depreciating rapidly, their home values jumped. In Santa Clara County, the house price index doubled two and a half times between 1975 and 1990.33 With home ownership also came guaranteed places in the California public school system, where the professional workers of the future (with their in-the-car wages) were trained. America’s society kept bifurcating, and without a powerful labor movement to push back, people were left trying to navigate their own families to the correct side. In that environment, the continued assimilation of migrant groups presented a pressing threat to white homeowners. They feared that nonwhites would undermine home values by moving nearby and that their children would take advantage of public programs funded by white tax dollars and end up competing with white children for future advantages. Equalizing opportunity sounds nice in theory, but in practice the attack on wages meant there was less of them to go around. For white settlers, equality was a step down.