As Kamala Harris Claims Oakland, Berkeley Forgives

High above an arena packed with Democratic delegates in Chicago last week, a video introduced the life story of Kamala Harris to the world.

“Behind me is where it all began,” said her childhood friend, Stacey Johnson-Batiste, standing in front of a charming yellow, two-story home where Ms. Harris grew up in a small apartment above a nursery school.

But where was that exactly? The screen simply read “East Bay,” as in the eastern section of the San Francisco Bay Area that sprawls over 1,400 square miles and is home to nearly three million people. Ms. Harris called the area just “the bay” in her speech on Thursday night. Other speakers throughout the week referred to Ms. Harris as hailing from Oakland, the East Bay’s largest city.

The word almost never spoken was the name of Ms. Harris’s actual hometown: Berkeley, Calif.

That little yellow house sits on Bancroft Way in the university city known, fairly or not, for a hippy-dippy vibe where residents gamely embrace the nickname, “People’s Republic of Berkeley.” Ms. Harris’s old neighborhood is now called Poets Corner for its preponderance of streets named for writers such as Chaucer and Byron.

The neighbors, who tend a community garden and circulate a newsletter, have a theory about why Ms. Harris does not shout out her hometown much these days.

“Oh, people would definitely think Berserkeley!” said Anna Natille, who lives near Ms. Harris’s childhood home and was walking her pug, Figgy, past it last week. “We have such a reputation for being on the far left, that we’re all a bunch of communists and socialists.”