Gavin Newsom is moving his children back to Marin County schools

SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife are moving their family back to Marin County, an exclusive pocket of Northern California with rolling hills and redwood groves that’s across the bay from San Francisco, POLITICO has learned.

The Newsoms will hold onto their six-bedroom property in the eastern Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks, and the governor and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom will spend some nights there. But they are relocating their four children back to Marin County, where they will stay with extended family and enroll in school for the fall semester, according to two people familiar with their plans, who were granted anonymity to convey private conversations.

Word of the move has started to spread in recent days among parents and friends in Sacramento and the Bay Area. POLITICO on Monday asked Newsom’s office about a forthcoming school transfer, and a spokesperson confirmed it.

“To ensure continuity in their children’s education, the family will split their time between Sacramento and Marin heading into the coming academic year,” said Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for the governor.

The family will return to where Newsom and Siebel Newsom grew up and raised their kids before he was elected governor in 2018. They are currently not looking to rent or purchase a home there, Gardon said.

Leaving Sacramento will allow the Newsoms to start their eldest of four — a rising high school freshman — at a new school rather than having to weigh a potentially disruptive transfer when Newsom’s term is up in January 2027, two of the people said.

The governor, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, has long talked about his plans to relocate closer to home . Newsom’s two immediate predecessors both commuted to homes far outside Sacramento, but it could fuel suspicions from opponents that the ambitious Democrat is already moving on from the job.

Newsom spends considerable time working from his office in Sacramento, where he meets with his staff, elected officials and other leaders visiting the Capitol.

The move is not likely to impact the governor’s visibility across California. He tends to hold news conferences in various regions based on their theme — from a snowy field near Lake Tahoe to present a water plan and roadside cleanups in San Francisco.

Heading into November, he’s also expected to embark on more national travel as a surrogate for President Joe Biden, whom he’s stumped for in South Carolina and Nevada between hosting fundraising events in San Francisco and Marin over the last year.

Newsom and Siebel Newsom attended school in Marin, one of the country’s wealthiest communities with its houseboats, woodsy mansions with sweeping views of Mount Tamalpais and some of the nation’s best hiking trails. Marin, which includes the bayside enclave Sausalito, majestic Muir Woods and Point Reyes National Seashore, is roughly a half-hour by car to San Francisco, north over the Golden Gate Bridge along Highway 101. It is just south of the wine-growing regions of Sonoma and Napa counties.

Newsom went to Redwood, a public high school in Larkspur, and Siebel Newsom attended The Branson School, a private academy in nearby Ross, where her parents own a home. The Newsoms’ eldest child, Montana, is expected to start her freshman year at Branson, according to one of the people with knowledge of the plan. Since Newsom took office in 2019, his children have gone to private schools in Sacramento County — and Siebel Newsom has been outspoken about issues the family grappled with such as bullying.

Newsom’s move will lengthen his commute to the Capitol’s office complex by an hour, give or take. The governor also has an office in San Francisco that will be closer to his new house, and he often is on the road in the sprawling state. When time permits, he prefers commuting by car — typically a sports utility vehicle — rather than flying, to avoid battling long waits at crowded airports. Instead, he conducts calls and consults briefing materials from a makeshift office in the SUV’s backseat.

While Sacramento and central Marin are separated by just under 90 miles, the economic and cultural differences can be stark — with Marin’s median home price at $1.64 million — nearly double the cost of a home in California, which is more than double the nationwide median-priced home of just over $400,000.

California governors have long wrestled with where to call home. Newsom’s immediate predecessor, Jerry Brown, opted for a downtown Sacramento apartment over the governor’s mansion when he first took office in 1975. Brown went on to become mayor of Oakland and state attorney general after leaving the top office.

During his second stint as governor beginning in 2011, Brown stayed in the Oakland hills and a downtown Sacramento arts loft until 2016. Brown and his wife, Anne Gust Brown, renovated the historic governor’s mansion that once was home to his late father, Gov. Pat Brown, almost a half century before.

When the Browns’ renovations were completed, the younger Brown and Gust Brown moved in for the remainder of his time in office, before retiring to the 25-acre family ranch in rural Colusa County that is the ancestral home of Brown’s great-grandfather.

Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, regularly commuted three hours by private jet to and from Sacramento and Brentwood, in Los Angeles. When he stayed in Sacramento, Schwarzenegger slept in a 2,000-square-foot hotel penthouse overlooking the Capitol. He paid his own way for the jets and suites.

Then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan spent only a year in the governor’s mansion, before his wife, Nancy, prevailed on him to relocate, famously deriding the Victorian-style government estate as a “firetrap.” The Reagans moved into an English-inspired tutor in Sacramento’s “Fabulous Forties,” an exclusive neighborhood bounded by 40th to 49th streets between Folsom Boulevard and J Street, a few minutes outside downtown.

The Newsoms’ move to the North Bay will be another homecoming of sorts. They last returned to Marin in 2011 , leaving their home in San Francisco’s Ashbury Heights and temporarily settling in their in-laws' Ross home as Gavin Newsom transitioned from mayor to lieutenant governor, serving through 2018.

Newsom often worked out of an office in San Francisco during those years, and his family lived for nearly a decade in a Midcentury property in Kentfield that they purchased for a reported $2.25 million in 2011. The Newsoms sold that house for nearly $6 million in an off-market deal in 2021. Before the sale, they briefly lived in the governor’s mansion Brown vacated before selecting a more modern and family friendly compound some 15 miles away — their $3.7 million home in Fair Oaks, in 2019.

Siebel Newsom is a documentary filmmaker whose credits include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” a picture about parents juggling their work-life balance and the roles fathers play at home.

Newsom is founder of PlumpJack Group, a wine and hospitality company that’s in a blind trust and run by his sister, Hilary Newsom, and cousin, Jeremy Scherer. With investment from Getty heirs, PlumJack Group’s stable of restaurants, properties and vineyards grew out of the small wine store Newsom founded on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street in 1992.