'Facebook is taking everything': rising rents drive out Silicon Valley families

[turbinetree]

Property companies advertising their proximity to Facebook’s campus are giving low-income residents a choice: pay a huge rent increase or move out

Sandra Zamora is quitting Facebook. Not because of Russian election interference, misuse of personal data or any of the social network’s other scandals.

For the 29-year-old, it’s personal: Facebook is her neighbor, and the company’s presence, she said, is wreaking havoc on her community.

Zamora is part of a group of Menlo Park tenants in four buildings facing massive rent increases from a new landlord, who is pricing out long-time residents while advertising the buildings’ proximity to Facebook’s campus. Zamora is holding out as long as she can. But she knows she will soon have to leave her home of 11 years, and she doesn’t know where she will go.

“Facebook is taking everything we have ... and giving us what? Nothing. Just pain in our lives,” said the pre-school teacher and restaurant worker, seated inside her dimly lit apartment, a mile from the company’s headquarters. “Facebook is just ruining the community.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/20/facebook-silicon-valley-housing-crisis-families-pushed-out


Just got my summer edition of Harper's magazine and it talks about New York, and what it is doing with housing...............the same shit

The Death of a Once Great City
The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence
By Kevin Baker

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

1. No worries..

Silicon valley (unfortunately for Americans) is due for a fault-line correction. Once the earth cracks open....prices will come down.

[Miles Archer]

2. I left California in 2012

I lived in Silicon Valley. MANY of the neighborhoods "in proximity to Facebook’s campus" are NOT good neighborhoods at all.

You have Menlo Park...or as I call it, "Atherton Lite" (Atherton being one of the most "affluent" cities in the U.S.). There's also Palo Alto and Mountain View. Each of these cities has an "old money" section, and a "dangerous" section. Atherton is the only one where it's mansions all the way. DECADES ago the median home price in Atherton was $1 million. This was BEFORE the "housing bubble."

What Ms. Zamora will do is what everyone else who has been priced out of Silicon Valley will do. She will either move out of Silicon Valley, or she'll get as many roommates as she needs in order to make the rent. Or she'll get a second job. Or some combination of the above.

I left. In 2012, it was overpriced and overcrowded. Friends who are still there have consistently told me "You made the right decision" as it has only gotten worse.

[turbinetree]

3. I lived in Mountain View, in the mid eighties, and the only way I could afford

the two bedroom apartment was with a friend, and back then it was around 1300 a month, and I was making a good living working with the airlines, but the costs ate about 35% of my income back then, plus the fact you needed first and last months rent plus a deposit, just to get in the place.
There were some engineers in the same complex working for Microsoft at the time and they couldn't afford it unless they had some help ...................Then if you wanted to find some place cheap you had to go all the way toward Sacramento and commute for 2 hours one way....................this market cannot sustain what is happening, it just does not work, pitting the haves against the have not's.........