The Place Where the Poor Once Thrived
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-place-where-the-poor-once-thrived/470667/
This is the land of opportunity. If that weren’t already implied by the landscape—rolling green hills, palm trees, sun-kissed flowers—then it’s evident in the many of stories of people who grew up poor in these sleepy neighborhoods and rose to enormous success....
Indeed, the streets of San Jose seem, in some ways, to embody the best of America. It’s possible to drive in a matter of minutes from sleek office towers near the airport where people pitch investors on ideas to cul-de-sacs of single-family homes with orange trees in their yards, or to a Vietnamese mall where, on a recent weekday, Vietnamese immigrants clustered in the parking lot celebrating the Lunar New Year by playing dice games. The libraries here offer programs in 17 languages, and there are enclaves of small businesses owned by Vietnamese immigrants, Mexican immigrants, Korean immigrants, and Filipino immigrants, to name a few. ...
Some San Jose residents say that as inequality has grown in recent years, upward mobility has become much more difficult to achieve. As Silicon Valley has become home to more successful companies, the flood of people to the area has caused housing prices to skyrocket—median sale price reached $830,000 last year. By most measures, San Jose is no longer a place where low-income, or even middle-income families, can afford to live. Rents in San Jose grew a whopping 42.6 percent between 2006 and 2014, which was the largest increase in the country during that time period. The city has a growing homelessness problem, which it tried to address by shutting down “The Jungle,” one of the largest homeless encampments in the nation, in 2014. Inequality is extreme: The Human Development Index—a measure of life expectancy, education and per capital income—gives East San Jose a score of 4.85 out of 10, while nearby Cupertino, where Apple’s headquarters sit, receives a 9.26.
“Chetty’s data and the generation that it dealt with—things have changed since then,” said Dana Bunnett, the director of Kids in Common, a San Jose advocacy group. “It doesn’t strike me that it addresses what we're really dealing with now in the community.”
