Bay Area: Gentrification at its subtlest and the survival of the richest

Nate's parents were born and raised in Cupertino. Our stay in Cupertino overlapped with them for a few years until they moved to Campbell and eventually to Idaho. Nate's parents were not in tech and the move was prompted by financial concerns mainly around rising rents. This one hit close since Nate and my son were childhood friends and also because the family for multiple generations was Cupertino born and bred.

PC manages the Art department and teaches every classroom at an elementary school in Cupertino. Art is not funded by the school district so this program is PTA supported and the compensation is significantly worse than what public school teachers make with no material benefits other than the remarkable excitement and joy of the students and hugs she receives from them emphasizing the difference she makes. For many years when the allocated funds ran out in Feb, she continued teaching until May,? the end of the school year, for no compensation so that every student continued to get the complete art education experience. While PC is able to do this, many schools in the Bay Area do not have such a program, in part because the finances around residing and working in that area would not make sense for most teachers to facilitate such an experience.

Most teachers in a high school in San Jose West live 50+ miles away and tolerate the Bay Area commute every single day. At a teacher's salary, it's impossible to buy/rent a single-family home in that area which is clocking at 3 Million + for a single-family home. They cannot afford to live in the same school district that they teach in. For many teachers the Bay Area is unaffordable and many have moved out of the state - some classrooms are being taught by relatively unqualified substitutes impacting the children of people whose income level has unleveled the playing and paying field.

In our townhome community, a poll informally showed that the employment of this cohort was overwhelmingly in the tech field and companies. In a recent flier from Andy, an Intero real estate agent, a modest single-family home listed at 2.5M sold for 811K above the list price. This is unfortunately not uncommon. There is spirited reporting on Wall Street hedge funds buying up homes in the Bay Area outbidding individual home buyers by going 20% to 50% above homes’ already-high asking prices. Similarly for a lot of San Francisco’s housing stock being owned by affluent out-of-towners, some of whom are also outside the U.S. pointing to these international buyers’ proclivity for all-cash purchases above the asking price which definitively affects the cost of housing and the city’s available housing supply, exacerbating the problem. British Columbia, Canada solved this problem in a way Bay Area, California has not been able to.

Some interview questions in a McDonalds in Sunnyvale focus on how far away the candidate lives,? how consistently they will be able to make it to their shift with the knowledge that employees living closer by virtue of "other" financial support may be better suited since just the hourly salary at these places would not enable a reasonable commute.

On Nextdoor, one member railed about feeling "poor" in the Bay Area when having an income of 250K. He was skewered for projecting entitlement though there may have been some truth in his rant. For a job that pays? $18 an hour working an insane 16 hours, 7 days a week one would net only 40% of that figure which contributes to destroying the biodiversity and ecosystem of a community. Sarah Schulman's quote "Gentrification replaces most people's experiences with the perceptions of the privileged and calls that reality" starts ringing a little more true.

At least in SF/Bay Area, the trend is the survival of the richest and we may all be worse off for it.

#gentrification #survivaloftherichest #bayarea