Google is extending a helping hand as it draws
up plans to expand into sprawling offices
beyond its headquarters in Mountain View,
California. That suburban city of roughly 80,000
people has been swamped with affluent tech
workers since Google moved there shortly after
its 1998 inception.
Since then, Google’s payroll has swelled from
a few dozen workers to the more than 103,000
people now working for it and its corporate
parent, Alphabet Inc. Nearly half of those
workers are based in the Bay Area.
While Google has been expanding, so have a
wide variety of other technology companies,
including Apple, Facebook, Oracle, Salesforce
and Netflix — all of whom also lavish their
workers with six-figure salaries and stock options
that can yield multimillion-dollar windfalls.
The high incomes have resulted in bidding wars
for the limited supply of homes in the Bay Area
that can only be afforded by the affluent, a group
increasingly dominated by tech workers, while
people employed in other lines of work struggle
to make ends meet on more modest incomes.
That is making it impossible for people on the
lower end of the economic spectrum to buy a
home in the Bay Area, where a mid-priced house
sold for $990,000 in April, according to the
California Association of Realtors, a trade group.
In 1999, a mid-priced home sold for $308,000.
It’s even worse in San Francisco, a city from
which many tech workers ride company buses
to the Silicon Valley suburbs. A mid-priced house
in San Francisco sold for nearly $1.7 million in
April, according to the realtors’ group, quadruple
the price of 20 years ago.