Sources: US Census Bureau; Wealth-X; 2019 point-in-time homeless counts; Bay Area Council; HSH.com; Business.org; Zillow
According to the 2019 San Francisco Homeless Point-in-Time Count and Survey, 70 per cent of respondents were living in the city when they became homeless, indicating the majority are locals. Lennie works as an Uber driver, and says many of her customers ask her about the homeless people they see on the streets as they drive by. “And I say, you’re sitting in a car with a homeless person right now and you would never have known it.”
Karen Chapple, professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that tech jobs “tend to be added by bringing people from outside because we don’t have people with the right skills . . . so that’s where the distortion in the housing market comes. It’s that huge quantity of new jobs very suddenly added.”
“The rent went up a lot, ever since Facebook took over basically everything,” the mother-of-three says. “There’s less apartments, homes, for everyone that’s been living here for a long time. Everybody’s moving out of the city . . . it’s causing the rent to go up, causing traffic, everybody’s struggling because of it. I mean, it brings in jobs but it’s not enough.”
Brian Hanlon, head of pro-housing group California Yimby , agrees. “The tech industry didn’t write zoning laws for California, they didn’t write the land-use policies . . . they didn’t write the laws that make building new housing extremely expensive in high local fees and other requirements. I don’t think it’s fair to blame the tech industry for the crisis. This crisis is the result of policies from the state government and especially local governments across California.
Some experts have argued that Facebook and Google's housing initiatives will do little more than offset their vast expansion plans, especially without cohesive regional and state reform Details of both pledges remain vague, with neither organisation going into the specifics of how these funds will be used. Meanwhile, Facebook is planning a 59-acre mixed-use complex for 9,500 employees in Menlo Park, while Google plans a 60-acre transit-oriented development in downtown San Jose for up to 25,000 workers.
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