California’s Silicon Valley is home to Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and eBay. The tech industry there is booming.
The result is the most extreme wealth disparity in America.
Santa Clara County, home of Silicon Valley, has both the highest percentage of homeless people in the entire US as well as America’s highest average household income along with some of the most expensive houses in the country.
Silicon Valley appears to be in the midst of a remarkable sustained period of wealth creation, but this has rendered the area one of super-rich or extremely poor with no middle class left to speak of.
As many as 20,000 people in the country will experience homelessness this year, according to recent census data. County officials say that means some 5,000 every night sleep rough which is more than it can deal with.
Some sleep rough on the streets, while others try to make it in one of the nearly 250 makeshift encampments, sprawling lawless villages of tents and plyboard.
Others, if they can still afford the $8 per night, spend the night on board the area’s only 24-hour bus, which they call Hotel 22.
Many have been backed into this situation not by lack of jobs, but the inability to keep up with rocketing rent prices, up in some cases by 300% of the national average.
While California’s minimum wage recent went from $8 to $10 an hour, the self-sufficiency standard is around $15.
This is not only happening in the world’s richest country, but in one of its top wealth areas.
Chris Richardson, at the homeless organisation Downtown Streets,
“We are trying to get tech billionaires involved in what we’re doing. They donate millions to good causes, but almost nothing to the local community they are helping destroy.
“It’s not necessarily their fault, but they are stakeholders in the homelessness problem and have the power and brains to change it.”
