When Ajay Royan of Mithril Capital, an investment fund, asks rhetorically “How are you supposed to have a startup in a garage if the garage costs millions of dollars?”, he is barely exaggerating the problem. The immense success of its tech industry means that the San Francisco Bay Area in which Silicon Valley sits has the highest cost of living in America. A median-priced home costs $940,000, four-and-a-half times the American average. The Department of Housing and Urban Development considers a family earning less than $120,000 in San Francisco “low income”.
. . . Nor have the tech giants as yet managed to improve things by using their muscle with local officials to ease some of Silicon Valley’s specific problems. Instead of building more affordable housing in a timely manner, which the Bay Area desperately needs, San Franciscan politicians are in the midst of discussing legislating the abolition of corporate cafeterias in order to force techies to eat lunch out. Big new infrastructure projects to ease congestion and make it easier to get to work from further away are nowhere to be seen. Instead there are private luxury buses to the tech campuses—which became, a few years ago, the centre of the first big popular protests against the new elite.
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