Tech Culture and Rising Inequality: A Complex Relationship

The San Francisco Bay Area has been the epicenter for technological revolutions for the better part of the past half-century, the launching pad for world-shaping startups from Intel and Apple to Google, Facebook, and Twitter. But Silicon Valley is also home to “The Jungle,” a 68-acre homeless camp in South San Jose, considered the largest such settlement in the United States. And as tech firms have shifted from suburban nerdistans to more urban locations, longtime Bay Area residents have raged against the Google buses, which shuttle tech workers between their city digs and offices and have become a symbol of the gap between the metro’s rich and poor. There is increasing concern over skyrocketing rising housing costs and rents (which are among the very highest in the nation), growing displacement of long-term residents, and the widening economic wedge between wealthy techies and everybody else.

All of this suggests that "startup" urbanism—not just the winner-take-all mentality of the one percent—is at a minimum connected to growing inequality and increasing unaffordability of America’s leading knowledge cities. But to what extent?