In San Francisco, far from the picturesque, winding streets in the hills, a glistening skyscraper represents how the country’s tech titans have transformed the city — and made it one of the world’s most expensive places to live.
The figures are mind-boggling: Average monthly rent for a two-room apartment in the city by the bay now runs to US$3,700, the highest in the US.
A household of four with annual earnings of less than US$117,400 is officially considered “low income.”
Photo: AFP
Want to go visit Facebook Inc’s headquarters in the close suburbs? It would take you two hours to travel 45km, day and night.
Salesforce Tower — named for cloud-based software company Salesforce.com Inc — now dominates the skyline.
Each day, huge buses transport tech workers to the suburban offices of Facebook, Google and Apple Inc.
All this wealth has sent real-estate prices soaring across the Bay Area — from Silicon Valley in the south to Oakland in the east — and widened the rich-poor divide in a striking way.
Thousands of shabbily dressed homeless people wander along Market Street, one of the city’s main shopping thoroughfares, not far from the headquarters of Uber Technologies Inc and Twitter Inc — as Teslas and Maseratis zip by.
With rent so high, some have taken to living in their cars, like Elizabeth V., a 59-year-old who works up to 16 hours per day as a security guard at one of the tech company buildings.
She earns just US$2,800 per month — not nearly enough to pay for housing for herself and her disabled brother.
“I guess we’re kind of invisible, because people don’t think of us when they think of Silicon Valley. They think of the small minority of engineers that earn a ton of money,” Elizabeth said.
She wakes up every morning in her car — which is filled with clothes and boxes of food — in a parking lot in San Jose, in the heart of the tech corridor.
Cary McClelland, whose book Silicon City published last year examines how the area has changed, said: “We see now a kind of homelessness that did not occur before — people who work, that is new.”
Whether talking to politicians, housing experts or residents, everyone agrees that even though San Francisco — built on a peninsula — has always had housing problems, the situation has become far worse since the technology boom of 2012.
The average price of a house in San Francisco shot up from US$670,000 in early 2012 to US$1.6 million at the start of last year, Paragon Real Estate Group said.
With the influx of tens of thousands of techies — software designers, programmers and engineers — whose salaries easily start at US$100,000 per year and go up from there, the cost of living rose quickly.
That triggered “skyrocketing evictions in the city... A huge number of businesses had to close,” along with cultural institutions and nonprofits, McClelland said.
“After the great recession [from 2008 to 2011], with so little place for investment capital to go elsewhere in the economy, so much of it came here and overheated the city,” he said.
French realtor Servane Valentin said that as of 2012 and 2013, “we saw young geeks in their 20s and 30s arriving with much higher salaries and had no idea about money.”
“They were ready to pay $2,000 for a studio,” a price far above the market value, Valentin asid.
Soaring real-estate prices have certainly boosted the ranks of the homeless — there are officially about 7,500 people living on the streets of San Francisco, a city of just 900,000 inhabitants.
However, they have also driven out people in the middle class, who now live in the far suburbs, with commutes of two to three hours each way. That aggravates road congestion.
As a result, “we almost always have openings for certain lower-paying jobs, such as medical assistants” who cannot afford to live in the city, said 55-year-old Peggy Sugar, who works in the health sector and has lived in the city for more than 30 years.
The same goes for teachers, firefighters, social workers, waiters and delivery workers, among others.
Yet, McClelland said that this is not entirely the tech sector’s fault, per se.
“Tech is a beneficiary of what is a very complicated environment ... and hasn’t figured out how to turn this investment that it’s benefited from back to the public,” he said.
Tech giants are becoming aware of the criticism leveled at them — and have started to react.
January saw the launch of the “Partnership for the Bay’s Future,” bringing together public and private organizations, including Facebook, Genentech Inc and several foundations, who pledged US$500 million to tackle the problems of housing and transportation.
Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff has came out in favor of plans to tax major businesses in San Francisco to help the homeless.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has opposed the move.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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