As tech giants move in, rising rents and home prices push minority households out of East Palo Alto
- Only a small fraction of jobs in California’s big technology companies go to those who live in this city of 30,000 people
- Latinos and African-Americans are being pushed out to make room for predominantly white technology workers
East Palo Alto in California is a poor city surrounded by the temples of the new American economy, which has – in nearly every way imaginable – passed it by.
Just outside the northern city limit, Facebook is expanding the blocks-long headquarters it built seven years ago. Google’s offices sit just outside the southern edge, and just a few miles to the west, Stanford University stands as the rich proving ground of the economy’s future. Amazon just moved in.
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Only a small fraction of jobs in these companies go to those who live in this city of 30,000 people, one of the region’s few whose population is made up mostly of minorities. And this demography is under threat by the one economic force that has not passed East Palo Alto by – rapidly rising rents and home prices.
“Amazon Google Facebook – SOS”, reads a painted bedsheet draped from an RV parked off Pulgas Avenue, one of dozens of trailers where families have come to live rent-free along a gravel path that leads from the city to the San Francisco Bay.
In the past year, John Mahoni, a burly and affable 41-year-old Latino man, has had a dozen visits from real estate speculators looking to buy his small house off Terra-Villa Street in the city’s worn-down southeast side. The most recent doorstep instant offer: US$900,000 in cash, almost three times what he paid less than a decade ago. He turned it down.
“They’ve stopped coming because I cussed them out, but I know they were just doing their jobs,” said Mahoni, noting that residents have the right to reject any offer for their property. “ … There’s no law against not being greedy.”