The tables have turned on high-paid tech workers in Silicon Valley, where housing prices have gone so far up that it is no longer just the average worker that can’t afford to live there. The very same six-figure-income techies who were initially responsible for contributing to the steep rise in rents are also now feeling the crunch of rising prices that others have been complaining of for so long.
“It is a long-running joke at Google that none of the employees at Google can afford to live near the office because things are so astronomically high,” Google software engineer Brandon Jones told local CBS News affiliate in San Francisco KPIX 5.
Additionally, influxes of overseas money being pumped into California’s real estate market, particularly from Asia, coupled with low-interest rates, have contributed to this increase.
Mountain View is the headquarters of several notable tech companies like Google, Mozilla and LinkedIn.
Jones is reportedly paying $2,800 a month for his three-bedroom home, but those numbers are expected to hit the $4,000 mark very soon, once renovations to units are completed. He says his six-figure income would be great anywhere else in the world, but that in the Bay Area, it’s “barely enough to provide a home for your family.”
NASA Engineer John Scarboro told KPIX 5 that he loves Mountain View and would hate to leave but realizes that it’s increasingly a possibility due to soaring rental costs. “There’s nothing that says we have to be here or that it has to be affordable,” he said.
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Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter @AdelleNaz
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