SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the need-more-land-where-the-water-is dept.
California's Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the fruit and nuts consumed each year. Yet today, backcountry places such as Patterson, population 22,000, are experiencing an increase in homelessness that can be traced, in part, to an unlikely sounding source: Silicon Valley.
The million-dollar home prices about 85 miles west, in San Francisco and San Jose, have pushed aspiring homeowners to look inland. Patterson's population has doubled since the 2000 census. Average monthly rents have climbed from about $900 in 2014 to nearly $1,600 in recent months, according to the apartment database Rent Jungle, compounding the hardships of the foreclosure crisis, the shuttering of several local agricultural businesses and surging substance abuse rates.
"The rents in Patterson are crazy," said Romelia Wiley, program manager of the local not-for-profit organization Community Housing & Shelter Services. "Why? I-5."
The freeway offers commuters access to high-paying job centers near the coast, and the number of people commuting to the Bay Area from the portion of the Central Valley that includes Patterson more than doubled between 1990 and 2013, to about 65,000 people, or at least 15% of the local workforce, according to an analysis by the University of the Pacific.
Why don't they build up instead of out?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 18 2017, @02:52PM
That phrase stuck out to me in the summary -- what precisely is "unlikely" about this kind of trend? Unless I'm missing something, this is the kind of story that has played out again and again when you have a successful booming white-collar business area that grows quickly. Housing eventually runs out in the immediate area, and highly-paid workers begin moving into surrounding areas. It happens in big cities when the "Yuppies" (now other terms are used, but that's one of the early ones for people in such trends) start moving into surrounding blue-collar neighborhoods; suddenly the "locals" are priced out. It happens in suburbs of cities when those highly-paid workers start having kids and want a larger house and a yard, so they move a little farther out and drive up rents and housing prices in working class areas around the city.
Whether the people who are priced out of the areas become homeless or find other solutions depends a lot on what local governments do in response to all of this.
Anyhow, it may be difficult to predict in advance exactly where such a trend will arise and which outlying areas will become the "hip" ones for workers to flock to... but the general trend isn't surprising or "unlikely" to me in any place where you have a cluster of highly-paid workers that's growing. It would be positively shocking to me if Silicon Valley did NOT cause this sort of housing crisis to happen SOMEWHERE in surrounding areas.