Housing, Tech and Taxes: 50 Years of Unaffordability in the Bay Area

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]How did the Bay Area get so expensive, anyway? It goes back to policy choices made over time, some as far back as 50 years ago. After World War II, defense contractors here grew and helped bring on the rise of what would become Silicon Valley. Developers, meanwhile, were creating whole suburbs, sprawling farther and farther from job centers to cater to all the workers moving here.

[00:00:21]And that meant more highways had to be built. Phil Cosentino's family farm in San Jose was chopped down from 10 acres to 2 acres decades ago because of a highway project. And other farms in his area were sold off to developers. It was closing in, closing in, closing in. And and there's nothing we could do about it. Residents of the Bay Area and the state were seeing rapid housing and commercial development, and they started pushing back. And they started passing policies aimed at slowing down major expansions and protecting the environment. You combine those constraints on housing with the unique tax laws here, like Prop 13, and the huge demand created by the explosive wealth of our tech field economy, and you get the very expensive place that we call home today. The tech industry cycles of investment and innovation have created not just financial stability, but major wealth for a ton of residents.

[00:01:14]But residents not earning those kinds of high salaries are being squeezed out of what were once affordable neighborhoods.

[00:01:21]I talked to Cassandra Catarez of Richmond. She's a single mom of a 4-year-old who said even as a full-time mental health case worker, her affordable apartment complex is becoming too costly for her. I've been trying to see if I can get a second job just to make sure I can maintain a roof over my son's head. It's very mentally frustrating, mentally draining. As one Berkeley professor put it to me, it will be hard to escape the kind of wealth inequality in the Bay Area without drastic action. You can find more on our series about affordability in California at kqed.org/affordability.