Burbed has often maintained that It’s Special Here, and therefore home prices can never go down (offer does not apply to homes not in the Real Bay Area).  Careers, employment, and investments, however, can and do change.  This is a rather bleak look at what happens when one was a Have but is not longer part of that group.

Silicon Valley Homeless Feel The Grip Of Recession’s Long Reach

By Peter S. Goodman; Business Editor, The Huffington Post
Posted: 03/01/12 10:00 AM ET  |  Updated: 03/01/12 10:29 AM ET

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — The first time Michele arrived at the Maple Street homeless shelter three years ago, she was still driving her BMW 325xi, the final remnant of her Silicon Valley affluence.

Her paper wealth of more than $2 million had evaporated a decade earlier, she says, via a stock options fiasco. She had used the options to buy stock in her high-flying software startup, netting a seven-figure profit by the government’s reckoning, but then held the shares until they were nearly worthless. That left her with no cash and a $200,000 tax bill. She had sold nearly everything to cover it: her house, her remaining stocks, her art collection.

Periods of joblessness, punctuated by depression and bouts with alcoholism filled out the ensuing years, with cause and effect blurring into a cohesive whole — one life, unraveling.

She had used the shelter as a way station, finding a new job at another software company within two months and then moving into a rented apartment. But by last November, just before Thanksgiving, she was out of work again, broke again, and back at the shelter, again. This time, she arrived on foot, carrying a backpack that contained all she had left in the world: some clothes, about ten dollars in cash, her laptop computer and her mother’s Omega watch.

This is a fairly long piece (3 pages) covering a few who had a high-flying life but are now looking at shelters and the Food Bank.  The Brookings Institution had recently examined the growth of suburban poverty, and the SF Bay Area wasn’t one of the growth standouts.  Nonetheless, the poverty rate in Bay suburbs has increased from 7.3  to 9.2 percent over ten years, or just over one out of eleven suburban residents.

There are stronger indicators of problems.  San Mateo County has tripled the number of people receiving food stamps in the last five years.  Second Harvest Food Bank is now serving 250,000 in both San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, an increase of 50 percent over the last four years.

Homelessness can be rendered invisible in this area when you drive from nice home to nice office in your nice car.  One of those profiled said you’ll notice it when you have to ride the bus.  In San Mateo County, you can even apply for county assistance at a kiosk or online from home (assuming you still have one).

Here’s how the various people profiled in the HuffPo article ended up losing it all.

One final note on poverty in Silicon Valley: While 12 percent of San Mateo County households earn less than $25,000, according to the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, a family of three (single parent of two children) there is not self-sufficient earning less than $79,000 a year. 

Do you agree with that number or the methodology used in determining it?

 

Bay Area Children Better Off Than Rest of California

In a sign of the Bay Area’s relative wealth, children in the region are more likely to live in households with higher incomes and with parents who are married and have higher education levels than children statewide, according to a survey of parents from the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health released in December. While 24% of children in the Bay Area live in households with incomes above $125,000, only 18% statewide had this level of income, the survey found. But because of the high cost of living in the Bay Area, 23% of parents here said their level of income isn’t enough to provide for their children, only slightly lower than 26% statewide. "While that’s better than the rest of California, that’s still concerning," said David Alexander, president and chief executive of the foundation.

Congrats to the Bay Area. And let’s face it, since California is the center of the world, then Bay Area children are better off than the rest of the world.

We’re #1! We’re #1!