Even the once-sleepy town of Palo Alto has gotten way out of control rent-wise.
By the way, if anyone remembers Mrs Fields Cookies, the first little shop - I recall it as hardly more than a counter in a tiny mall off the street in the downtown - was opened by a housewife named Debbi Fields in 1977. Her chocolate chip cookies were a major local sensation due to their soft texture. Business expanded exponentially, and she relocated the company to Denver in 1982. Mrs Fields finally sold her baked goods empire in the early 1990s.
Surely one of the very few examples of a non tech-centered business success originating from here !
I had been wondering how quiet, balmy Palo Alto was faring in the midst of the high-tech hoopla going on everywhere around it.
Here is the answer in a CBS News report today :
"With the median house price in Palo Alto now $2.5 million, nearly doubling in just the last four years, even the reasonably well-off feel shut out. Kate Downing is a Silicon Valley corporate attorney and her husband is a software engineer. Together, they are in the top 2 percent.
But they can’t afford a house in Palo Alto.
Downing resigned from Palo Alto’s Planning Commission, with a letter in which she lamented the city becoming a place where “young families have no hope of ever putting down roots.” She and her husband are moving 40 miles away, to buy a house.
But Downing said people shouldn’t feel sorry for her.
“I think the people we should be sorry for are the people who can’t do that. What are you going to tell the people who are cooks, are cops, are teachers, are nurses, those are people you don’t want to move,” she said. “You can lose a lawyer, you can’t lose the people who are the backbone of your city.”
[ A Palo Alto mother ] worries that her hometown is becoming so wealthy that soon only the extremely wealthy will call it home."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-heart-of ... riced-out/
A commenter added some insights :
Jayjaybe
28 minutes ago
"This Palo Alto housing cost escalation has been ongoing since the Sixties. The key factor in the syndrome...Stanford University, the heart of the spawning ground of Silicon Valley.
"Ironically, the nature of this elite private university is that its students generally aren't locals; they're from around the nation, and as alumni, they rarely stay local. Many of the folks who've clustered in Palo Alto aren't Stanford grads but the attraction to the imagined aura of that big-name academic institution has had its socio-economic repercussions...in this general area, not only Palo Alto.
"I've just recently moved from that area for retirement, after 45 years in the immediate Palo Alto vicinity. The coup de gras [ the author of his comment seems not to be a scholar himself, as he should have written 'grace' - ] in this choking-out of all affordability has been the recent clustering of Google and Facebook campuses in adjacent towns.
"Stanford University has been contending with this obvious escalation for decades; its faculity [sic], support staff, and students have been getting priced out of off-campus housing for decades. So, for the past 20 or so years, the University has been steadily increasing its on-campus housing--in all categories...often despite conflicting views from neighboring municipalities. Stanford is on private, unincorporated land that has allowed this workaround. Silicon Valley's trade-offs have been a very mixed bag."