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But for over three decades beginning in the 1970s, Menlo Park did not build any large multi-family housing, said Menlo Park City Manager Alex McIntyre. The median home price is $1.6 million and the city is now among the top 10 in the nation with the fastest increasing home values, says a recent NerdWallet report.Īffordable housing tends to be located in apartment buildings rather than houses. Since mid-2011 when the company moved here, the median rental price for a two-bedroom apartment in Menlo Park rose 42 percent to $3,700, according to the real estate website Zillow. Rentals listed on Craigslist and real estate websites frequently tout closeness to Facebook as a plus. It’s not uncommon to spot tourists posing for pictures at the company’s thumbs-up “like” sign in front of its headquarters on Bayfront Expressway.įacebook’s success, with a net income of $2.9 billion last year, has arguably increased nearby property values. The company is Menlo Park’s largest employer and landowner. “People are seeing investors buy up those properties in the hopes that a Facebook person will come and purchase them for a higher amount of money.”įacebook’s second campus in Belle Haven is set to open this spring for 4,000 additional employees, some of them looking for housing nearby. “People are seeing their neighbors leave,” said Jennifer Martinez, executive director of Peninsula Interfaith Action, which advocates for affordable housing. Most of the city’s Latino and African-American residents live in this part of town, east of Highway 101. Real estate developers, advocates and residents say a long building hiatus in Menlo Park, the city’s hot real estate market and Facebook’s expansion in Belle Haven - the city’s poorest neighborhood - put enormous pressures on Facebook’s working-class neighbors. Silicon Valley’s technology-fueled economy is exacerbating a regional housing deficit that is pushing low-income residents particularly to move out of the region to more affordable cities or stay put in tough living conditions. (Data visualization by Farida Jhabvala Romero/Peninsula Press))

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How much are the new jobs in the area paying? Click to launch full interactive graphic that shows what fraction of the new jobs will pay enough to afford housing in Silicon Valley. Prices go from about $400 to over $1,000, according to the ads, residents and police. On a recent afternoon, a bulletin board at a local grocery store down the road from Facebook featured three handwritten ads in Spanish offering garages for rent. But demand is strong and supply is widespread. Most garages here are illegally converted to rentals and represent a health and fire hazard, according to city police. Children don’t have room to play, and one doesn’t have enough space either,” said Contreras, adding that she knows more local families living in similar conditions. Still, Contreras says her family’s living situation is far better than in years past, when their home was a rented garage without a kitchen or heat. To afford the $2,700 monthly rent, the couple shares a room with their children and sublets the other two bedrooms.

Like many renters in Menlo Park’s Belle Haven neighborhood, Maria Contreras believes Facebook’s presence here has pushed up rents, making it harder for working-class families to find decent places to live.Ĭontreras and her husband, who works in construction, saw their rent increase by $200 last November for their three-bedroom house.