Since mid-2011 when the company moved here, the median rent 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 new extension of its campus in Belle Haven, also called East Menlo Park, is set to open this spring for 2,800 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. Elsa and her husband have been unable to find an apartment they can afford in the area. Elsa, a mother of four who requested her last name not be used because of her immigration status, cleans up her home in a rented garage on Jan 15, 2015. 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.
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. (Farida Jhabvala Romero/ Peninsula Press) Prices can go over $1,000, even though most garages here are illegally converted, according to Menlo Park Police. A billboard at a Belle Haven grocery store advertises garages for rent on Jan. 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. Reporter Farida Jhablava Romero’s radio report originally aired on KQED in March 2015. Silicon Valley’s tech boom is exacerbating a regional housing deficit that is pushing low-income residents to move out of the region to more affordable cities or stay put in tough living conditions.
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