On the Death of Tech Idealism (and Rise of the Homeless) in Northern California

Summary

Fuckers. I couldn’t get the word out of my head, because he wouldn’t stop saying it. I was sitting in the tiled courtyard of the Mediterranean-style home of an old acquaintance, a venture capitalist and serial tech entrepreneur, who lived a few blocks from Zuckerberg in Palo Alto. Next to us was a massive stone slab over which water dribbled into a reflecting pool. A Buddha sat on the stone, contemplating the flow. Above us sprawled the canopy of a century-old olive tree, which had been raining its fruit onto the courtyard.Article continues after advertisement It would have been an idyllic scene, were it not for the presence of my acquaintance, who kept smacking and berating his dog, a puffy, pure-white Alaskan-looking thing, who wouldn’t stop eating the olives. In my previous career, I was a landscape designer, and this person was my client. I’d lived in Santa Cruz then, a hippie-surfer town about an hour away on the other side of the mountains that separate the Valley from the ocean. I was not alone in commuting over those mountains—many of Santa Cruz’s hippies and surfers make the trek to stick their straws where the wealth is. I went to college at the University of California in Santa Cruz—home of the fighting Banana Slugs!—and spent the entirety of my twenties there. When I drove over after arriving in Cupertino, however, a camp lined the main road into town; hundreds of unhoused residents inhabited another area along the river. When thirty approached, I began to think of things like owning a home, which even an hour from the Valley’s gravitational center was out of reach with my income at the time. So a few months after the Great Recession hit, I moved back to Georgia, where I’d grown up. I bought a house on seven acres for $90,000. I’d been away from California for twelve years. Much had changed. The real estate costs I’d fled had tripled; 2008 prices now seem quaintly affordable. I don’t remember ever seeing a tent on the streets of Santa Cruz back then. It ...