Silicon Valley's Van-Dwellers

of the third day. We actually typically give it like a fourth day. Um, and I'll come back and check on it and see if it's abandoned. Sergey McGee spends a lot of his time knocking on the doors of hundreds of our v's, lining the city streets, logging license plates, and marking wigs that haven't moved for several days. Yeah. Way, and this one's unmarked. Yeah, this carter has been marked. And then we'll go from there. We'll try to contact the person and warn him. And now we're get a

ticket with and riding it's tobole. They get two of those typically before we we tell although we do allier, you know, authority that to the first time. That's the last thing we want to do. These vehicles aren't abandoned their people's homes. Mountain View is the center of Silicon Valleys tech boom, and it's minting millionaires almost by the hour.

But the byproduct of all this new wealth is that thousands of people are being forced to live in our vs across San Francisco and the Broader Bay Area because rent and house prices have risen so high. Living in an r V used to be a cool life hack for a few iconoclastic Googlers, extending the Silicon value myth of sleeping under your desk and working out of a garage. Now it's become an act of desperation and a symbol of a housing crisis that can no longer be ignored.

I'm per Gatkari and I'm Alistabar. You're listening to Decrypted. A small handful of Googlers have lived in our vs on and off since the company's early days. I recently spoke to one former Google and named Matt Weaver, who did it in two thousand five. For about a year, I didn't have to live in an r V to make and me I did at least a part because

of it. There I had a new kind of uh tech job in the Bay Area that I was doing perfectly fine at um and lived in an RV in non fall parts tipally to say that I had done such a thing, it was a fun thing. Back then, Google was a newly public company with about five thousand employees, and Facebook wasn't much more than a dorm um project.

Since then, things have changed dramatically. Google now has roughly a hundred thousand full time staff and tens of thousands of temporary and contract workers, and Facebook, which is headquartered just a few miles to the north, has about thirty five thousand employees. Then there's Uber, Lift, Airbnb, Palanteer, PayPal LinkedIn. The list goes on. Nowhere near enough housing has been built to keep up, so home prices and rents have soared, and the result is thousands of people living in r

v's in towns all over Silicon Valley. If I look at this road, if you just count with the naked eye, it's one, two, three for five, six, seven, kind of eight. But then if if you include these ones, that's it's funny. I counted about fifty in and around Google's campus on the eastern edge of Mountain View. The city has logged almost three hundred Palo Alto, Berkeley and other Bay Area

towns of similar numbers. The r vs are usually white or beige, and they either parked along leafy residential streets lined with detached suburban houses, or they're tucked away near office pocks. Hi, I'm sorry to bother. The knocked on the door of a cute ranch style house and one long time resident was at home, so we chatted for about half an hour on his front porch. Across the street. There are about ten RVs. Nice guy works over at Google, comes over, shakes my hand, says Hi, offers me a beer.

He's just going to be living out of it. Girlfriend would come by at four o'clock and go up on top and do sunbathing. We always joked it is what it is, and and that was that of all of the r vs. Maybe that's of what it is. The other, however, is a pure um and everyone has the same tagline. It's too expensive here for them to get um, you know, the house or an apartment or whatever it is. He sounds like he's accepted the situation, but he's had mixed

feelings about the RVs for some time. Google keeps taking care of my home value. It keeps going up. Thank you Google, But um, you know with that you don't want the crime. I gotta. I got a kid. This year, tensions between homeowners and the people living in the r vs has boiled over. In March, the nearby community of Berkeley voted to ban RV parking on public streets, and a few weeks later, Mountain View followed with a ban

of its own. In the lead up to that vote in b a city council meeting devolved into a screaming match. Would you like us to discuss the r V item or not? Would you like us to discuss the RB item or not? There's so much anst around this issue right now. One day, when I was looking at a local news website, I spotted a comment from a Mountain View resident which said stop feeding the bears, as in the r V dwellers are bears that should be removed. So I set out to talk to our V dwellers

and hear their stories. What I found, of course, is that they're not animals. Despite what that amount of View isn't wrote. They're often well educated, hard working people who would be living in a comfortable apartment or small house in almost any other part of the US. Mountain View officials have checked the data, and contrary to the perception of some homeowners, there's no evidence that our V dwellers

are committing crimes at a higher rate than other residents. Still, Googlers who live in our vs are keeping a low profile these days. I put letters on windshields of about twenty r vs around the company's headquarters campus asking them to get in touch. There's sometimes a telltale sign they work for the Internet giant. You can often see one of those multicolored Google bikes part next to an RV, so the inhabitant can jump on and cycle to the office.

Put my letter there as well. There we go. The thing to do is you pop it under the windscreen wiper, rather than obviously knock on the door and disturbed them. Is only in the morning right now, so people probably haven't got up yet. A few days later I got an email from an anonymous address. It said, our group tries to stay discreet avoiding media inquiries, but we understand the importance of having our narrative told I recommend you

reach out to Van Dweller's at Google dot com. When I emailed that official company address, I got no reply. There is a Googler who calls himself Brandon S who's been blogging about his experiences, but he tends to focus more on financial planning advice, such as how to buy a house elsewhere while you save money living in a

vehicle in Silicon Valley. And he didn't want to talk to us for this podcast, but I was able to talk to other people currently living in r v's. On a sunny spring afternoon, I met up with a guy called Sam about a hundred yards from Google's headquarters. Hello, how are you? Sam's forty one and he spent most of his career in I T but he currently drives for Lift. His wife, Linda, works at a big drug development company in Silicon Valley. Sam looks like any other

tech nerd. He had a sharp haircut, wore trendy jacket and expensive jeans, and he rode up to me on an electric scooter with a high end action camera attached to his chest. Scooter. Yeah, runs, that's pretty cool, I think so. Uh so you live around around here? Well in the r v s, So yeah, on literally on

this road or um. Some days we're right now, just on the other side, um over between, like the Yahoo building, I'm sorry, the YouTube building and the Google Maps forget the Sam and Linda used to own a house in Sacramento, but they sold and moved when Ninda got that new job. Once they arrived, they found out they couldn't afford rent. This is despite a combined income of roughly a hundred

thousand dollars a year. In most places, you live like a king on that, but here it's very hard to make ends meet if you want to also build rainy day savings, as we're all told we're supposed to do, And we just did the math when we were, you know, renting a room and we could kind of stay afloat, but there's no way to save any money for retirement or the future at all. We just be floating and then at some point rent prices will go beyond our

ability to pay. Turns out living without a permanent address is complicated. We agreed to change Sam and Linda's names because they're afraid that if Linda's employer find out she lives in an RV she'll be fired. It's a very gray area living out of a out of an rv UM. There's big litigation on whether or not it's even legal to live out of an RV and have a bank account and things like this. So once you become homeless,

it's very difficult to become unhomeless. That's because if you don't have a traditional address, it's impossible to get landlord references to rent a home, and it's trickier to arrange a mortgage if you want to buy. Sam and Linda had to talk to a lawyer about how to keep their bank accounts and retirement savings accounts. Financial regulations mean banks usually want a residential address for account holders, and pier boxes are frowned upon. Technically, they can see our

accounts and and there go out. I did I did not think of that, uh E trade accounts, All of that would could technically go by by if we did not, if we were not very careful about how we did this. Sam didn't want to go into more detail because he's concerned about losing access to their accounts. Now that they've been in this situation for at least a year, he's torn about whether they should have made the move to Silicon Valley at all. It's a mixed blessing living. I mean,

who wants to live half homeless? I mean it's as as much as it can look glamorous online, it comes as its own problems. Sam struggles in particular with the neighborhood tensions. It's not easy knowing homeowners don't want you around. I would imagine if I paid two million dollars for a house, I'm not in a hurry to see somebody living out in a r V out on the street either, you know, so I people pay very high property taxes here and to see people kind of skirting that, I'm

sure it's that's not making people excited about about their neighbors. Plus, Sam doesn't work at Google, so he can't enjoy company perks like showers that make it a lot easier for employees to live in an RVY. The Google employees that everything subsidized for them, food, laundry, anything they could possibly want, which is why they can downsize totally do a van. It's one stop shop for them. For some people, it's it's a stepping stone. For some people it's a it's

a trap. I wanted to get a better sense for what life is like for people living in r vs without Google providing toilet, showers, food, and laundry. So I spent an afternoon with another RV resident, Paul Kastner. So you want to give me a tour? Sure, Um, this is the living room. Paul has spent his career in tech, including a recent stint at a semiconductor equipment supplier as a quality engineer. The company cut staff, including Paul, and now he's looking for a new job and surviving in

an RV. Got a couch that folds down into a bed, a couple of chairs. Um, I'm a musician, so I have a nice speaker system here with and can listen listen to songs. Um, that's cool, yeah, all right. And then kind of kitchen here. Kitchen I think of it like a European kitchen. It's got everything that anybody here has, but just like tiny bit smaller inside, Like got a stove and I think, umallon tank in the back, uh,

and then two tanks by the way. That lapping sound in the background was Paul's dog, Bandit, who was very friendly, and I was impressed by the way Paul made use of his small space, but it did smell musty, I have to say, and dealing with sewage seemed difficult to There's a service center about eight miles north where Paul can go to emptiest tanks and refill with fresh water. The other option is to use a hose to empty the waist directly into the sewer system through sewer cleanouts

on the street. Paul says that goes to the same place everyone else's waist goes. But ultimately Paul's main challenge is the same as sounds. Your neighbors don't like you, or they're even scared of you, And for the people living in r v's it's about to get worse. In March, Berkeley band r vs from parking overnight, Pacifica, East Palo Alto, and other Bay Area towns have enacted limits as well. At the end of March, mountain View voted to do the same. It's unclear when this band will kick in,

but it's coming. At a mountain View city meeting in March, several residents and our redwellers blame big tech companies for indirectly raising prices and not doing enough to fix the issue. The city council was criticized to Dozens of people came with signs that read I stand with Mountain View Vehicle residents, and a group representing the people living in our vs came to speak at the event. Preventing parking and throwing

more people out of our community is unconscionable. I do not want to live in a town where the only people who can afford to be here are very very rich, tech eas or very very old retirees like myself. Thank you again. This is a polarizing issue for Mountain View residents. Some people are standing up for the rights of our View residents, but other homeowners are happy about the parking bands. These are often people who were lucky enough to have

bought a home many years ago. They don't want new apartment buildings marring their suburban paradise, and they get angry at the thought of affordable housing bringing poorer people to their neighborhoods. For at least a decade, this attitude has won out. Rising salaries and a growing population, combined with a limited supply of new homes, has sparked a surgeon prices. The median rent in Mountain View has almost doubled since late two thousand, ten to four thousand dollars a month.

That's nearly triple the national average. The median Mountain View home value is one point eight million dollars, up from seven hundred and fifty thousand ten years ago. Landlords are richer, homeowners feel richer and smarter for buying early. The odd homeless person on the street could easily be ignored or explained away as a product of poor life choices. The r V explosion is changing all of this. When cities cracked down, r V dwellers usually move on to the

next town and hope for the best. But now that many towns and limiting parking, it's unclear where all these people will go. I spoke to Jennifer Loving, the CEO of a group called Destination Home, which is trying to reduce homelessness in Santa Clara County, where Mountain View is located. She blames the lack of affordable housing for low income workers. She said, this type of real estate isn't as profitable for developers who would rather build mcmansion's for wealthy tech workers.

We have rising rents, we have gentrification, we have people being displaced, and and all of that together is creating an untenable situation for thousands and thousands of families and individuals that are trying to live and work here in this community. I also spoke to Alison Hicks, one of only two Mountain View Council members to vote against the

r V parking ban. She says the tech boom happens so quickly that residents are struggling to adjust to the fact that they now live in a densely populated area with different needs. A hundred years ago, this area was farm land. It was the valley of heart to Delight. After post war it became a suburb, and now we're becoming a more urban place. Urban places have problems that

suburban and rural places down. So this is the reason Sergeant McGee spent so much time driving around Mountain View keeping track of our V dwellers and offering them support, warning them of the coming parking band, and pushing people to sign up for what little affordable housing is available right now. And there are other worrying signs too. When I rode along with Sergeant McGee one recent afternoon and our V resident ran away from us, we jumped in

the police car and quickly caught up with him. Sergeant McGee found what he suspected was meth and fetamine on this person. So what do you do now, I'm again I can bug him to take a big problem, um buck m but he's going to come right out. So he lives in that RV right where that canvass very painted a citation go to court. And then there's that sewage issue. Sergean McKee stopped to inspect one r the that had brown liquid leaking from an outlet pipe near

the rear wheel. And we've again complaints about this one leaking sewage and I just haven't got it with leaking. You can see there's dried something underneath it. But you can see the duct tape and say the cap that's that's the reservoir for the sewage. So it's you can see you see where it's darker right underneath it. Yeah, you can see where it's it's been dripping. The sergeant tested the slowly growing pool to prove it was human waste. It was, and he got serious with the people living

in the vehicle. A self driving car world passed as he lectured the two residents. So you guys need to take care of it like a SAP, so we're supposed to there's a new ordinance for towing like we're supposed to it. I'm not gonna towd today, but tomorrow if I come out here and it's like this, it's getting towed, all right. So you've been notified so early after all your reporting on this. What was your sense about how people are feeling about the issue. Do they think tech

companies should be doing more? Yeah? Most people I heard from think think Google, another big tech company, should really step up more than they've done so far, and in the short term they should at least make some of their big parking lots available so are the owners can

park pretty safely overnight. What about this concept, you know, this historical concept of the company town which auto companies, mining companies have done in the past, where they not only build housing directly for their workers, but in some

cases whole towns. Yeah. I've spoken to someone who's familiar with Google's thinking on this, and they said the Internet Giant is not at all interested in becoming a residential home builder or like a major landlord for staff, and it's actually, unfortunately unlikely to make car parks available for RV parking either. Google officially declined to comment for this story, but they did point me to an interview one of their public policy managers did. She's Rebecca pros And and and

she spoke to PBS back in two thousand sixteen. Obviously, our footprint creates pressure, creates pressure on housing and transportation. But that pressure isn't just tech. It's not just Google. It is all the industries that are creating the economy of the Bay Area. We all have to work together to figure out what we are going to look like

and how we're going to live. Alie, I mean, she's right that this isn't solely Google's problem to deal with, but it is true that most of the wealth created in the last few years has come from the tech industry. So I wonder is there a push for Google and other tech companies to pay more in local taxes. Yeah, there's a general feeling, including from that guy in Mountain View that we spoke to, the resident, that the industry isn't paying enough tax on their huge profits that they make.

But Google is giving money to a lot of organizations to tackle these issues. It's also got a very big plan to invest millions and millions of dollars in an area called North Bay Shore, which is nearby it's headquarters. And this will add thousands of homes, including about of homes in that plan that will be affordable housing. It's definitely encouraging that Google could help to create thousands of

new homes through that plan. But I can't help thinking Google is a company that has more than a hundred billion dollars in cash on its balance sheet, so still even after those millions are donated, it's a bit like you or I giving ten dollars to a homeless person we pass on the street. And that housing advocate Jennifer Loving that we spoke to, she thinks the North Bay Shore plan should include a lot more affordable housing. She said,

is nowhere near enough to solve this problem. And then of course you also have to think about the fact that it's not just about money. You know, Google could in theory throw a million billions and billions of dollars, not millions of dollars, but you need the political will as well, so people who live in these areas that they actually have to want to help their neighbors. And when push comes to shove sometimes you know that doesn't happen so if it does take time, maybe year is

to really address this issue. Do you think there's a risk that the whole situation could escalate if it's allowed to fester. Yeah. I think there are a couple of risks, And the first one was was put pretty well by Allison Hicks, who was that Mountain View council member we spoke to. Her point is that if regular people can't afford to live here, the fabric of the society breaks down.

So if you think of teachers, chefs, trash collectors, baristas, those types of people, these are people who make everyone's community function properly. And if these people are pushed further and further way, it's going to become a strange city and especially very hard for those people. And you can't have a town that functions if we only have tech workers living in it. Just even if you have no compassion for people themselves, you know, it won't be a

functioning city as I know it. It wouldn't be a city that I would want to live in. And the second issue could be even more of a risk, and that's that tech companies could go elsewhere. So in February, the Google CEO summed up pitch I he announced a plan to spend thirteen billion dollars and that would go on new offices and data centers. And a lot of this was outside Silicon Valley, and that's almost becoming a trend.

We know Amazon has decided to do the same thing as well, expanding outside of Seattle after housing and infrastructure has come under a lot of strain in that city. Yeah, and and and when pushed on this type of thing, tech executives who are based around here, you know they'll blame it. They won't blame it directly on on this homeless crisis or the housing problem, but they'll basically say, you know that the amounts we have to pay for smart for smart engineers is just way, way high, and

you know the reason. The reason is because it costs so much to live here. And just going back to sergeant McGee, did you ask him Ali how he feels about all of this. Yeah, we got into it a bit when my ride along with him ended. I asked basically whether the r V wave will ultimately be solved, and he looked pretty tired as he thought about the answer. Yeah, And you know, the way things are going, I don't see how it's all going to disappear. I mean, where

are we going to put everyone? You know, there's not enough housing at the moment. After a twelve hour day, he had a long drive ahead to get home because he can't afford to live in Mountain View. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. If you live in a city where house prices have been affected by the tech boom, I would love to hear from you. You can write to us at Decrypted

at Bloomberg dot net. Well, I'm on Twitter at Alistair m bar and I'm at piagad Cary and please help us spread the word about our show by leaving us a racing or a review wherever you like to listen to podcasts. This episode was produced by Pierge Cary and Lindsey Cratterwell. Our story editor was Emily Buso. Thank you also to Aki Ito and Vander May and Brad Stone. Francesco Levi, his head of Bomberg Podcast. We'll see you next week.