Blog # 8 Gentrification in Silicon Valley

This picture above is a picture of the protesters blockading the Google Bus.

For this week’s blog, we looked at the issue of Google buses being funded in San Francisco and how this affects their residents. To be honest, I had no clue what this topic consisted of, but after doing the readings on the topic I feel I understand the general idea of it. This topic was very interesting to me because I never would have thought Google would have a need for such a thing as a Google bus. The Google Bus in the San Francisco Bay Area has become a recent target for accusations of gentrification, eviction and displacement. The definition of gentrification is a shift in an urban community towards wealthier residents and/or businesses and increasing property values. In the process of gentrification, the residents of cities are paying the price for these changes. The Google Bus, which serves as the private transportation system for wealthy Google workers that brings them from their San Francisco homes to their Silicon Valley jobs, has become a symbol of inequality within the area. According to Goldman’s “When companies break the law and people pay: The scary lesson of the Google Bus” article, it has revealed that rents near the shuttle stops are rising faster than those farther away from it. It also shows that Google buses have allowed their riders (Silicon Valley employees) to rise above the rules and restrictions of “normal” transit riding citizens. An example is how single car drivers may be ticketed for blocking up spaces such as public bus stops because it interferes with the public transit system. However, while this could happen to the single car drivers, the Google buses and shuttles don’t seem to be facing that kind of issue at all. According to the same article “Google, Facebook and Apple aren’t facing millions in unpaid parking fines, however, because the MTA hasn’t been writing the tickets.  Since the shuttles began using public bus stops, they’ve simply flouted the law without consequences.”

It is my opinion that the situation with the Google busses in San Francisco can be related to the issue of digital divide. It is the poor communities that are suffering at the expense of wealthier communities at the cost of their homes. The way that this is happening is the busses are creating more traffic and creating a denser population of people in the areas that the busses travel to. This in turn increases the cost of the city and increases real estate rates. As a result it causes the lower income people to become displaced since they are not able to afford the increased living of cost prior to the prevalence of the Google busses. This situation also raises issues of race because as in most cities the poorest residents are minority or first generation residents so when poor residents are displaced they are most likely low income residents.  This is the reason why most of the protesters of the Google busses in San Francisco Bay area are the low- income communities of color. These protestors set up demonstrations so large that they can attract the attention of the social media. By doing this, they are giving themselves a chance to be heard. By doing this, they are showing people just how much they believe in their cause against Google busses.