In Silicon Valley, a New Investment: Eviction
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Virginia Valencia earns $12 an hour working the morning shift at Tesla Motors Inc. headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where she serves food and drinks to the staff and billionaire co-founder Elon Musk.
After work, the single mother of three goes home to the one-bedroom rent-controlled apartment she’s struggling to keep in East Palo Alto’s Woodland Park, an 1,811-unit complex bought in 2011 by Equity Residential, the largest publicly-traded U.S. landlord. The company, founded by real estate magnate Sam Zell, owns more than 70 percent of the regulated apartments in the only city between San Francisco and San Jose with a rent control law.