Silicon Valley's Housing Haven Is Under Siege

East Palo Alto is the last bastion of low-rent housing in an area where companies such as Tesla Motors, Facebook, and Google have minted at least two dozen billionaires and thousands of millionaires. The city’s Woodland Park Apartments, a group of buildings with 1,811 units bought in 2011 by Sam Zell’s Equity Residential, is where many Silicon Valley cooks, janitors, and housekeepers live, often working second jobs to pay the rent.

For some, even two paychecks are not enough. Each month as many as 300 Woodland Park residents receive notices from Equity Residential giving them three days to pay or vacate their homes, according to an employee’s testimony in a lawsuit. Virginia Valencia, a single mother of three, has been fighting eviction from her one-bedroom Woodland Park apartment since she fell behind on her $1,064 monthly rent in November. “I’m alone, and I don’t have a family to fall back on,” says Valencia, who works in the Tesla Motors cafeteria for $12 an hour. “It seems like they just don’t want us here.”