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Though the lawsuit is ongoing, city workers started installing “no oversize parking” signs on nearly all of the city’s streets in August, at a cost of $1 million, severely limiting places where recreational vehicle residents could park in Mountain View. It is just one city among dozens taking action to remove RVs and those who live in them through such bans.

“There were more people against us than for us,” Janet Stevens, 63, a plaintiff named in the lawsuit, said of the November election. “[But] it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with street safety.” For Stevens, who has watched the city change as more tech company employees have moved in, the fight around housing affordability and the RV ban comes down to Nimbyism and “a lack of support and true understanding of who [vehicle dwellers] are to start with.”

The lawsuit underscores Stevens’ analysis. “[Mountain View] is in the heart of Silicon Valley where, in recent years, an economic stratification has yielded significant wealth for some, but skyrocketing housing prices for all,” the complaint read. “As a result, many of Mountain View’s long-time residents have been priced out of the housing market and forced to live in [RVs] parked on the City’s streets.” Most of those living in recreational vehicles, like Stevens, grew up in Mountain View, lived in the city as adults, and rely on city services to survive. Stevens is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and has chronic fatigue syndrome and high blood pressure. In addition to her friends and neighbors, Stevens’ medical team and support group are located in Mountain View. “If I was to leave here I don’t know. [I’d be in] deep, deep trouble being able to find doctors that were understanding and willing to support my treatment for my diseases that have multiple realms of symptomatology,” Stevens said.

Proponents of the ban say it’s not so much the recreational vehicle residency itself, but the eyesore of the oversize vehicles, the waste disposal on city streets, and the lack of regulation. Advocates for equitable housing policy counter by saying Measure C is a proxy ban on poor people: a targeted attack on the city’s residents who can’t afford the increasing rent prices in one of the most expensive regions in the country. While the median household income in Mountain View has doubled in the past twenty years, income inequality in the Silicon Valley has ballooned, growing at twice the state and national rate. Almost 20 percent of the region’s households have no savings. For many, the area rent — now $2,500 per month — is impossible to afford.

“It’s getting worse and worse,” said Nantiya Ruan, a professor of law at the University of Denver. “Inequity and that imbalance of power just means that people become more and more disadvantaged and pushed out of communities and don’t have a voice in government and everything else that stems from that.”

According to Ruan, this leaves wealthy residents with even more authority. “There is a lot of power for communities to regulate how their space is used,” she explains. “And so, what municipalities are doing is making it hostile for those who need to sleep in their car or sleep in their RV by doing all sorts of different zoning code laws.”

The history of targeting and discriminating against undesired community members is baked into the American legal framework. Redlining is the most well-known example of this. In addition to the federally sanctioned segregation that kept Black people from building wealth in well-to-do neighborhoods, so-called “sundown town” laws forbade non-white people from remaining within city limits after the sun set. Oregon banned Black people, and some municipalities required Native, Japanese, and Jewish people to leave by 6:30 each evening. California also maintained an “anti-Okie” law, which banned unemployed people and migrant workers from entering the state in 1937.

Ruan argues these policies live on in the network of bans on RV residency, though — unlike discriminatory laws of the 20th century — vehicle laws don’t explicitly target poor people. Even if they did, given that there’s no constitutional protection for economic status, Ruan says, making these laws difficult to challenge in court. These laws are “really about focusing on keeping people out of public space and therefore out of [public] consciousness,” Ruan said. “[The laws] keep them from being visible, right? [Politicians think] nobody wants to see visible poverty.”

Mountain View isn’t the only city instituting laws on vehicle residency. Los Angeles instituted its own ban against parking for “habitation purposes” in 2017, affecting the then-total of 7,000 homeless people living in their cars. Neighboring suburbs of Los Angeles, such as Culver City, Santa Monica, and Malibu all have bans on sleeping in one’s car overnight. This April, Carlsbad city officials updated their city codes to include a ban on camping within city limits as well as parking oversize vehicles overnight on city streets. Those who want to park their vehicles within city limits overnight are now required to obtain a 24-hour permit and are restricted to acquiring six permits per month. In August, city council members in Flagstaff, Ariz., voted to keep a law on the books that bans camping — including vehicle camping — at the dismay of locals who have been pushed out of their homes by increased housing prices and wildfire. Following the approval of an ordinance that requires residents to move their vehicles every three days, the city of Eugene, Ore., is considering its own parking ban in “industrial commercial areas.” And in Lacey, Wash., plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit against the city for effectively banning RVs and those who live in them by way of a city ordinance that limits the number of hours a vehicle can be parked on the street.

In lieu of providing housing, some cities are creating “safe parking” programs with dedicated spaces like church parking lots where vehicle residents can park overnight. Mountain View has one such program, and plays host to a third of all safe parking lots in Santa Clara County, but there aren’t enough spots for every person who needs one. Moreover, Stevens says she applied three times for a safe parking spot but never heard back. Even if she had been approved, she doubts she would have accepted, given the lot’s restrictions.

Katie Calhoun, a PhD student at the University of Denver who studied the efficacy of the Colorado Safe Parking Initiative, says it’s common for safe parking programs to have restrictions, such as prohibiting the consumption of alcohol. Designated safe parking lots did make residents feel safer in Denver, though the average duration of stay in the safe lot was three months, after which just under half of vehicle residents continued to live in their car.

The City of Mountain View could address the claims of public safety concerns by establishing a waste disposal site where residents can easily access it and pushing for more safe lots. And, of course, the city could stop exacerbating the housing crisis by, among other things, not approving the destruction of rent-controlled apartments. For those who aren’t able to access a safe lot in cities with vehicle residency bans, there aren’t many alternatives aside from risking a police encounter, potential arrest, or moving to a town that doesn’t have a ban on the books.

As for that eventuality, Stevens says, “There is no preparation for that. Except for maybe, you know, driving around looking for a town where they’ll accept me to live.”

President Trump describes the opportunity zone program as a prime example of how his administration has helped African Americans. This June, Trump claimed that since 2017 “countless jobs and $100 billion of new investment, not government investment, have poured into 9,000 of our most distressed neighborhoods anywhere in the country.” Opportunity zones have also been talked up by the few prominent African American Trump allies, including Sen. Tim Scott (one of the bill’s original co-sponsors) and HUD Secretary Ben Carson. Scott called opportunity zones “the first new, major effort to tackle poverty in a generation.”

Yet the program has been troubled since the beginning. Governors were permitted to select their state’s opportunity zones, with few criteria: 95 percent of the zones had to have a 20 percent poverty rate or a median income that is 80 percent or less of the metro area’s median income. Governors could also designate five percent of the zones in areas that are not low income. That latitude resulted in developments ranging from luxury apartment buildings to a ”superyacht” club being designated as eligible for opportunity zone tax breaks. Reporting from the New York Times, ProPublica and other news outlets revealed that friends and relatives of the president — including son-in-law Jared Kushner — stood to benefit from the opportunity zone tax break, and Treasury is already conducting a corruption investigation.

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Governors looking to tout the success of opportunity zones in their state had incentives to pick areas with development projects already planned or underway — such as areas adjacent to or including a college or university. Adam Looney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, found 33 opportunity zones in areas where 85 percent or more of the population are enrolled in college. The zones meet the low-income threshold, but that’s because students don’t typically earn much while taking classes.

Designating these areas as opportunity zones because of students’ lack of income is a cynical use of an antipoverty program. Universities have been creating pockets of wealth near their campuses for decades, driving up rents without benefitting the long term residents who will remain long after each class graduates.

In West Philadelphia, for instance, real estate investment in areas near universities has already changed the face of the historically African American neighborhood. West Philly is home to the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. The University of Pennsylvania lured professors and students to the area with tactics that ranged from installing streetlights to offering low-interest loans to encourage faculty to buy in the area, and even created a new public elementary school to offer an option for an elite education in the neighborhood. Their tactics were so successful that the average selling price of a home rose from $78,500 in 1995 to half a million dollars by 2018. Drexel is now borrowing directly from Penn’s playbook, including building a new public middle school.

Drexel is just one of the 33 universities mentioned in the Brookings report. In the opportunity zone that includes Drexel, the poverty rate is 66 percent and 88 percent of residents are enrolled in college full time. Those statistics are reflected in college towns selected as opportunity zones across the country. The University of Southern California, surrounded by a historically low-income area of Los Angeles, is located in an opportunity zone with a poverty rate of 88 percent. A whopping 99 percent of residents, however, are full time college students. College students at small private universities (such as Liberty College) and behemoth public institutions alike (such as Texas A&M) are making their towns and neighborhoods eligible for a designation intended to help areas that have struggled with generational poverty.

Mantua and Drexel’s campus are in the same opportunity zone. A $43 million project dubbed the Village Square on Haverford got the go-ahead from the city in late 2019. It will bring 166 new apartments and townhomes to the opportunity zone in Mantua, with 80 units flagged as “workforce housing” with their selling price capped $230,000. That’s significantly higher than Philadelphia’s average home sale price of $188,000, and well out of reach for Mantua residents, whose income is less than half of the city’s median. The development will include 32 rental units of affordable housing, though there has been no word as yet about what definition of affordable the developers will use. The new development is located just a few blocks away from an off-campus housing complex marketed to students at Penn and Drexel.

Mantua residents have organized to have a say in how their neighborhood changes. They settled on a push to rezone most of the neighborhood as single-family housing, which they intended to prevent developers from buying up blocks of Mantua and converting the area into student housing for Drexel. They were successful, but the rezoning may not pay off in the long term. “It’s really a conundrum for the community to be in,” Wright said. “Multifamily [zoning] could potentially create naturally occurring affordable housing in the neighborhood because you can have apartments that might be available to lower-income or moderate-income people.” Focusing on protecting single-family homes means fewer available rentals — and higher rents.

That’s a problem, because people in the rental market may be the most vulnerable to changes in the housing market, according to sociologist Susan Clampet-Lundquist, professor at Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s University and University City resident. Overall, changing neighborhoods are a mixed bag for longtime residents. The changes do bring more amenities to the area. The Village Square on Haverford, for instance, will include a supermarket and a coffee shop. Homeowners will likely see the values of their property go up. But the story is different for renters. When people leave a rental, they are unlikely to find another unit at a similar monthly cost and may have to leave the neighborhood, a process of indirect displacement.

“To me, the most important part is indirect displacement, a reduction in affordable housing,” said Clampet-Lundquist. “That creates the demographic change that you end up seeing.”

Mantua residents aren’t necessarily opposed to college students in the neighborhood, Wright said. They don’t begrudge the developers now showing up because they will turn a profit. They just want to make sure they can stay in their homes and enjoy the benefits of those changes, too.

Politicians ranging from Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Biden have proposed changes to opportunity zones, from defunding the program (AOC) to reforming it (Biden). Biden’s reform plans don’t include specific housing protections for people in opportunity zones such as Mantua. And existing local and federal programs could help with this particular problem, including rent control, Section 8 housing vouchers, and assistance programs for long-term residents that subsidize the inevitable rise in property taxes, Clampet-Lundquist said.

Using these programs to help in cities where opportunity zones meet skyrocketing real estate prices could limit the damage to low-income areas. So would an acknowledgment that incentives designed to maximize return on investment for the wealthy may not be the best way to address poverty.

These moves, in communities in which tech companies have extracted special tax treatment and other benefits for decades, are supposedly meant to increase “affordable” housing stock. But for many area workers, including those at tech companies, the new housing will remain out of reach.

Apple’s plan calls for $2.5 billion in spending, including $1 billion in an affordable housing investment fund and $1 billion in first-time buyer mortgage assistance. It is the most generous of recent rollouts. Facebook committed $1 billion to the construction of 20,000 units, use of land owned by the company, and construction of housing for “essential workers” like teachers and firefighters. Google similarly offered $1 billion, primarily in the form of land. Meanwhile, philanthropic ventures such as The Bay’s Future, driven by tech company executives, are also pledging to wade in to the fight for affordable housing in the Golden State.

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“It’s a good thing these companies stepped forward,” said Jeffrey Buchanan of Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition campaign that includes unions and local advocacy groups. “There’s a huge need for financing” of the type that these commitments will provide.

But the problem of housing in the region isn’t just one of money, he explained. It also involves policy, better wages, and responsibility on the part of companies rapidly building up their campuses without adding complementary housing to prevent displacement — and ensure their own workers are housed.

Research indicates California needs 3 million new housing units by 2025; the Bay Area alone needs at least 187,000 units across all income levels according to the most recent state projection. 41.5 percent of households in the Bay Area are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing. 25,000 workers a day endure “super-commutes” of more than 90 minutes as they struggle to get from affordable communities to work in Silicon Valley.

In its recent “Out of Reach” report, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition found that the Bay Area’s housing wage — the amount of money you need to afford a two-bedroom apartment — ranges from $41 to $91 per hour. Statewide, workers need to work 116 hours a week at minimum wage to afford housing.

Meanwhile, a deeper look at many of the tech companies’ proposals furnishes vague details, though much talk of “affordable housing.” Many of the plans explicitly state the intent to produce mixed-income housing, rather than 100 percent affordable developments, something developers argue is usually necessary to make a development viable, especially in areas with high construction costs.

The definition of “affordable housing” in the Bay Area may surprise those who aren’t California residents. Low-income housing, defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as 80 percent of the area’s median income of $136,800, is still $129,150 for a family of four, and households making $80,600 are considered “very low-income.” “Extremely low-income” is $48,350.

The percentage of set-asides for affordable units varies; Facebook recently pledged 225 of 1,500, or 15 percent, of a planned Menlo Park development’s units for “affordable” housing. Notably, inclusionary zoning requirements in some Bay Area cities, like San Francisco, already force developers to include a set number of affordable units or pay in-lieu fees, and developers also benefit from incentive programs for constructing affordable housing. Thanks to state and federal policy, noted Buchanan, these units will eventually expire, with pricing jumping up to market rate.

While housing affordability for those outside the tech industry who feel squeezed by mounting costs driven by high tech company income is a significant issue, it’s a problem within the industry too, where all tech workers are not created equal. For employees in technical roles — such as developers, site reliability engineers, and more — it’s possible to afford to buy or rent housing units. Likewise for those in high-level non-technical roles, including attorneys, marketing executives, and some managerial positions.

But for the workers in the non-technical pipeline, including assistants, operations personnel, researchers, and customer service representatives, there’s a tremendous pay disparity — one that is exacerbated for contract workers, who are becoming a growing part of the tech workforce because of their low cost and shielded liability. Those workers are sleeping in their cars in the parking lots of their employers because they cannot afford housing, cleaning toilets, cooking food, driving buses, and providing security at marginal pay. When they’re not at companies like Facebook and Google, some are taking up shifts elsewhere, driving for ride shares, and hustling to pay the rent.

The tech companies’ plans lean heavily in to the popular argument that the affordability crisis in the Bay Area is one of availability; building housing, at any price point, is supposed to relieve this pressure. Advocates across the state are also pushing for rollbacks of density restrictions that limit the height and number of units that can be built, and promoting the of accessory dwelling units — also known as in-laws or granny units — to rapidly increase access to housing. Buchanan notes a growing interest in the use of co-housing — community living that integrates public and private spaces in a planned development — as well as community land trusts, which steward land to promote affordable housing, retaining ownership of the land while encouraging affordable development that gives residents a stake in their homes.

Not all advocates are convinced that this approach, known as filtering or trickle-down housing, is effective. Some raise concerns about the risks of displacement and gentrification, describing this as “a problem of equity and access,” not simply a question of housing units by the numbers. “YIMBYs,” wrote a collective from the LA Tenants Union, referring to boosters who push for filtering, “do not support empowering and protecting tenants through policies like right to legal counsel, just-cause eviction, and rent control. They overwhelmingly ignore the possibility of increasing supply with public or social housing.”

The policy struggles over housing highlight that simply building more isn’t always an option, speaking to deeper systemic problems that make it hard for people to find safe, sanitary, affordable housing in their communities. And even if building more housing is possible, say community organizations, that’s only one part of the solution to a complex problem.

Companies like Facebook and Apple are pledging to collaborate closely in public-private partnerships with policy-forward solutions, while still implying that privatizing public services is the only way to fix them. As long as tech companies dodge taxes, accept handouts and incentives, and receive preferential treatment, while relying on large philanthropic gestures to distract from their business practices, it’s hard to determine how much they can truly contribute to local economies.

I traded in my MetroCard for a CTA pass and moved to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. There was a creative black community, my $750 rent was affordable, and I still had enough money to get bottom-shelf whiskey if I went out. A new job opportunity took me from the beauty of the Southside to an $800 gem in Humboldt Park.

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Things were going decently until the neighborhood — filled with “2 Flats,” an affordable Chicago housing staple — began to change. Moving trucks were constantly present, and I began to see a lot more white faces. A 2018 study from the Institute of Housing Studies at DePaul University states that due to gentrification, 2 Flats in neighborhoods like mine — which often house multiple generations — were being purchased and turned into single family homes, pushing out lower-income residents.

My building was purchased by a management company who slapped on a coat of fresh paint, put one washer/dryer set in the basement ($4 per load), and then slid a note under my door telling me they were raising my rent. Within three years, the rent went from $800 to $1,200. In August of 2017 I got another notice: the rent was going up to $1,475.

A single-person household in Chicago earning under $36,000 yearly is considered to be very low income — that was me. Factoring in transportation, bills, student loans, helping family, food and more, there was no way I could survive in this or many other Chicago neighborhoods. Survival included entertainment, such as seeing a film or treating myself to my favorite lunch spot, even though the world chastises poor people for trying to get moments of joy in our everyday lives.

I needed a place to live and fast. I had to stay in Chicago; I built a life here with relationships and a budding career. I couldn’t afford to start over. I scoured the internet and tucked away in the news tab of Google was an article about an initiative that I had never heard of. The Affordable Requirements Ordinance, as it’s called, requires developers to dedicate 10 percent of their units to affordable housing or pay into a low-income housing fund; most developments, unsurprisingly, opt to pay out. A new twist to the ordinance was being tested in the areas of Logan Square, Avondale, and West Town (The Hipster Triangle), along with some Near North/West areas. It required developers to commit 15 percent of new residential buildings to affordable rentals or build affordable housing within two miles of the development.

This sounded like my key to staying in Chicago, but getting that affordable housing would prove to be a difficult and time-consuming task. There was no list of participating properties, no one answered at the phone number I found, and the only contact email was for buyers of low-income units. I walked around the city and collected numbers from the temporary signage of 18 developing properties. With every phone call, my inquiries were met with exasperation, confusion, or false promises of a returned phone call.

After a few weeks, one building set me up with an interview to obtain an application. A leasing agent asked about my educational background, my work experience, and if I was in programs like LINK and Medicaid. I was being vetted to make sure I was the “proper” low-income resident. They didn’t want to make their wealthy future residents uncomfortable. They wanted someone who could not be clocked as poor on top of being black when they saw me checking my mail. After more interviews and massive amounts of paperwork that included a copy of my degree and character letters from my managers, I was offered a studio. I had played their game and three weeks later I moved in.

It’s not just the city that has a vendetta against its non-wealthy residents; it’s the surrounding suburbs as well. The 85 percent lily white and wealthy suburb of Tinley Park, for example, recently reached a settlement with the Department of Justice and Department of Housing and Urban Development after an affordable housing development that would have brought black and brown faces failed to get approval after being opposed by residents. This historically racist suburb is paying out over $2 million in damages. This didn’t happen on some very special episode of a 1960’s sitcom. This happened in real life in a place that is 45 minutes outside of Chicago.

Developers are cashing in when they pay into the aforementioned low-income housing fund instead of offering an affordable unit. They get about half of that $225,000 fee back in tax credits and that’s just one of the incentives the city offers; more than $4 million has gone missing from the fund. Chicago has to stop rewarding developers for opting out of helping the poor. These buildings need to increase the amount of units available to low-income people and be required to offer them, no buying your way out. They should then be required to help fund housing in forgotten communities, helping them to rebuild and thrive.

This Affordable Requirements Ordinance Pilot Project is one way to address housing affordability and segregation, but communication and access are key to making it work. A visit to the city’s website or an appointment at the local Department of Human Services should have residents well on their way to finding housing that they can afford and be proud to call home. Residents shouldn’t have to become a detective at the poorly proposed West Side police and fire academy to find proper housing.