Tech Made Cities Too Expensive. Here's How to Fix It

In 2013 protests broke out in Oakland, California, directed against the private buses that shuttle tech workers from pricey homes in the city's gentrifying areas to jobs in Silicon Valley. "You live your comfortable lives," read a flyer that protesters handed out to passengers, "surrounded by poverty, homelessness, and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success." That moment of backlash was an outgrowth of what I call the New Urban Crisis: the decline of middle-class neighborhoods, the gentrification of the downtowns of certain cities, and the reshaping of America's metropolitan regions into islands of advantage surrounded by larger swaths of disadvantage. Technology is one of the country's biggest growth industries, but it comes at a price--just ask any teacher looking for housing in San Francisco. Meanwhile, other areas aspire to build similar tech-based economies, hoping to become a Silicon Alley, Prairie, or Gulch, though potentially triggering crises of their own.