Since the California Gold Rush, economic opportunities have drawn people to the Bay Area from all over the world. But for just as long, the region’s boom-and-bust economy has made it impossible for others to stay.
Since the 1990s, the tech industry has driven costs higher, but for some who work in the industry and haven’t struck IPO or AI gold, life in the Bay Area is not adding up.
Ani and Alex Vecchi, both software engineers, live in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley with their orange cat, Mushu. They haven’t been in the Bay Area long, but already, both aged 30, they’re starting to worry that the city they love may be too expensive for raising a family.
Mark Wogulis and Melanie Bowden, both 62, raised their family in Northern California, but a layoff made it impossible for them to stay. Last spring, they put their house in Berkeley on the market and drove to Santa Fe with a cat, Molly, and a chihuahua, Felice.
Researchers at Joint Venture Silicon Valley confirm what many already feel: the region’s economy is generating enormous wealth, but also growing impossibly unaffordable for most people.
Even well-paid tech workers are being forced to choose between the Bay Area and the rest of their lives.
“It distills to a few key points,” said Russell Hancock, President and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, at the organization’s annual State of the Valley conference in late February. “We have a very hot economy. It’s creating a lot of wealth. It’s not creating as many jobs. And our housing is too expensive.”
And it’s creating demographic churn — young people move in while older folks move out.
Ani and Alex Vecchi met about 10 years ago in physics class while studying software engineering at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
She went into front-end, customer interface work. She’s now a senior software engineer for Banquet Health, a startup software platform for hospital meals. “Using tech for a good cause is huge for me,” she said.
They came to the Bay Area in June of 2024 because Alex’s weather monitoring startup Sorcerer landed a $500,000 grant from Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator that launched Airbnb, Dropbox and DoorDash. It was, in startup terms, a golden ticket.
“Starting a company here, you have to do it here,” Alex said. The investors are here, or a short drive down the Peninsula. Scheduling a Zoom call? “It’s not the same,” he said. “Things spark here.”
Sorcerer closed a $3.9 million seed round last year. “That data is what powers, essentially, the forecasts on your phone.”
They have been having the time of their lives in San Francisco.
“There’s a lot of greenery,” Ani said. “There’s a lot of people out and about. You have that drive [to succeed in business], but it’s also peaceful, in some ways.” They love walking and picnics and meals with friends. “There’s a lot going on here,” Ani said.
The thing is, the Vechhis are starting to think about having children. But it’s complicated. They need both salaries, and both sets of parents, who could help them with childcare, live in Florida. And they’re not ready to make that move.
Rising child care costs in the Bay Area are forcing parents to make painful tradeoffs, either by passing up career opportunities, cutting back work hours, or quitting altogether. For families with multiple young children, these expenses can surpass a parent’s entire salary.
The Vecchis also shy away from the idea of leaving San Francisco for a Bay Area suburb with nominally cheaper real estate. “If we were to move out of the city, we might as well move back to Florida.”
“If you gave me the option and I had the money, I would stay here 100%,” Alex said. And the family back in Florida? “They understand. They want us to be happy where we are. They know that we’re doing a bunch of great things here. When we think about moving back, we think, ‘But we’re not going to be happy over there.’”
Research from Joint Venture Silicon Valley provides statistical confirmation of personal experience. For years, the Bay Area has created jobs faster than it builds housing, fueling relentless price pressure.
In Silicon Valley, just 28% of Millennials own homes, compared to 68% of Baby Boomers, giving older residents an asset to rely on even in tough times. The Vecchis, like most people their age here, are still scrambling for a financial foothold, even though they both work in tech.
“All these things have implications for community, and now we’re seeing it. We’re living it,” Hancock told KQED.
In some ways, Ani and Alex Vecchi and Mark Wogulis and Melanie Bowden are living the same story twenty years apart. Young people arrive, fall in love with a place, build a life. Then something shifts, and the place that felt like home starts to feel like a problem to be solved.
After decades in California, Mark Wogulis and Melanie Bowden felt the sting of leaving somewhere that felt like home. “It does hit differently,” Wogulis said, “when it’s not your choice.”
Wogulis and Bowden met decades ago when they were teachers in San Francisco. He was teaching science.
She was teaching math. They started a family. He pivoted from teaching to pharmaceuticals, then got a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology.
Pharmaceuticals and biotech are notoriously volatile, but he worked at Elan Pharmaceuticals in South San Francisco for nearly eight years, then at Novozymes in Davis for nearly 13.
From there, he moved to Amyris in Emeryville, which at the time specialized in developing sustainable alternatives for chemicals traditionally derived from petroleum or wildlife that were used in the beauty, flavor and fragrance industries. “Turned out everything they were selling, they were losing money on,” Wogulis said. “When the money ran out, they went bankrupt.”
There were three rounds of layoffs, but Wogulis remained optimistic. “I thought I had made it,” he said, because he hadn’t been laid off, even as the company went into and emerged from bankruptcy.
Then he got axed during a fourth round of layoffs.
At first, Wogulis thought he’d find another job, like he always had. But now in his 60s, his experience and longevity made him more expensive relative to other prospective employees.
“There’s no way to prove it, but there was no doubt in my mind that there was age discrimination involved,” Bowdon said. “He would be fully qualified for a job and hear nothing on many, many, many jobs.”
“There were people older than me at Amyris,” Wogulis said, “but not very many.”
It was also true that, thanks to LinkedIn and artificial intelligence, Wogulis was competing with biochemists from all over the world, many of them willing to relocate to the Bay Area.
“Yeah, there just was nothing,” Wogulis said. “I applied for a bunch of stuff that either I was over- or under-qualified for. I mean, I got a couple of rejections. Most of them just went off into the void.”
When the layoff came, the couple was living in Berkeley, in a 1,570 square foot Craftsman-style home they bought after raising their family in Davis.
“We loved the location. So close to BART and bus stops, and lots of good restaurants within walking distance. I could bike to work. We also liked the charm of such an old house,” Wogulis said.
But they crunched the numbers and realized they didn’t have much financial runway before they’d have to take off for someplace cheaper.
“We needed to get out of there. We couldn’t afford that house,” Bowden said. That’s how they decided to retire early at age 62 and move to Santa Fe, with their cat and dog in tow.
The couple, born on the tail end of the Baby Boom, had the benefit of owning homes for much of their working lives.
The proceeds from the sale of their house in Davis became the down payment for the house in Berkeley, so their mortgage was only $3,000 a month. Still, their utilities and property taxes added up to about $19,000 per year.
They moved to Santa Fe knowing nobody but their real estate agents, who helped them find a house for $600,000— half what they paid in Berkeley, even though it’s roughly the same size. They don’t even have a mortgage, something that seems wild to most Bay Area homeowners today. The property taxes are smaller, too: about $4,000 per year.
“We did it out of necessity,” Wogulis said. “I would have felt a lot better if I’d totally chosen to come here, I didn’t feel under the gun to do something. Yeah, that was difficult. It does hit differently when it’s…” he said, giving Bowden a chance to finish his sentence, the way longtime partners often do. “…When it’s not your choice. We had to move. We had to.”
“You know, there’s people I miss, definitely,” Bowden said. “Our neighbors are very nice.”
“It just takes time,” Wogulis said. “It took time in Berkeley, too.”
“Luckily, Santa Fe is a very cultural and artistic city. There’s so many museums, plays, concerts,” Bowden said. Their grown kids came to visit at Christmas. She is keeping up with masters swimming and cat rescue. They got a second cat through Felines and Friends. His name is Cyrus.
Back in the Bay Area, the AI revolution continues the region’s long tradition of minting new millionaires and billionaires. The question is whether everyone else can hold on.
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