Earlier quoted context omitted.
the jobs that are mentioned in the article that are being hit the hardest are teachers, firefighters, caretakers and so forth. How many of those have been automated away? It seems that tech workers in the valley have found their own analog to blaming immigrants for downward wage pressure, their particular boogeyman seems to be the robots. No, the answer is much more trivial. As the article points out, the huge influx…
I think there’s a step missing in the analysis there. If tech workers are spending all this money — what are they spending it _on_? If they’re spending it locally shouldn’t that increase wages locally?
To be clear the flow is: tech companies make enormous revenue but require high skill workers. To make this work they pay whatever it costs to get workers and no more - in this case that means just enough to offset the enormous cost of housing.
Since the baby boomers practically banned all housing development in the bay once their little burns were built, this result in a little see-saw battle where landlords raise the rent until tech companies are forced to raise wages, back and forth. Employees are left with an equation that looks basically like: enormous salary - obscene rent = just a bit more cash flow than you’d earn in software anywhere else.
Thus the flow of capital is from tech companies to landlords, in an arms race that will only end when the landlords have taken so much of the capital out of tech that the industry sputters and moves away.