Screen Shot 2015-10-26 at 11.50.34 AMIf you doubt that the gap between the tech-haves and the have-nots is widening, you need only look at this new Zillow report about how tech workers are affecting home prices in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

The real-estate site found that gap between the average tech workers’ homes and everyone else’s has been “widening” recently. In fact, the average Apple worker’s home is “worth more than five times as much as the average American home.”

Photo via Zillow/home for sale near Cupertino, CA for $1.7M
Photo via Zillow/home for sale near Cupertino, CA for $1.7M

Zillow also found that the average Google, Facebook or Apple employees’ home has a median value of “well over $1 million.” Say, like this average-looking, three-bedroom, two-bath gem built in 1977, measuring just over 1,800 square feet, that’s listed for more than $1.7 million (see right) in Cupertino, Calif.

“Bay Area home values are soaring, driven by a flood of well-paying jobs at technology companies,” Zillow states. “But Zillow found home-value appreciation for tech workers from these three companies outpaced that of their neighbors in Silicon Valley.”

Zillow says it used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and ran it through its Living Database of All Homes to come up with a median home value for workers near Apple, Google and Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Let’s look at some more not-so-fun numbers from Zillow about northern California’s hottest real estate markets. Think of it as a cautionary tale for those of us here in Seattle:

  • The typical worker at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters has a home worth about $1.14 million.
  • The median home value of Facebook workers is $1.25 million; for Google workers it’s $1.28 million in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, Calif., respectively.
  • Apple workers’ home values took off after the first iPhone was released in June 2007, when Apple’s stock price rose, increasing the wealth of many employees.

Additionally, San Francisco real estate continues to be very, very bad for non-millionaires.

Photo via Zillow/San Francisco
Photo via Zillow/San Francisco

In case you are sitting on top of your money, like a super-coding Scrooge McDuck, laughing and kissing your gold thinking, “Who cares?” You might want to start.

HBO recently premiered a documentary called San Francisco 2.0 by Alexandra Pelosi (yes, Nancy’s daughter) that shows how tech money is transforming San Francisco — and much of it is not pretty.

“San Francisco is a microcosm for what is happening not only in the United States, but all over the world,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says in the film, citing Vancouver, London and Manhattan as other examples, as San Francisco Business Times reports here.

“It is places that are increasingly desirable to live in that are becoming gated communities,” Reich continued. “I’m worried about a city that is becoming uniformly wealthy, out of reach and out of touch.”

San Francisco’s boom of custom cupcakes, specialty cocktail bars and sterile sky-rise apartments have stirred the likes of this guy, Stuart Schuffman, a.k.a. Broke-Ass Stuart, who’s running for mayor of San Francisco. He’s a great reminder that we all need to get out and vote!

Enjoy (language NSFW) via AJ+:

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