MOUNTAIN VIEW — About a 10-minute drive from where Google is building its sleek, multi-billion dollar campus in Mountain View, there's a long row of RV's along the CalTrain tracks.
The people who park here can't afford to live any other way.
"The rent is too much," said Ricardo Castillo who lives with his eight-months-pregnant wife in a tiny travel trailer parked illegally near Rengstorff Park. "It's not the best, but it's better than standing out in the rain," he said about the small living space.
Skyrocketing rents are one of the reasons the city has called for and Google has committed to build up to 5,700 housing units with 20 percent designated as affordable.
"The exciting thing is that this 20 percent more than doubles the affordable housing that exists in Mountain View right now," said David Meyer, director of strategic initiatives at Silicon Valley at Home, a group advocating for more sub-market rate housing.
Google understands housing must be part of its expansion plans in the Bay Area, Meyer said.
"What we're excited about is for more companies to also take on this kind of challenge," he said.
The problem is that everyone struggling to make ends meet in Silicon Valley will not benefit from the supply of new affordable units.
Teachers, for example, in the Mountain View Whisman School District earn too much to qualify for affordable housing programs, yet find it tough to pay market rates.
"It's the irony of raising salaries," said Ayinde Rudolph, the district's superintendent. "We raise salaries to make it competitive, but we price them out of below-market rate housing.
"I think this is something that has to be solved by developers, by corporations," he said. "I think it has to be solved by the city as well as school districts."
This is part two of reporter Matt Bigler's special series "G-Town" about Google's vast development plans in Silicon Valley. Read part one here. The rest of the series will be published this week.
