By Ester Bloom | CNBC
Rents in San Francisco and Silicon Valley have reached such unprecedented heights that some Facebook engineers reportedly asked Mark Zuckerberg for help paying rent, some Twitter employees earning $160,000 feel like they’re barely scraping by, and even some residents making six-figures can qualify as “low-income” and receive subsidies. Now, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has come up with a patch: It is paying about $30 million to provide temporary, prefab housing for 300 of its employees.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Alphabet is making a significant investment in modular housing built and shipped in from elsewhere by the start-up Factory OS, because the current local offerings are so overpriced: “San Francisco rents have jumped by almost 50 percent since 2010, while home prices have increased 98 percent since the bottom of the market in 2009.”
