Yesterday, the Times provided a May Day update from Havana on the development of "class consciousness" in Cuba. Today it is Silicon Valley that gets squeezed into the Times' laughably predictable framework of analysis: "Corporate Jet Center Exposes Silicon Valley's Class Divide," the headline over the article says.
In fact, people of all classes who live near airports don't like the noise. This is true, in my experience and observation, regardless of economic conditions, geography, or income inequality, and regardless of whether the airplanes involved are private Gulfstreams or not-so-private People Express planes. Rather than demonstrating a class divide, the nearly universal opposition to airplane noise from neighbors of airports show that many issues transcend the class boundaries that are so ardently reinforced by Times reporters and editors.
The reporting in the article illuminates the lack of a class divide. It quotes a "part-time school custodian" saying she is "going to try to talk to that guy at Facebook" about trying to prevent the conversion of the Palo Alto mobile home park where she lives to luxury residences. If the class divide were as sharp as the Times insists it is, such communication would be unthinkable.
What the article is really about is an inflation in the price of houses in Silicon Valley. The Times reports:
Sales figures for single-family homes in Santa Clara and San Mateo, the two main counties in Silicon Valley, show median prices have risen about 30 percent in the past year while the inventory of available homes has fallen by roughly half, according to an analysis of local multiple listing service data by the Silicon Valley Association of Realtors. The median prices for March — $735,000 in Santa Clara and $925,000 in San Mateo — only hint at the current market's frenzy.
Each property now typically attracts between 10 and 30 offers, eventually selling from 5 percent to 25 percent above the asking price, said Moise Nahouraii, the owner of Referral Realty in Cupertino. Jeff Barnett, a former president of the association and a regional vice president at Alain Pinel Realtors, said 30 percent to 40 percent of sales were paid in cash.
One can interpret these developments in terms of a "class divide," as the Times does. Or one can interpret them in terms of the effects of the Federal Reserve's zero interest rate policy — "zirp," or of California's strict environmental regulations that protect ridgelines, redwoods, and live oaks and that make it very difficult to win approval for the construction of new housing. The Times article doesn't mention the effects of regulatory restrictions on the supply of new housing. Nor does this particular article mention interest rates.
Over on the op-ed page, however, Nobel laureate economics columnist Paul Krugman, under the headline "Not Enough Inflation," writes that inflation, "at barely above 1 percent by the Fed's favored measure," is "dangerously low," and that such low inflation "encourages sitting on cash." Someone should tell Professor Krugman about housing prices in Silicon Valley.