Geography Professor Emeritus Richard Walker was featured in a KQED article titled, "Housing, Tech and Taxes: 50 Years of Unaffordability in the Bay Area."
The carefully curated flower pots, matcha mixing bowls and Buddhist prayer beads at Kogura Co. in San José’s Japantown have drawn shoppers for decades.
Richard Kogura’s family has operated the Japanese gift and home goods store, now near the corner of Jackson and North Sixth streets, since his grandfather Kohei Kogura started the company in 1928.
Over the decades, the store’s inventory has shifted — from radios and sewing machines to home goods and gifts — mirroring the changes unfolding outside its doors.
Just as the wares have changed over the years, so has Japantown: evolving from a working-class neighborhood to a haven of high-priced apartments as handsomely paid tech workers and developers have flocked to the area.
“As I look at folks that are moving into our neighborhood,” Kogura said, “the only people who can afford to move into the neighborhood right now are the high-tech.”
Across the street from his shop is Sixth and Jackson, a 518-apartment complex opened two years ago that lists studios for rent beginning at roughly $3,000 per month, climbing to roughly $11,000 for the highest-end three-bedroom units.
“The sponsors of our Little League teams were the Plumbers, the Carpenters, the Teamsters,” Kogura, 70, recalled as he walked the aisles of his family’s shop on a sunny Tuesday in March and reflected on his upbringing.
“If you needed a job, there was always work because of the canneries,” he said, referring to companies like Del Monte that once anchored the local economy.
Those jobs are gone. In their place: a tech-driven economy that brought immense wealth — and costs that many longtime residents can no longer afford.
Over the past half-century, the Bay Area has transformed from a region where working- and middle-class families could build stable lives into one of the most expensive places in the country.
That shift was driven by the collision of explosive tech-fueled wealth with decades of constrained housing growth, shaped by local opposition to development, environmental regulation and tax policies like Proposition 13.
The result is a region where soaring home prices and rents have outpaced wages, deepened inequality and pushed longtime residents to the margins or out altogether — forces now reshaping communities like San José’s Japantown and affecting the people struggling to remain in them.
Powered by decades of tech expansion, limited housing construction and policies that restrict turnover and development, the region’s cost of living first got out of sync with the rest of the country around 50 years ago, experts say, with more recent tech booms only furthering sky-high costs and wide disparities.
“The Bay Area is rich and prosperous, and that creates a very high demand for housing, and that drives up prices,” said Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at UC Berkeley and an expert on California history.