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Valencia has been fighting eviction since she fell behind on her US$1,064 rent payment in November. And she’s not the only one. Each month, as many as 300 Woodland Park residents receive notices from Equity Residential giving them three days to pay or vacate their homes, according to an employee’s sworn testimony in a lawsuit.

“I’m alone and I don’t have a family to fall back on,” said Valencia, 32, who works for a contractor that operates Tesla’s food services. “It seems like they just don’t want us here.”

East Palo Alto is the last haven of low-rent housing in a region where companies like Tesla, Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. have minted at least two dozen billionaires and thousands of millionaires. Woodland Park is where Silicon Valley’s cooks, janitors and housekeepers live, often working second jobs to hang on to their homes as rents soar and wages stagnate.

Declining Affordability

Affordable housing is becoming harder to find as communities like Woodland Park disappear from cities across the country. One in four renters in the U.S. now spend more than half of their income on housing, up from one in five a decade ago, according to a 2013 report from the Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“It’s not a problem that’s just unique to those high-cost markets,” said Christopher Herbert, research director at the center. “It’s felt in a lot of communities across the country. We do see it even in low-costs markets, reflecting the big disparity between what it costs to provide housing and what low-income people earn.”