With the help of Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, PayPal, Google, Yahoo, Netflix and others, the center of gravity for tech companies gradually shifted from the East Coast to the West Coast.

Year after year, Silicon Valley companies draw in tens of thousands of software engineers, lawyers and other professionals. Not all of them make huge salaries, but in recent years, the economic influx has displaced thousands of people who do not work in tech, forcing them to leave the Bay Area. A quick search on the real estate platform Zillow reveals the median home price in Palo Alto is $2,833,400.

The Housing Crisis

"You can see people living in vehicles on the streets," said Lenny Siegel, former mayor of Mountain View. "School districts are losing teachers. It's gotten worse because we've had this unprecedented employment growth and very little housing development."

The Stanford Research Park is home to more than 150 different companies and their 23,000 employees. The university itself directly employs about 13,028 staff members, plus another 2,240 faculty members as of 2018.

“We had faculty housing on campus from the very beginning, to provide an opportunity for faculty to be close to the education and research mission of the institution," said Martin Shell, Stanford's vice president and chief external relations officer. "And we think that we’ve been following in that tradition for the last 125 years.”

"They [Stanford University] are the major employer on the Mid-Peninsula both for the university faculty and staff, but more importantly perhaps, numerically, is the Medical Center. It's a huge employer, so big that now they have a separate plant out in Redwood City that thousands of people are working at," historian Staiger said.

Stanford officials told our investigative reporting team they plan to build about 1,300 housing units and more than 2,400 beds for graduate students, at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.

“We did that for many reasons, not the least of which was our graduate students were increasingly having a challenge to find a place to live in close proximity where they could afford to live here,” said Shell.

When an apartment complex in the works, the expanded Escondido Village Graduate Residences, opens in about a year, Stanford will house more than 75 percent of its graduate students on its campus. The university already houses all of its undergraduates on campus.

Some may ask why building more housing is Stanford’s problem when Mountain View, Palo Alto and other nearby cities also haven’t kept pace with growing demand over the last half-century. Or, for that matter, whether it's a problem for tech companies in the region to solve.

In recent months, tech titans like Google and Facebook have announced major initiatives to help build housing for their employees and others, providing a combination of cash and land as incentives and asking local municipalities to help shape their housing plans.

That shift in the public conversation is putting Stanford in the spotlight for a growing number of local politicians and housing advocates. "Stanford has more land than the city of Mountain View," said Siegel. "Yeah, they’re a big institution and they do a lot, but they need to do more."

Expanding Real Estate Empire

Stanford leases homes to faculty at prices well below market rates — it’s one of the ways Stanford attracts top academic talent from around the world that might not otherwise move to the region.