Photo: James Tensuan, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Mason Trinca, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Tyson Pope

Palo Alto

Jane Huang, 29

Huang moved to Palo Alto with her parents at the age of four. She attended local high schools and Stanford University. Yet despite her hard work, the Palo Alto housing market is too challenging for her to foresee a future in her hometown.

“I went to Stanford, I work as a software developer, I make a six-figure income, and I still have to live with three roommates,” Huang said. “What more can I do?”

Huang isn’t worried about not being able to pay her rent, but she is worried about doing anything that might upset her landlord. “Landlords have a lot more power here than they used to,” she said.

“They know how impossible it would be for their renters to find anything else locally.”

While her concerns for herself are real and serious — “With the current housing market, I’m afraid I’ll have to live with roommates for the rest of my life” — she’s equally concerned about what the housing market means for the many Palo Altans who weren’t fortunate enough to go to Stanford and make six figures.

“I’ve seen a lot of people accepting crazy conditions in order to have somewhere to live,” Huang said. “Conditions like, the renter can’t use the kitchen, or the renter can’t have guests after 10 p.m., or the rent is 80 percent of someone’s income.”

After hearing enough of these stories, Huang started speaking at City Council meetings about the need for more housing in Palo Alto.

“It feels very much like the older generation just wants us to go away,” Huang said. “But this is my home, too.”

Palo Alto

Jessica Clark, 41

Clark was born and raised in Palo Alto. She and her husband, another native Palo Altan, have three children in the local public schools. Her husband is a respiratory therapist, and until several years ago, Clark ran a thriving day care business in their home. Then their landlords decided to move in, tossing them on the recent housing market — and changing their lives.

“The only place we could afford to rent at that time was a much smaller, much more expensive condo where I could no longer run my day care,” Clark said. “So I was forced to shut down.”

With the family’s income reduction, they qualified for Palo Alto’s Below Market Rate Housing Purchase Program, a program to help low and moderate-income buyers secure units. To put it mildly, the program is oversubscribed.

“This will be our sixth year on the list,” Clark said. “There are still more than 200 applicants ahead of us.”

Meanwhile, their rent keeps going up. Two years ago, Clark said, their current landlord raised their rent by nearly $1,000 a month. They can’t pay any more than they’re already paying.

“We’re paying $4,000 a month for a 1,200-square-foot condo,” Clark said. “But there are places nearby renting for $5,300. Our lease will be up in June 2018, and then I don’t know what we’ll do.”

The uncertainty has affected her kids.

“They ask me all the time, ‘Where will we go next?’” Clark said. “I can’t shield them from this. They see it at their schools, too — about 85 percent of the staff at the elementary school has to commute. There are real cracks in the foundation of the community here.”

It’s not easy to leave, Clark said, because her extended family’s lives are in Palo Alto.

“Our parents are getting older,” she said. “Our siblings live nearby. Our children’s lives are here.”

But with a new lease term approaching, they have started to think about it. If they had to move, Clark says, it would be out of the Bay Area altogether.

“Anywhere we could move locally, we’d be facing the same issue in a few years,” Clark said.

Worried about her family, she started going to city council meetings. “And I just heard people complaining about traffic, about height limits, about trying to turn Palo Alto into Manhattan. I’m not asking for the moon here. I don’t think Palo Alto will become unrecognizable with a change in zoning laws and more homes. I think that will make it possible for Palo Alto to keep the people who hold a community together.”

Berkeley

Tyson Pope, 34

Pope, who grew up in Southern California, is in his final semester as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. A transfer student from Riverside City College, Pope is dyslexic — a condition which influenced his long path to a bachelor’s degree.

It’s also a condition that’s complicated his quest for housing he could afford in Berkeley.

As a transfer student, Pope was able to live in campus housing at first. (All new students at UC Berkeley are given priority status for on-campus housing.) Once his priority status was over, he didn’t win the continuing student lottery for on-campus housing. He tried the Berkeley Co-op, but his learning disability means that he needs a quiet space in which to concentrate.

“The environment wasn’t good for me,” Pope said. “It was clear that my grades were going to suffer.”

After repeated appeals to the campus housing office failed to turn up a room for him, Pope started looking for off-campus housing. (UC Berkeley doesn’t give priority in its housing lottery to continuing students, even if they’re disabled. Spokesman Adam Ratliff said the shortage of student housing “is a major concern for the university.”)

The Berkeley market was, to put it mildly, a shock.

“The university’s rental listing service had all of these units that were $4,000 or $5,000 a month,” Pope said. “The only relatively affordable rooms I could find were in the parts of Oakland or Richmond that were nowhere near public transportation, and I don’t have a car.”

The situation got so stressful, Pope said, that he contemplated not coming back to campus at all.

“I was doing research about whether there was some way for me to finish through Berkeley’s extension program,” Pope said. “I just didn’t see a way to live there long enough to finish my degree.”

Finally, he found a room for $1,500, on the south side of Berkeley. It’s more than he can afford. He’s taken out another student loan, and his family has scrambled to come up with extra money to help him.

He’ll graduate in December. He intends to study for a master’s degree in education, so he can help other students with learning disabilities, but first he needs to work. He’s already thought about the kinds of jobs he’ll apply for — all of them, he said, far away from the Bay Area.

“The housing situation here definitely impacted my future plans,” Pope said.

A closer look at two Bay Area cities

Palo Alto

Despite a 1989 cap on nonresidential development, Palo Alto continues to struggle with a significant jobs-housing imbalance. The average rent in Palo Alto in July 2017 was $3,298, according to property data research business Rent Jungle. One-bedroom apartments were $2,850 a month, and two-bedroom apartments were $3,808.

The lack of affordable housing in Palo Alto has been a major political issue there for the past two years. Leaders are listening. Since 2016, city officials have worked to preserve the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park and to explore a number of changes to zoning regulations and height limits.

The June 2017 draft of Palo Alto’s new comprehensive plan update calls for allowing higher density residential buildings along major commercial corridors. Increased density means more housing units.

Berkeley

Berkeley’s rental prices and home values have skyrocketed over the past few years. The median rent in Berkeley in June 2017 was $3,650, according to real estate firm Zillow.

Berkeley leaders and citizens have responded to the city’s housing crisis in a variety of ways. On the one hand, voters in the November 2016 election passed Measure AA, which strengthens rent control protections. On the other hand, Berkeley was sued twice in the past year for refusing to approve a small housing development which neighbors complained would create traffic congestion and cast shadows on their homes.

UC Berkeley’s new chancellor, Carol Christ, has put housing at the top of her list of concerns for the university. One conceptual plan — to put student housing and supportive housing for the homeless in People’s Park — has met with controversy.