SAN JOSE — The housing crisis has hit home for San Jose City Councilmember Raul Peralez.

Peralez and his wife, six-month-old son and two dogs were forced to move from the home they rented just east of the airport for nine years when their landlords informed them they were moving out of state to retire — and selling the house.

With the economy strong — and a “Google village” planned by the internet giant surrounding Diridon train station in the councilman’s district — Peralez is the latest example of the toll Silicon Valley’s housing crisis is taking not just on low-income, but middle-income residents with six-figure incomes.

“This is what hundreds of families are feeling across San Jose and the region,” said Maria Noel Fernandez, the head of Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition that has raised concerns about Google contributing to gentrification and the area’s housing crisis.

Read The Price We Pay: How Rising Housing Costs are Transforming the Bay Area

Peralez’s landlord gave the councilman’s family 90 days to find a new place — a timeframe that still proved challenging for the young couple in the midst of the Bay Area’s housing crunch. They finally found a place that would take their dogs, a townhouse with no yard behind the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

“We’re paying $600 more — for less,” said Peralez, 37, who represents downtown and left his job as a San Jose police officer to run for city council.

“We were in the same challenge as everyone else,” he said. “I’d love to have not been in the hunt for an apartment. I’d love to be in the hunt for a house. But we don’t have the ability to afford a home — and so we’re struggling in that regard and we’re renting.”

As a council member, Peralez makes $97,000 a year but will see that rise to $125,000 this summer after the city’s salary setting commission voted recently to raise council members’ salaries. His wife, Victoria Ramirez, works for a non-profit.

A Bay Area News Group special report, “The Price We Pay” published Sunday on the region’s runaway cost of housing found both renters and home buyers require more than six-figure incomes to afford a home in San Jose’s neighborhoods surrounding downtown.

And with Google expanding downtown, housing advocates warn the search for affordable rents could drive away more working-class families.

Peralez’s District 3 stretches from roughly Highway 101 on the north and east to Interstate 280 and Alma Street on the south to Highway 87 on the west. It encompasses the site of mostly industrial buildings and parking lots that Google has been buying up for its new downtown campus that could add housing and office space for more than 20,000 workers over the next decade. Just the specter of Google coming to town is affecting the housing market — even though construction could be years away.

“Almost every single location that we were looking said ‘near the new Google village,’” Peralez said. “That’s sort of the tagline now, so I know the effect is real.”

“I think it’s very real,” Fernandez said, adding that she and other renters are seeing landlords and real estate agents use proximity to Google as a savvy marketing tool.

It’s a fact of life that Peralez is clearly internalizing as he evaluates the Google project, which is still in the planning stages. In December, the city sold several pieces of property to Google for more than $100 million, critical pieces for the company to commit to San Jose, and the tech giant has the option to purchase several more parcels from the city. Since the end of 2016, Google has spent nearly $320 million on property downtown.

But so far, the direct impact of Google’s buying spree on rents in surrounding neighborhoods has been negligible, according to data compiled by Zillow and analyzed by the Bay Area News Group.

The median rent in neighborhoods in the 95110 ZIP code, which includes Google’s planned campus, has remained flat, actually dropping by $9, from 2016 to 2018, to $2,763. Neighborhoods in the 95112 ZIP code, just east of downtown, have seen a $33 rise in median rent during that period, to $3,112. Data was not available for the heart of downtown’s 95113 ZIP code.

But like the rest of the region, downtown neighborhoods have seen bruising rent increases in the last six years, with median rents in those two neighborhoods jumping 36.7 percent in ZIP 95110 and 41.2 percent in ZIP 95112.

“Yes, there is a shortage of available housing,” said Matt Mahood, president of the business advocacy group The Silicon Valley Organization. But, he said, “I don’t think the councilman’s issues can be attributed to a nonexistent Google campus.”

While the campus and other developments are in the works downtown, there aren’t thousands more workers flooding San Jose, Mahood said.

Fernandez said the lack of a campus doesn’t matter.

“People know that Google is coming. I think people are capitalizing on it now and trying to take everything they can from this potential project,” said Fernandez whose family had to leave their home in San Jose’s Japantown because the owner decided to sell the condo. She wanted to stay in the neighborhood but couldn’t find anything affordable and ended up moving to south San Jose..

Peralez said he has an extra responsibility to help tackle the affordable housing issue. He posted on Facebook Monday that he and his wife realize how lucky they were to have had such a stable housing situation over the years and how fortunate they were to find a new townhome downtown.

“How do we ensure that San Jose remains a place that everybody can continue to afford to live?” he said in an interview last week. “And that includes the people that are just like me that have maybe grown up here their whole lives.”

Still, he said, “I have no personal interest in closing the door on growth and innovation in our city. And I think we should continue to be open to growth and development.’’

However, he added, he and city officials need to keep a proper balance of growth and housing. “That’s the one unique place where I have an opportunity to help make a difference here.”