San Jose is battling a number of social problems as it deals with those fiscal challenges. Its poverty rate is 12.9 percent, and there are still hundreds of homeless people, even though the city shut down the homeless people’s encampment known as “The Jungle” in late 2014. As more people are unable to keep up with rising costs in the region, many end up on the city’s streets.

“We have the social costs of the income divide in San Jose without the resources to address them,” Vossbrink said.

It can be disconcerting to see the poverty amid so much prosperity, especially because poverty in San Jose looks different than it might elsewhere. There are no hulking public apartment complexes here, nor are there homeless people begging for money on the subway, because there isn’t a subway (though there is a downtown light-rail system). Instead, people here stay in their cars and drive from work to home, making it possible to completely avoid seeing poverty at all.

Lisa Silva, for instance, has spent weeks sleeping behind a library. I met Silva in a well-manicured parking lot for the county’s social- services office, where she was sitting on a bench, guarded by her dog Shorty, who was in a shopping cart nearby. Silva had lived in a duplex in San Jose for seven years, until the landlord decided to make it into a single-family apartment and charge more rent. Silva, who is on Social Security Insurance, could no longer pay the rent—she only receives $900 a month—so she became homeless. She’s signed up for the Section 8 housing list, but was told the waiting list is 12 years. The website now says that waiting list is closed.

“I’ve never been homeless before, but it’s gotten very expensive,” she told me. “It’s a hard place to live.”

With such a gap between rich and poor, some advocates say that San Jose should be requiring the billion-dollar businesses based here to pay more in taxes. The San Jose State professor Scott Myers-Lipton is gunning to put such an initiative on the ballot in November. The gross-receipts tax, as it is known, would charge local businesses anywhere from 60 cents to $1.20 for every $1,000 they earn. (Businesses that make less than $1 million would be exempt.) The measure would raise an additional $30 million to $70 million a year, he believes.

“Why is it that San Jose, the richest city in the richest country in the world, has the third-worst roads in the U.S.?” he said. “We’re trying to expose some of the contradictions within our community.”

Myers-Lipton, who created a group, San Joseans for a World Class City, to advocate for the tax, is no stranger to local businesses. In 2012, students from one of his courses, which encourages students to engage in social action, felt that raising the minimum wage in San Jose would improve life for residents. So they gathered 20,000 signatures and put the initiative on the ballot. When it passed, raising the minimum wage from $8 an hour to $10 an hour, San Jose became the largest city in the country to increase its minimum wage.