San Francisco, the nation’s hotbed of innovation and and a veritable millionaire-production factory is struggling with its economic development. To wit: a new report from the city’s Human Services Agency (via *The San Francisco Chronicle*and Valleywag) finds that, on some metrics, San Francisco has more income inequality than developing nations, rivaling not the likes of Sweden and Denmark, but countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

The figure cited by the Chronicle is the Gini coefficient, which measures income distribution on a scale of 0 (everyone shares wealth equally) to 1 (all of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of one person). Sweden landed at a .25, and Denmark came in at .24. The United States, per the World Bank, earns a .45, with San Francisco at .523—worse than Rwanda’s .508, and barely better than Guatemala’s .559.

Of course, one sole figure isn’t necessarily convincing, and a single rubric that was created in 1912 probably can’t tell the entire story of a city’s socioeconomic health. But the new report doesn’t arrive in a vacuum: the Brookings Institute found in February that San Francisco’s income inequality is growing at a higher clip than that of any other city, and that “skyrocketing housing costs may increasingly preclude low-income residents from living in the city altogether.” Only Atlanta currently has more income inequality than San Francisco. For reference, New York comes in at six on the institute’s list, with Chicago (8), Los Angeles (9), and Baltimore (10) closing out the top 10.

The director of the Human Services Agency told the Chronicle that while his caseload is not necessarily increasing, families who receive benefits are unable to apply them toward housing. Skyrocketing prices, buoyed by increasing numbers of increasingly wealthy residents, are outpacing any efforts of the lower classes to hold on to footholds in the city.

Much of the blame has landed at the feet of the Silicon Valley technology community, where it seems as if millionaires are christened daily. Flush with cash, tech entrepreneurs (and employees of giants such as Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) increasingly snap up apartments in the city, at times clashing violently with protesters who feel the industry has a responsible to invest in the community, and demand the government work to keep housing affordable for those left watching the tech boom. On the other hand, those working in the tech community see themselves as job creators and innovators unfairly maligned for their success. (The industry’s self-regard is a topic of never-ending scorn, as there’s a sense that tech companies are making life better and the rest of us should be only grateful that pervades the community and, at least in part, underwrites Mike Judge’s satirical HBO show Silicon Valley.)

The city’s response has as of yet not been particularly emphatic, though perhaps reports such as the one at issue today can be seen as signals that the disturbing shifts in income equality are not going unnoticed. Following public outcry over Google’s employee shuttle buses, San Francisco imposed a $1 per-stop, per-day tax on companies that pick up their employees in the city. The 18-month trial program is expected to net the city about $1.5 million, pennies compared with the $500 million per annum that some protesters have demanded. A U.C. Berkeley study found that rents for apartments within walking distance of a sample of Google bus stops were significantly higher than those not within walking distance of a stop.

What’s clear, regardless of what side of the gentrification/tech-boom debate one is on, is that San Francisco’s demographics are rapidly changing, and living in the city is increasingly—and rapidly—becoming a practical impossibility for many of its working-class residents. It remains to be seen whether the government (through increases in the minimum wage, public benefits, or more aggressive rent control) will ultimately elect to protect the city’s working class, or instead tilt even more in the direction of the technology industry.