For decades, every city in the Bay Area has restricted housing production. And for decades, the Bay Area has gone deeper into housing debt. People and money continue streaming into the region, cities rarely allow new housing, and prices continue to rise.

This hurts every industry in the Bay Area and tech is no exception. The housing market steals money straight out of our pockets and, if we stay the current course, will rob us of the better version of ourselves we need more time to become.

How Housing Robs Us Blind

Housing in San Francisco costs 73% more than in Austin, 53% more than in Seattle, and 36% more than in Los Angeles. And figures for many of the Peninsula Cities are even worse. After accounting for cost of living, our real incomes in Bay Area tech are often lower than those of our colleagues in less expensive locales simply by virtue of housing costs.

Obviously, this is bad for us as employees, but it hurts founders and investors as well. The higher housing prices climb, the more founders have to pay employees to provide for the same standard of living. And the higher labor costs become, the more money founders have to raise from investors, meaning more capital gets tied up funding the same amount of work.

All this adds up to tech, as an industry, paying more and more to stay in the Bay Area for zero added benefit.

Median Rental Price per Bedroom Source: Trulia

But there’s more at stake than just burn rates and take-home pay. As it stands, housing prices are a millstone around our industry’s neck. And the longer it takes us to shrug off the burden, the more of our future we’ll lose while we struggle to keep running in place.

Selling Tomorrow to Pay for Today

Tech works because we have an underlying ecosystem of startups vetting each and every new idea. Whether a fledgling company grows up to be a unicorn, gets acquired by a giant, or dissolves into obscurity, it’s contributing to the massively scaled process of trial and error that drives our industry as a whole. This process, in turn, is powered by a continuous flow of people and ideas, all mixing and matching in the hopes of building something new.

But the higher housing prices climb, the fewer new people and ideas will be able to make it to the region. In a 2015 interview with Business Insider, Chamath Palihapitiya remarked that if he were just turning twenty now, the twenty-year-old version of himself probably wouldn’t come to the Bay Area because, at this point, it’s too expensive. Our broken housing system is silently depriving us of future contributors who could build great things; and for each individual who’s preemptively priced out, we’ll never know what those things might have been.

Our industry’s future, however, relies on more than just lowering barriers for a larger number of people to participate; it relies on lowering barriers for a wider range of people to participate as well. And accomplishing that has less to do with the people trying to come here as it does with the people trying to stay.

Stronger, Better, Faster: Building a More Inclusive Tech Industry

The Bay Area itself is diverse. But Bay Area tech is significantly less so, and we have every reason to view this as a problem. The more closely everyone’s backgrounds converge on common life experiences, the more similar everyone’s mental models of the world become. That sameness creates collective blind spots and leaves us myopic in deciding which problems are fit to be solved.

Embracing diversity — be it along lines of race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, age, or anything else — allows us to incorporate a wider range of perspectives into our decision-making. It helps us randomize our biases as we design products, build companies, and allocate capital. As an industry, it makes us collectively smarter.

Becoming a more inclusive industry, though, will not be easy — even in a region as diverse as ours. Many economically marginalized Bay Area communities suffer from limited access to education, particularly in the STEM fields most relevant to tech. Tech also has deep-seated biases when it comes to hiring. Personal referrals play a huge role at early-stage firms and while they’re great for getting quality talent who’ll click with the prevailing company culture, they don’t tend to foster diversity as employees end up recommending people already within their own social circles.

There’s also the problem of how a demographically unrepresentative population of investors dictates who gets funded. This affects who gets to play startup founder, who gets hired as early stage employees, who gets set up to be personally referred, and so on down the line.

Luckily, there are more than a few folks working on this. Organizations like Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code, Hack the Hood, Mission Bit and Telegraph Academy are equipping people from marginalized Bay Area communities with the technical skills they need to be effective. They’re also making in-roads into our industry’s insular social circles, building the relationships that will help lower barriers to entry in the future.

But even under the best conditions, meaningful diversity will likely take a generation. And under the worst conditions, displacement will only take a handful of years. San Francisco tends to get all the press, but longstanding communities in East Palo Alto, Oakland, and the greater East Bay are all facing pressure from skyrocketing rents as well. If we don’t fix what’s broken in our housing market, these communities will be pushed to the extreme peripheries of the Bay Area, if not expelled from the region entirely. And if that happens, all the work that’s been done to create a more inclusive tech industry will have been for nothing.

Some will read this and say, ‘So what? Tech doesn’t have to happen here.’ And they’re right, it doesn’t. But a tech that is less myopic, more diverse, and smarter on the whole, does. If we don’t get diversity right in the Bay Area, we’re not going to get it right in Seattle. In terms of the depth of our talent pool, abundance of capital, the maturity of our startup scene, and the diversity of our population — the Bay Area is unparalleled. There’s no place quite like it today and there’s no place anywhere close to becoming what it could be tomorrow.

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There are any number of things that we, as an industry, can and should be doing. But for now, I’ll ask for only one thing: just care.

Care enough to recognize that there’s a problem. Care enough to agree that it’s worth solving. And care enough to want to know what to do next. That’s a step farther than many in our industry have gotten, it’s the first step we have to collectively take before we can fix what’s broken, and, for today, first steps are enough.