Scenes from California’s progressive feudalism…

On a morning the stock market was sailing to a record high and a chilly storm was blowing into Silicon Valley, Wendy Carle stuck her head out of the tent she calls home to find city workers duct taping an eviction notice to her flimsy, flapping shelter walls.
“I have no idea where I’m going to go,” she said, tugging on her black sweatshirt over her brown curls and scooping up Hero, an albino dog. …The Silicon Valley is adding jobs faster than it has in more than a decade as the tech industry roars back. Stocks are soaring and fortunes are once again on the rise.
But a bleaker record is also being set this year: Food stamp participation just hit a 10-year high, homelessness rose 20 percent in two years, and the average income for Hispanics, who make up one in four Silicon Valley residents, fell to a new low of about $19,000 a year— capping a steady 14 percent drop over the past five years, according to the annual Silicon Valley Index released by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, representing businesses, and the philanthropic Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Simply put, while the ultra-rich are getting even richer, record numbers of Silicon Valley residents are slipping into poverty.

“The fact is that we have an economy now that’s working well only for those at the very top,” said Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C. “Unless we adopt a new approach to economic policy, we’re going to continue going down this path, which means growth that does not really benefit the great majority of people in this country.” Nationally, Mishel says the declining value of the federal minimum wage is a major factor driving inequality. On Monday, in an effort to address this, minimum hourly wages will rise from $8 per hour to a new minimum of $10 per hour, the nation’s largest minimum wage increase approved by voters last fall.

The median home price is $550,000, and rents average just under $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in this region that is home to many of the nation’s wealthiest companies including Facebook, Apple Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Google. For a family of four, just covering basic needs like rent, food, childcare and transportation comes to almost $90,000 a year, according to the nonprofit Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

Before the Great Recession, about 10 percent of people seeking food had at least some college education. Today, one in four who line up at food pantries for bags of free food have been to college. Last year the share of households in Silicon Valley earning less than $35,000 rose two percentage points to 20 percent, according to the 2013 Silicon Valley Index.

Stanford University, in Palo Alto, boasts 1,173 alumni with a net worth of more than $30 million — only Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have more.
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“There are millionaires, even billionaires, who sit in their sunrooms watching me work in their gardens and they have no clue what’s going on,” said Sherri Bohan, a credentialed horticulturist who ran a landscape gardening firm for 30 years and raised two sons as a single mom. Today, retired and disabled, she picks up a free bag of groceries every week at her local food bank. Without the food she says she would go hungry.