Aerial view of San Jose, Calif.
Aerial view of San Jose, Calif.
San Jose is officially the least affordable city to buy a home in the world, and that’s not a local exaggeration. It’s one of the first data points in the 2026 Silicon Valley Pain Index, the seventh annual report from San Jose State University’s Human Rights Institute. The jarring fact sadly sets the tone for what follows in the report: more than 300 statistics pulled from over 250 sources arranged from smallest to largest, telling a comprehensive story of the region’s inequality.
Set aside individually, the data is staggering. The median single-family home in Silicon Valley sold for $1.98 million in 2025, more than $1.1 million above the state median. Roughly 0.1% of homes sold for under $500,000. Meanwhile, 0.1% of households have more than $30 million in investable assets, and the top 10% of residents control 75% of the area’s $1.17 trillion in liquid wealth. The bottom half holds less than 1%. In terms of pay, a tech worker’s salary outpaces a food service worker’s by more than $400,000.
These gaps are seen across the report. Only 6% of technical roles at Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies are held by Black employees and only 8% by Hispanic or Latino employees. Latino residents in Santa Clara County are also arrested at 3.4 times the rate of white residents, the highest disparity in the state. More than 5,600 households were evicted in 2024, nearly triple the number in 2021. Annual infant care now costs nearly $35,000, triple what it cost two decades ago.
Aerial view of Cupertino, Calif.
Aerial view of Cupertino, Calif.
Michael Dao, director of SJSU’s Human Rights Institute and one of the report’s principal investigators, has worked on the index for the past three years. During a phone call with SFGATE, he shared that this year’s report didn’t produce many surprising findings but instead pointed again to a consistent story: people being priced out of the same region that’s minting billion-dollar companies around them.
Dao added that federal funding and budget cuts, especially the impact of H.R 1 on food safety net programs, have been working their way into county services and further increasing instability in Silicon Valley.
Over the years, the report has become a valuable resource. Community-based organizations cite statistics from the Pain Index to help secure funding, though Dao said its future also isn’t bulletproof. He and the other principal investigators work on it for free outside of their normal roles at the university.
Still, Dao stressed that the value of the report isn’t in the numbers themselves but what they stand for. “While you may see a number,” he said, “those numbers are actually representing a person or family facing an intersection of problems.”