Overcrowded Housing Invites Covid-19, Even in Silicon Valley

This geography is as fundamental to how the place operates as the invention of the microchip. Every day, throngs of clerks, landscapers and elder-care workers wake up on the eastern parts and travel to homes on the western parts or to the corporate campuses of tech companies to do subcontracting work. And every night, they return to overcrowded homes.

Ms. Lorenzo was one of them. She immigrated to the United States six years ago from Guatemala with her two children, fleeing a broken relationship and looking for a new start. Now she is a green-card holder with a new partner and a 2-year-old. Until the pandemic hit, she made about $16 an hour mopping floors and vacuuming carpets in homes on the other side of the peninsula.

For a while, her wages and Abel’s were enough for their own small place — a $1,600-a-month studio that had a bed for them and a shared mattress for the children. Then the rent jumped to $2,100. And then to $2,650.

The couple went looking for cheaper housing and roommates, a quest that has become a Bay Area ritual. Since the Great Recession, a growing share of Bay Area movers, from all but the most well-off households, have gone to homes with four or more adults from ones with one or two adults, according to a study by researchers at Stanford University and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The high-end version is dressed up with a description like “co-living” or explained as a culturally in-tune couple sacrificing an extra bedroom in the suburbs for a life of less driving closer to the city. The low-end version is poverty. Whatever it is called, the economic calculus is the same.

Wages are higher in coastal California than in inland areas, where housing is cheaper, so all but the very rich have to make a trade-off between a commute and space. It is just that the choices for poorer workers are more extreme, like a three-hour commute from cities like Stockton or huddling together in homes where nearly every space is the site of someone’s bed.