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Every day, the Bay Area is topping national lists of places with housing crises. Now, we’re at the top of a different list — the list of who’s taking the lead on building affordable housing.

Last week, the Valley Transportation Authority Board passed the strongest affordable housing policy of any transit agency in the country.

The Valley Transportation Authority controls more than 300 acres of public land that will be getting developed in public-private partnerships. This new policy says each site must have a minimum of 20% affordable housing units, while setting a goal that in aggregate 35% of all the housing built will be affordable.

VTA is also targeting the communities who are affected the most by inequity, committing that half of the affordable units will be for extremely low income residents and half for very low income.

With low-income residents four times more likely to ride transit than high-wage earners, this policy takes aim not only at the Bay Area’s housing and displacement crisis but also at our carbon footprint.

The Bay Area is projected to add 2.1 million new residents by 2040, with Silicon Valley absorbing the largest share of that growth, yet regional plans have not shown where the housing will come from for of all these residents – let alone for the low-income residents. W ith cities and agencies across the county facing decisions every day about equity and inclusion – and the San Jose City Council facing a similar decision this spring about affordable housing on City-owned land – this landmark vote by the VTA board forms a critical part of our broader strategy to build and preserve tens of thousands of affordable housing units in Silicon Valley.

The victory we are celebrating today shows what happens when we stand together and say that public dollars and public land – our dollars and our land – can and must be leveraged to fill our housing gap, not make it wider.

Today we released a new research brief, Tech’s Invisible Workforce, which reveals the breathtaking scale and depth of a decades-long trend driving inequality in Silicon Valley.

Anyone working hard to get by in this region knows that rising rents and incomes that don’t keep up can make it seem harder every day. This new brief points to a key reason: in the low-wage industries that provide services to tech companies, jobs are growing three times faster than in the rest of the economy.

It’s time for tech to take responsibility for all the workers that support the industry. The technology industry is booming, and the jobs that are growing during the boom are in subcontracted industries and occupations – like cafeteria workers, security officers and janitors – dominated by immigrant workers and workers of color.

The jobs in these contracting industries don’t come with the six figure paychecks and stock options. Instead, they pay barely enough to cover rent – let alone food, gas, child care or health care.

The result is dramatic segregation by occupation: Potential contract workers – whether they’re in white-collar jobs like human resources or accounting, or blue-collar jobs like landscaping and food service – earn a fraction of what direct tech employees earn, and are up to 5.8 times more likely to be African American or Latino.

We see the impact every day in our communities: 22 percent of contract industry workers live in households with multiple unrelated families and 31 percent have no health insurance.

The tech industry is making enormous profits in our Valley off of these workers. Responsible industry leaders have the power to ensure that contracted workers share in the prosperity and wealth in this region.

Good corporate citizens take responsibility for making sure their contracted workers have good jobs and a voice at work. They invest in building a community where janitors, security officers, cafeteria workers, teachers, nurses, firefighters and other non-tech workers can afford to live. They create career opportunities for contracted workers, and they are transparent about this workforce when company data are reported.

Tech companies can do better.

Several billion dollars in transportation and land use planning funds flow to the San Francisco Bay Area each year – a projected $287 billion in the next 25 years.

In a groundbreaking policy shift, the regional planning and transportation agencies that oversee these funds voted this week to adopt two new priorities: stemming the Bay Area’s displacement crisis, and tackling inequality by growing good, middle-wage, career-path jobs.

The votes were the culmination of more than two years of advocacy by Bay Area communities and workers, spearheaded by the Quality Jobs Network and 6 Wins for Social Equity. Working Partnerships USA and our networks of grassroots allies have been working with these partners to say that displacement and good jobs need to be at the center of the regional debate.

$287 billion and the transportation and infrastructure they build have a profound impact on what kind of jobs and housing we have in the Bay Area, who gets to live and work here, and what their lives will be like.

Yet until recently, Plan Bay Area – the region’s plan for those investments – paid no attention to whether the growth that it supports was creating good jobs or bad.

As Bay Area communities have struggled with the double whammy of soaring rents and soaring wage inequality, development often happens in ways that exacerbate existing disparities and widen the wage gap.

Now the regional agencies have said that the success or failure of Plan Bay Area’s investments will be measured in part by whether they added middle-wage jobs and combatted displacement.