On Wednesday, nearly a hundred San Jose workers, residents, and community leaders assembled at the Googleplex in Mountain View to tell Google: if you’re coming to San Jose, you need to be a good neighbor.
From our town hall meetings and surveys, it’s clear that our community is concerned the Google mega-campus will price out working families and break up our diverse neighborhoods.
With this in mind, we delivered an open letter directly to Google saying it must address the housing impacts of this project. We told Google we expect it to:
- Contribute to an affordable housing fund for San Jose
- Reserve 25% of residential units in the project for low-income tenants
- Financially support the legal defense of San Jose tenants facing eviction
- Support tenants’ rights policies
Later that day, we marched and lit up City Hall with the words SAN JOSE IS NOT FOR SALE to tell the Council they must not sell out San Jose’s diverse communities as they negotiate with Google.
We’ve delivered our housing demands – but the battle has only just started. If we want Google to be a good neighbor and help to protect our communities from further rent hikes, homelessness and evictions, we need to keep up the pressure.
