San Jose State University researchers unveiled new findings Wednesday that show poverty and inequality continue to plague Silicon Valley.
This year’s iteration of the Silicon Valley Pain Index, which provides more than two hundred statistics, aims to investigate “personal and community distress or suffering” in Santa Clara County. It was authored by a team led by Anji Buckner-Capone, an assistant professor at San Jose State.
“The 2025 Silicon Valley Pain Index continues to show the pervasiveness of inequality in our communities,” she said. “The central message is that the challenges we’re facing are rooted in systemic failures.”
At a press briefing following the report’s release, speakers spoke about three key issues highlighted within the report: housing, food insecurity and education.
According to the report, there are 10,394 unhoused residents in Santa Clara County, which includes 2,200 students in San Jose alone. The report also found that San Jose would need to build almost 8,000 homes each year to reach its 2031 housing goals, when the most homes it’s added in a single year since 2019 was 1,710.
Buckner-Capone pointed out that while the nine wealthiest Silicon Valley households earned $136 billion more last year than the year before, 100,000 Silicon Valley residents had virtually no net assets.
“The gap between the wealthiest and the lowest income residents is just exponential, and that is disheartening, and we don’t see a change in that,” she said.
Briyana Costa, a graduate student who did research for the index, said residents would need to make about $125,000 annually to afford average rent in San Jose, which is $3,209 per month, according to Zillow.
“The high cost of living in the community is forcing people to make impossible choices,” she said. “Families are doubling and tripling up in single apartments. People are working multiple jobs, sacrificing their health and well-being to just meet basic needs.”
According to the report, 90% of parents surveyed by San Jose’s Second Harvest Food Bank – which serves half a million people every month – worry that they won’t be able to provide nutritious foods to their children.
Leslie Bacho, CEO of the food bank, said that recent federal budget cuts in particular could prove devastating to her food bank’s ability to operate.
“Having to do things like skip meals and rely on less nutritious fast food has very real long-term health impacts,” she said. “These massive reductions are going to push more of our neighbors into crisis, and all of the food banks in the nation can’t fill that gap.”
Bacho said that given how wealthy and affluent some were in Silicon Valley, she hoped to see “real policy change” – something that state and local governments had not yet provided.
“[These problems] are the result of policy decisions,” she said. “We have the power to make better ones in a region where billionaires and child hunger exist side by side. We have the opportunity to decide what kind of community we want to be. We have the resources here to do better for everyone.”
The index also reported stark disparities between schools in different neighborhoods: While public schools in Palo Alto spent $26,000 per student in 2025, public schools in the East Side Union High School District spent about $14,000.
“We’re seeing resources scale back as budgets are stretched, schools are closing, and we have high dropout rates and low academic gains, disproportionately affecting some communities,” Buckner-Capone said.
Ruth Melton, an undergraduate student who did research for the index, said the lack of affordable housing in the Bay Area led to the decreases in enrollment, which itself contributed to the upcoming closure of 14 schools across three school districts on the east side of San Jose.
“How will they get their child to school when their school is no longer walking distance and they don’t own a car?” she asked.
These challenges, Melton said, would have a “domino effect.” The index reported that 1,028 Santa Clara County high school students had dropped out in the 2023-24 school year. Melton, meanwhile, highlighted that 79.2% of residents in the Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint School District had bachelor’s degrees or higher, compared to just 25% in the East Side Union District.
Jennifer Briscoe, the board chair of Filipino American advocacy organization LEAD Filipino, criticized the lack of mental health support she said Silicon Valley schools had given to students.
“The Trevor Project recently found in a survey of LGBTQ youth that AAPI – and specifically Filipino youth – reported among the highest rates of contemplating self-harm and suicidal ideation,” she said. “When we see zero investment by the way of local San Jose schools to address student wellness and mental well-being, we are concerned.”
The report notes that some aspects of life in Silicon Valley have changed for the better in the past year. Use of force incidents involving the San Jose Police Department have continued to decline. Services to prevent homelessness and supportive housing assistance have expanded. And tree planting initiatives and reductions in carbon dioxide emissions have made the region more environmentally sustainable.
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Still, Michael Dao, the director of San Jose State’s Human Rights Institute, said that “based on the data we’ve collected, [poverty and inequality] have gotten worse.”
Ultimately, Buckner-Capone said she hoped the report would inspire action from the government, but also from individuals living in Silicon Valley.
“My hope is that people will kind of dial in on a few data points that they’re most struck by, and see where they can get involved to make a change in their communities,” she said. “We do know that people have an incredible opportunity to advocate for changes, and we really need people to be a part of that effort.”