Rents in Oakland, California, are climbing at the staggering rate of 34 percent per year — the biggest increase in all of the Bay Area. On the periphery of San Francisco, Oakland is part of the most expensive housing market in the country, where billionaires are displacing millionaires, and a second wave of gentrification is feeding unprecedented urban decay in some parts of the city.

The bubble-fueled economic growth in Silicon Valley and San Francisco has brought thousands of high-income earners to Oakland, who have been buying up properties in flatland neighborhoods, benefiting from a relatively cheaper housing stock caused by government disinvestment since the 1980s.

To make matters worse, speculative real estate companies have implanted flip operations throughout Oakland and the surrounding cities. They are buying up properties quickly with cash, doing minimal rehab, and then quickly putting them back on the market at a far higher price, ready to be purchased by tech workers, feeding off ten years of misery caused by the foreclosure crisis. Meanwhile, the banking industry, with equal enthusiasm, lends to these capital-endowed newcomers and denies homeownership to most Oaklanders.