5 major ways Silicon Valley has changed in the past 10 years

While the population of Silicon Valley has grown in a decade, the most startling growth has come with income inequality.

In 2010, the population of the Silicon Valley was estimated at just over 2.5 million, with the majority of residents living in just six of the region's 39 cities.

Fast forward a decade, and the population has grown to 3.1 million.

Although the average age of Silicon Valley workers has remained about the same — the biggest demographic is between 20 and 39 — it's people's income that has had the most startling growth.

Average income in the region has skyrocketed to $140,000 a year, more than double the state and national average.

But sometimes, a six-figure salary is not enough to live in Silicon Valley today. According to The Mercury News, some six-figure households are considered "low income" in relation to the rest of the residents in the region.

A great deal of wealth has sprung up within in the Bay Area this past decade. One big reason for this wealth gap is the amount of money that people can earn there — tech giants like Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft contribute to this with their record-breaking stock-market share prices.

The median home price in Silicon Valley right now is upwards of $1.2 million. Back in 2010, 23% of new affordable housing units approved, according to a study measuring the valley's economy, compared to just 8% approved in 2018. This means with what little housing there is available, it is more likely than not to be completely out of range to those without six-figure salaries.

Meanwhile, the homelessness has reached crisis levels in the Bay Area as the cost of living has skyrocketed.

In the Bay Area, the number of people living in the streets or in vehicles has increased by 17% in the last few years.

Even though Silicon Valley has the highest median income in the nation, more and more people are living without shelter across San Jose and Santa Clara Counties — at least 10,000 people were recorded without shelter in 2016.

In 2013, when some estimates put the homeless population at 7,600, Jennifer Loving of San Jose's Housing 1000 campaign told Business Insider that budget cuts, lack of housing, recession-era tax breaks, a lack of paying jobs, a growing wealth gap, and rising home prices created a "perfect storm of homelessness."

Homelessness in the region has become so prolific that some homeless people have resorted to using 24-hour buses for a warm night's sleep, and tents and RVs line the roads leading to unicorn companies. Some solutions to the crisis involve building "tiny home villages," but even those could end up stuck in bureaucracy.

The cost of living in Silicon Valley has also become so unreal that it's chasing many techies out of town. The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area is the proverbial heart of Silicon Valley, and it became the most expensive place to live in the US in 2018. Goods and services are about 27% more expensive than the national average in San Jose, according to The Bureau of Economic Analysis.

According to an analysis by The Mercury News, gasoline prices and the cost of rent are "major drivers of the jump in consumer prices in the Bay Area" — meanwhile, wages are not keeping up with the rising cost of everyday items.

Many of the services we depend on today were still in incubation in 2010.

Many of the services that are ubiquitous today were still in their infancy 10 years ago.

Take Uber for example. The app launched a beta version in late 2010 in San Francisco. At the time, its "black car service" was 1.5 times more expensive than hailing a cab, but could be done with just a tap of a screen, which meant that Uber was mainly used by techies.

But San Francisco and Silicon Valley's government agencies weren't fond of the service when it first showed up on its streets. Just four months after launching, Uber received a cease and desist order from the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority and the California Public Utilities Commission. The company, to this day, still continues to fight back against its hometown, spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns against proposed legislation.

Uber wouldn't go worldwide until 2012, when other ride-hailing services like Lyft began entering the market.

In 2017, CEO and founder Travis Kalanick was ousted after a series of scandals ranging from reports of sexual harassment to aggressive strategies to take down the competition. This past May, Uber went public, and had one of the biggest tech initial public offerings of all time.

Though in 2010, one sidewalk staple of Silicon Valley had yet to be seen: e-scooters. The so-called "scooter wars" of Silicon Valley wouldn't reach its peak until late last year, when 12 scooter companies, including those pioneered by Uber and Lyft, fought to flood the region's market — completely upending San Francisco's permit application process, causing the city to outright ban the scooters until the bureaucratic process was complete.

The way we eat has also changed this decade, thanks to apps like UberEats, Postmates, DoorDash, Instacart, and Grubhub, which all grew their legs in the Bay Area.

Autonomous cars in 2010 were said to be 'years away from mass production,' which is still true today.

Google began debuting its autonomous vehicles on the highways, roads, and intersections of Silicon Valley in early 2010 using GPS, sensors, cameras, radar, and lasers to "see" the world around them.

If you were around in San Francisco then, chances are high that you've seen a Toyota Prius with a "funnel-like cylinder on the roof." Back then, experts pegged that fully autonomous cars, meaning cars with no human inside to survey, would be "years away from mass production."

Now that is has been a few years, experts are still saying fully autonomous cars are decades in the making. And there are many reasons for this: For one, most of the roads in the US are ill-equipped to handle driverless cars, as potholes and poorly marked lines don't lend themselves to high tech. But it is not just infrastructure that is the problem. Many technologies that would make autonomous cars a reality, like cloud-based sharing software, are still being developed.

CEOs like Tesla's Elon Musk have been hyping the public with the notion that driverless cars are imminent, but that still hasn't happened. Until then, you can still expect to see stories about accidents involving self-driving cars and regulatory battles.

Silicon Valley still has a diversity problem.

Technology has drastically changed the way we live in the past decade. But inside some of the world's biggest tech companies, things have relatively stayed the same.

Most tech workers are white and male, despite efforts to diversify. The term "old white boys club" has been used to describe the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley for the better part of a decade.

In 2010, Silicon Valley's top 10 companies employed lower percentages of women, African-Americans and Hispanics in 2005 than in 1999, an analysis by The San Jose Mercury News showed. And, women "create[d] only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups" according to The Times. "Silicon Valley shows signs of changing, albeit slowly."

Today, even after aggressive demands for tech companies to reveal gender and racial data, the $424.7 billion of the venture funding raised since 2009, only $289 million went to black women, even though the number of black women entrepreneurs continues to rise every year.

In 2017, women held only 18% of Google's tech jobs. Only 1% of Twitter employees were black. At Facebook, barely 3% of workers were Hispanic. In a Reveal study of 177 of the top Bay Area tech firms, "nearly a third of the firms … had no executives who were women of color."

One excuses tech companies in Silicon Valley make for its lack of diversity has remained the same for years: There's not enough supply of workers of color in engineering.

Diversity and sexual harassment scandals have come into the spotlight for many tech giants in the last decade, spurring viral hashtags like #DeleteUber and the worldwide Google Walkout, where employees left their desks to protest the company's systemic culture of sexual misconduct.

In response, some tech companies have pledged to update their hiring processes, and put an end to mandatory forced arbitration policies.