Gulf Between US East And West

Eric Ellis, East Palo Alto

12/27/1997

University Avenue, Palo Alto runs through the American Dream.

At its western end, it's all million-dollar properties, manicured lawns, Latino house-staff, BMW coupes and Stanford University, the preferred college of the First Family.

At its eastern end, just 200 metres over the 101 Freeway overpass from San Francisco, it's as blighted a neighbourhood as could be found anywhere.

In Palo Alto, or "Shallow Alto", streets are paved, the lawns manicured, the lifestyle all Gap and Tommy Hilfiger and Banana Republic. Urban services here offer classes in the Internet, various languages, cordon bleu and Thai cooking. In East Palo Alto, a footpath is a revelation. The streets are pot-holed and puddled, shops boarded or barred. Urban services offer drug counselling, halfway homes for battered wives, family planning for young teens.

In Palo Alto, about the biggest daily decision would be the cafe latte over a cappuccino, Emporio Armani or Kenneth Cole. Palo Alto youths ski, "hang out", drive chunky "sports recreation vehicles" that Daddy paid for and worry not about whether they'll get a job after graduation but what they'll buy with the first year's yield from their sign-on stock holdings. Oracle, Intel, Sun and Netscape are just down the road.

Across the 101, the life decision facing East Palo Alto youths is that between a "Saturday night special" or a shotgun. East Palo Alto youths lurk on street corners, sell crack and if they are not selling it, sniff it. If Silicon Valley is the wealthiest part of the wealthiest country in the world, no-one seems to have told East Palo Alto, smack in the middle of it.

Where Palo Alto spawns Nobel Prize winners (three this last batch) East Palo Alto has traditionally been the McDonald's of Drug Culture.

This city of 36,000 people is known by neighbouring San Franciscans as the murder capital of the USA. On one night a few years back there were 12 shootings. Pacific Gas and Electricity, the local utility, refused to send its technicians there without a police escort.

The typical economic formula of Palo Alto's prosperity is relatively simple - one is born into wealth, goes to Stanford, gets a job at Oracle, Sun or Intel and later leaves with some colleagues to start up a hot tech firm. Then all sell out for big bucks a few years later and the process starts again.

It's all about social mobility. Palo Alto has its floating population but they float from one well-paid job to another because they can. It's places like Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Cupertino, the Silicon Valley heartland, where there is an acute shortage of accommodation. Some of the highest rents in the US are levied and willingly paid here.

The East Palo Alto economic formula is simpler still. You stand on a street corner waiting for cars to pull off the 101 freeway from San Francisco. Sometimes they line up ten deep on the back streets, just like a drive-in hamburger joint. The drivers get their serve of drugs and the cycle continues. Every night.

And it's not hard to find accommodation in East Palo Alto.

The healing, the reconciliation, the rising black middle class that presidents like to speak of, is largely a myth in East Palo Alto. The globe-trotting Hillary might one day get to Brazzaville and spread some White House cheer, but it's doubtful Chelsea and her Secret Service detail will make it to East Palo Alto, a kilometre or so from her campus.

The depressed economic state of East Palo Alto confirms the trend in the otherwise booming US economy. Where places like Palo Alto have lifted the US to its paramount position in the world economy, the nation has not moved in tandem.

For those in work, average black incomes are still 50-60 per cent of average white ones, pretty much unchanged since the 1960s. Black unemployment has fallen to 9.8 per cent from 10.5 per cent a year ago, but it's still 2.3 times the white unemployment rate.

Moreover, the black jobless rate is higher than it was 20 years ago. Some 28 per cent of US blacks live below the poverty line, which is designated in the US at an annual income of $16,036 for a family of four and $12,516 for a family of three.

And it seems that East Palo Alto has more than its share. Not that Palo Alto would care too much.