Boomtown

The Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown, pastor at Third Baptist Church of San Francisco and president of the city's NAACP branch, talks about how black San Franciscans have been left out of the tech boom.

Tech companies in Silicon Valley are attracting developers from all over the world to build for them. These newcomers are backed by Wall Street and international banks. That means a lot of the money coming here, is not staying here.

As San Francisco begins formal regulation of the burgeoning short-term rental industry, questions remain over how the city can regulate the thousands of listings available on sites like Airbnb. Reporter: Guy Marzorati

Mayor Sam Liccardo says that market forces are more powerful than City Hall when it comes to fixing income inequality.

San Mateo has long been a bedroom community for tech hubs to the north and south. But in recent years, it's built a niche for itself as a home to tech startups such as GoPro and Solar City, among hundreds of others. Unlike in other cities, such as San Francisco or Redwood City, residents say the boom hasn't altered the character of San Mateo all that much. Reporter: Rachael Myrow

San Francisco's skyline is full of one sign of the times: construction cranes. In the past two years, there were close to 60 crane permits issued by the Department of Building Inspection. Reporter: Tiffany Camhi

History teaches us that in this region, boom follows bust. Maybe you were here when the tech bubble burst in the year 2000. San Francisco alone lost 12,000 workers in one year. What happened then? Are we headed for more of the same? Reporter: Stephanie Martin-Taylor

Last week, we learned about an effort in the booming oil town of Midland, Texas to give teachers housing stipends. Could that work here? We asked Mountain View's interim Superintendent, Kevin Skelly. Reporter: Stephanie Martin-Taylor

Driver Plaza is a large traffic median at the Oakland-Berkeley line. It's not much to look at but it is also a longtime gathering place in a historically African-American neighborhood. Driver Plaza illustrates, in some ways, how gentrification is changing the East Bay. Reporter: Andrew Stelzer

For all the talk about the prosperity of the tech boom, more than a third of Bay Area jobs pay less than $36,000 per year. KQED's Forum looks at what the current economic boom means for low and middle-income workers.