Featuring Lenny Siegel: A Voice for Peace, People, and Affordable Housing
From anti-war activism to affordable housing advocacy, Lenny Siegel’s lifelong fight for peace, people, and justice offers powerful lessons in grassroots leadership and local action.
Hi, peace seekers, community builders, and housing justice champions,
Today, I’m honored to introduce you to Lenny Siegel.
Every once in a while, you meet someone on your journey who leaves a lasting impact—not just for what they believe, but for how they act on those beliefs.
I met Lenny Siegel at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, where we stood together as Bernie Sanders delegates, holding #NoMoreWars signs and calling for peace and justice. Lenny encouraged me to run for Mountain View City Council and support Measure V for affordable housing, and I did.
But Lenny’s activism doesn’t end with national conventions. A longtime community leader and advocate, Lenny served as a city council member and mayor of Mountain View, California. We’ve worked side by side in the California Democratic Party, united by a belief in people-powered politics, affordable housing, and a better future.
I’m honored to share Lenny’s article, “Billionaire Valley,” a powerful look at the real story behind Silicon Valley’s rise and the urgent need to fight for equity in a region shaped by deep inequality.
Give it a read. Lenny’s voice is one we need now more than ever.
BILLIONAIRE VALLEY
The Real Story of California’s Tech Mecca
Throughout much of the world, local leaders want their regions to become the next Silicon Valley. Yet few know what made the stretch of industrial suburbs at the southwestern edge of the San Francisco Bay so impactful, and fewer recognize the socio-economic challenges that face the Valley’s residents and threaten the long-term health of its tech economy.
Silicon Valley employs hundreds of thousands of tech professionals. Nicknamed for companies producing silicon-based integrated circuits, or chips, it remains the global center of semiconductor design. It is home to household-name tech giants such as Apple Computer, Google, and Facebook. Just about every major car company in the world has a tech office in the Valley. The Valley hosts thousands of startup companies.
Learn more about the birthplace of Silicon Valley in this video.
The visible alliance between a handful of Valley billionaires and Donald Trump has thrust the area into the national limelight, but the real story of the Valley’s success and shortcomings is largely unrecognized.
Three key ingredients made the Valley what it is today:
First, in the decades after World War II, Stanford Provost and Engineering Dean Frederick Terman, Jr. consciously created what he called a Community of Technical Scholars. He built partnerships among university researchers, private companies, and the federal government. Before it was known as Silicon Valley, the area had one of the country’s greatest concentrations of high-tech military contractors.
One of those researchers was the Nobel-Prize-winning inventor of the transistor, William Shockley. Shockley Transistor never flourished, but eight of his top engineers left to form Fairchild Semiconductor, the first commercially successful semiconductor company. For many years, all of the major chipmakers in the Valley, including Intel, were spin-offs from Fairchild. There was such a large concentration of silicon semiconductor production in Santa Clara County that by the mid-1970s it became known, nationally as Silicon Valley.
With ongoing advances in both design and production, for many years Valley chipmakers were able to double the computing power and reduce the costs of integrated circuits every two years or so. This is known as Moore’s Law, after one of the eight engineers who formed Fairchild. Each new generation of chips enabled new hardware and software products, from Pong and digital watches to ChatGPT and self-driving cars.
Second, the Valley is the best place in the world to start a tech company, where tech entrepreneurs can take advantage of the sustained improvement in chip density. There is a surfeit of talented engineers, many of whom are willing to work for peanuts and stock. There is a slew of venture capital investors willing to back innovative entrepreneurs in exchange for massive, but risky payoffs. All of the services that young companies need, from specialized lawyers to assembly contractors to technical writers, are readily available.
Protected by weak anti-trust policies and strong patents, some of these startups generate monopoly profits. It is this feature of Silicon Valley that has generated 56 billionaires as well as a class of affluent tech professionals. The vast wealth of the Silicon Valley elites comes not from salaries, but from stock appreciation, particularly in the holdings of company founders. Furthermore, many Valley professionals can pay “cash” for overvalued houses by borrowing against their corporate equities.
Third, particularly since civilian tech overtook military production, the Valley has welcomed foreign-born professionals. Two-thirds of tech professionals now working in the Valley were born outside the U.S. Many startups have been founded by foreign-born entrepreneurs The largest groups are from India and China, but people have come from all over the world. Some are here temporarily. Many stay.
In general, foreign-born tech workers are accepted into the Valley’s growing communities, which host schools, faith institutions, and markets serving many of these ethnic communities. It is this dependence on foreign-born talent that led Valley business leaders to oppose Trump’s 2017 Muslim Ban and argue in 2025 against limits on H-1B visas for specialty workers.
Despite its success in selling products, creating billionaires, and generating global envy, Silicon Valley has an underbelly of deficiencies. The Valley suffers from higher and accelerating levels of wealth and income inequality than the rest of the U.S. The leading industry-backed think tank, Joint Venture Silicon Valley, reports, “a mere nine households control more wealth than the entire bottom half.” This is not just a mathematical issue. It is manifest in a crisis in housing and transportation.
In a market dominated by stock-owning professionals and highly paid immigrants, Silicon Valley has some of the highest home prices and rents in the country. Joint Venture reports, “Approximately 45% of renters and 44% of homeowners are burdened by housing costs…” People make up for that by taking extra jobs and spending less on health, food, and other necessities. Others live in overcrowded apartments.
But the most visible symptom of the housing crisis is the jobs-housing imbalance, with a growing number tech employees and others—teachers, service workers, etc.—commuting significant distances each day from neighborhoods distant from centers of employment. Megacommuting, defined as traveling more than three hours to and from work daily, is rising dramatically after a decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is most evident in the clogged freeways, which steal time from commuters. Even with the growing number of electric vehicles driven in the Valley, commuting traffic remains the region’s number one source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite the billions accumulated by a select few, Silicon Valley is on the verge of choking on its own success. As Yogi Berra famously said, “No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.” Despite comparatively high salaries, teachers are in short supply. It’s hard to find people to work in restaurants. Young people move away, to the dismay of their homeowning parents.
Silicon Valley, as well as any other community seeking to become a Silicon geography, needs to do more than invent new digital products. It must plan for balanced, equitable growth in the interests of all its residents. The tech oligarchs who are lobbying for lower corporate taxes and less regulation are not geniuses, but lucky, aggressive businessmen. And they are killing the goose that laid the silicon egg.
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Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight, A project of the Pacific Studies Center
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia