Also I assume the author is implying their gentrification of Oakland is cool and acceptable but Google employees gentrification is so not.
This vitriol really needs some perspective, although I'm pretty convinced this has to be a troll.
Cite: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032011/perinc/new01...
By relatively modest, I was referring to the salaries earned by people in actual places of power.
If the author wanted to bring up the extreme disparity between the really-wealthy and the rest of us, I am all ears, instead they've focused on the harm done to them by the new gentrify-ing population; yet I assume at one point the author was a gentrifier of the same neighborhood they now wish to protect.
People were upset when the hippies moved in to SF too.
My opinion is : stop fighting this discussion. You can't win. There are no words anywhere that will make people accept being forced into homelessness without fighting. Just shut up, go to church sunday and pay a few hundred bucks on collection, because that will actually help them for a while. Lots of churches help people relocate because they've got lots of locations, and this is (part of) what they do.
TLDR: These protesters are right. Google, or googlers, techies in general, are forcing the lower rungs on the social ladder into homelessness.
Sorry to say, but you're lucky you're in America. In Europe, I cannot imagine these protests would have remained peaceful. A few tires and one window does not count as violence. Visit the poor parts of Brussels once with what a techie normally walks around with in San Francisco and you'll know what violence is.
Of course the reason this doesn't happen in Sanfran is that this is just the n-th time the poorest are being forced out.
Which isn't saying that techies aren't paid very well, even in relation to their cost of living, but rather that absolute salary numbers mean little by themselves. A $60K salary in Manhattan for example is a tough life, whereas a $60K salary elsewhere can be very comfortable.
It's just more complicated than absolute numbers, is all I'm saying. If anything the fact that $100K is "not much" relative to the cost of living there is yet another symptom-- it implies that an eminently reasonable amount of money like $60K isn't enough. IOW, we should talk about floors, not ceilings or even averages.