There appears to be only slight anecdotal evidence that "the Chinese" are a significant, over-represented, or manipulative force in Bay Area real estate. Or did I miss it?
Followup questions I'd have: 1) Historically, what proportion of SF or nationwide housing is sold to foreign buyers? 2) Historically, what proportion of that figure is sold to Chinese buyers? Especially curious about #1. If the Chinese are just taking the place of yesterday's big foreign buyers (Russian, Japanese, or whoever), then we can put this into a typical perspective. If indeed they're raising the overall percentage, and not just their own representation within it, that's a more compelling statistic in favor of the author's thesis. Either way, I would have liked a bit more analysis in the piece.
In New York and London, it's "the Russians" who are blamed, as if they were the only one; in San Francisco, it's "the Chinese"; in parts of Southern Europe, it's "the Arabs". In reality, it's nonresident dirtbags from all over the world, including the U.S. Attributing it to one nationality is racist, unfair, and misleading. Really, the problem is dirtbag global elite speculators (and, likewise, the average Russian or Chinese isn't a dirtbag, and the average American ultra-HNWI is one) but that's too many words so people just shorten it to "foreign speculators". (By the way, speaking as an American, I am totally fine with Londoners and Parisians calling American nonresidents "dirtbag foreign speculators". It's not racist to hate the global elite of all stripes; it's patriotic no matter where you are.)
Is it "the Chinese"? No. It's corrupt ultra-HNWIs from all over the world. People just blame "the Chinese" because a fifth of the world's population is Chinese, but it's really unfair because most Chinese people (like 99.9 percent) aren't the dirtbags buying up Palo Alto, and many are the victims of the dirtbags buying up Palo Alto.
That's one of two trends here. There other is specifically Chinese, like Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, and Koreans before them, emigrating to various English-speaking cities around the Pacific Rim, such as Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Vancouver, Toronto, Seattle, and San Francisco/San Jose. The (Northern) "California Housing Bubble" is a conflux of these two trends.
Let's say there are only 3 kinds of investors: Chinese, Chilean and Czech. In a ideal world where those countries have the same population and the same wealth distribution, you'd expect each country to be represented equally, so you'd expect 33% of investors to be Chinese, 33%$ to be Chilean and 33% to be Czech. Now, if you see that 40% of investors are Chinese, then they are clearly over-represented.
It's kind of difficult to define 'over-representation' in this case, because the normal parameter (population of country of origin) doesn't really apply. Now, if you define it as 'number of people with the money to invest in housing in California', maybe you have a way to measure it...
I have a couple friends, immigrants from China, who wanted to retire and move to a part of San Francisco with less steep hills. They complained that every time they found a place, it would be snatched away by somebody with a whole lot of cash. Mainly, somebody from China.
Eventually, they did find a nice little house in the desired neighborhood, much smaller, only a few yards away from a bunch of grocery stores and the church that they attend. So, that worked out for them.
Ya, like other groups in California don't?
Some of the Asian communities do a better job of it than other ethnic communities. That isn't racist. Facts aren't racist. Only people's interpretation of facts can be racist. It only says something about you if your only interpretation is that the condition is directly tied to race.
If the condition isn't tied to race, then noting this might cause other people to benefit themselves economically through cooperation.
I am Asian myself, though not Chinese. There are such groups associated with my ethnicity which engage in such mutual support. I, personally, am not laboring under the impression that this is any kind of proof of one group's superiority over another. Please produce your evidence to the contrary.
So, is any mention of ethnicity an automatic indicator of mild racism? How is this at all logical? It's not, so I'm pleasantly surprised that you were downvoted.
Do we ignore all the back-scratching that's been happening in the California high-tech sector (and one that's lacking in diversity too)?
No. If you look back on my posts, you'll find frequent comparisons of mine of the Bay Area tech sector to the old boy network in Mad Men.
That part was kinda important to understand the example :)