Buying a standard home in San Jose now requires an income north of $460,000 — one of a raft of figures in this year's Silicon Valley Pain Index, the San Jose State University report that turns the region's inequality into hard numbers.

Released Thursday by SJSU's Human Rights Institute, the annual index is a statistical inventory of who thrives and who struggles in one of the wealthiest regions on earth. This year's edition finds the top 10% of residents holding 75% of the area's wealth while the bottom half hold less than 1% — a gap its authors argue is the product of policy choices, not scarcity.

Researchers at San Jose State University on Thursday released the newest Silicon Valley Pain Index, the annual accounting of structured inequality that has become one of the region's most-cited progressive documents.

Assembled by the university's Human Rights Institute, the index compiles statistics across housing, food, childcare, employment, education, health and wealth. Its purpose, its authors say, is to give government officials, community leaders and residents a shared, unsentimental picture of who is being left behind in a region defined by its riches.

The topline numbers are stark. The top 10% of residents hold 75% of the area's wealth, according to the index, while the bottom 50% hold less than 1%. San Jose ranks among the most expensive large cities in the United States: buying a standard home there now requires an income of more than $460,000.

"We have an even greater gap in income between the wealthiest and the rest of us," lead author Anji Buckner-Capone said, as quoted by NBC Bay Area. "We have seen more schools close. We have seen increases in compromised physical and mental health. We have far too many individuals and families who are unsure how they will make ends meet."

The report's framing rejects the idea that the region's hardship is inevitable. "We have abundant resources," The Health Trust CEO Dr. Tony Iton told NBC Bay Area. "There's enough for everybody to get food and healthcare and childcare. It's not like there are shortages of these things. It's just the policy is not investing in our people."

That argument — that Silicon Valley's misery is manufactured by policy rather than scarcity — has been the index's throughline since its inception. The Human Rights Institute modeled the project on the Katrina Pain Index, created in 2005 by Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley to document the structural inequalities exposed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. SJSU adapted the approach to make Santa Clara County, in the institute's telling, a "human rights county."

The housing figures echo years of local reporting. San José Spotlight found in January 2025 that the cost of living in Santa Clara County is rising faster than wages at every income level: while the county's median income climbed nearly 75% over a decade, the price of a two-bedroom apartment jumped about 90% in the same period. A household now needs roughly $125,280 a year to afford a fair-market two-bedroom — out of reach for the roughly one-third of county households earning under $100,000.

Scott Myers-Lipton, an SJSU sociology professor emeritus who worked on the index for five years, has repeatedly pointed to remedies within local control: a higher minimum wage, zoning changes to permit lower-cost medium-density housing, and higher business taxes to fund affordable units. "It doesn't have to be this way, we have solutions, and it just takes our city council to act," he told San José Spotlight.

For all its detail, the index lands the same message each year, only sharper. The region that produces world-changing wealth cannot, or will not, house and feed a growing share of the people who live in it. The authors insist that gap is a decision — and that it can be decided differently.