WHO LIVES IN BERKELEY’S NEW APARTMENTS?

There is an apartment house under construction on San Pablo Avenue at Jones Street called Jones Berkeley. It’s big. It contains 170 apartments and covers a whole block. They are renting apartments there now. Studio apartments are $3,000 a month. 2 bedroom apartments are $4,800 a month, and 3 bedrooms are $6,700 a month. Jones Berkeley. These rents are typical for the new buildings that are popping up all over town, and there are over 1,000 apartments currently under construction in Berkeley. Now – Jones Berkeley is not in a spiffy neighborhood. Across the street are auto repair shops and vacant stores. It isn’t near campus, it isn’t near a BART station, and unlike San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Berkeley does not have a lot of high paying tech jobs. There are no big tech companies or banks headquartered here. So – where do the people who live in buildings like this get the money from to pay rent like this? I can’t figure it out. Can you?