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37 » VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM TECH EMPLOYEES FLEE SILICON VALLEY According to an article by the Observer's Sissi Cao, prime-age workers (those in their mid-30s) are retreating from Silicon Valley due to the lack of affordable housing. "A typical software engineer at the highest- paying tech companies in the area now needs to spare a third of his or her income to afford a home near work, which runs around $1.2 million," Cao reported. In an attempt to alleviate this problem, Trulia found that the Golden Gate City built more new homes than any other city in 2017. Last year the city approved 94.6 percent more homes than its average between 1980-2016. e total number of permits in 2017 was 6,270. Although San Francisco's affordability crisis has been waging for more than a decade, it seems to be reaching epic proportions. A recent Black Knight report found that San Francisco hit a new peak in home appreciation, as prices rose by more than 11 percent year- over-year in December 2017. One way tech companies are reacting to the affordability problem is by building branches outside of San Francisco to retain employees, as conveyed by Lux Capital co-founder Josh Wolfe, who spoke to Cao. However, for residents who don't want to move out of the city, unorthodox living arrangements may be the solution. New York Times writer Nellie Bowles recently delved into this problem, finding that some professionals are moving back into dorms when priced out of the single- family housing market. "Everybody told me housing in San Francisco was really expensive, but I was like, 'I live in New York, how much more expensive can it be? … I was a bit cocky," Katherine McKim, 37, told Bowles. CRYPTOCURRENCY BACKED BY REAL ESTATE e cryptocurrency landscape is something of a wild frontier at the moment, with new cryptocurrencies being introduced all the time. Bitcoin is by far the best known of them, but even Bitcoin's long-term legacy remains unwritten, to say nothing of how blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a whole will change various financial institutions and industries. But now a new crypto is trying something interesting: Property Coin is backed by real estate. Property Coin is the creation of Los Angeles-based Aperture Real Estate Ventures, and launched at the end of February with an initial coin offering that will allow real estate investors the chance to "own a professionally managed portfolio of real estate assets via the blockchain." Property Coin uses the Ethereum blockchain as its foundation, which is itself the second leading cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. Property Coin will cost investors $50 per coin, with a required minimum purchase of $1,000. Aperture says that Property Coin is a strong alternative to Bitcoin, which is increasingly popular but also prone to wild swings in value on any given day. Money raised by the ICO will be used "to fuel the growth of Aperture's existing technology and real estate investment business, which uses a combination of proprietary technologies and human expertise to spot otherwise hidden opportunities to invest in undervalued properties in metropolitan areas throughout the United States," according to a statement by the company. "Unlike many cryptocurrency offerings, Property Coin's proposition is straightforward," said Andrew Jewett, Co- CEO of Aperture. "One hundred percent of the net proceeds from sales of Property Coins will be used to invest in properties and loans identified by our proprietary software and our experienced team. Accordingly, Property Coin is designed to be 100 percent backed by real estate assets, giving each coin holder a fractional economic interest in the investments made by Aperture or its affiliates with the net proceeds realized from the sale of Property Coins." Property Coin is just the latest in several interesting ventures seeking to unite the housing market with the new frontier of cryptocurrencies. e City of Berkeley, California recently announced it was teaming with UC Berkeley's Blockchain Lab and finance startup Neighborly to look into creating a new cryptocurrency that would be backed by municipal bonds. Funds raised by that cryptocurrency's ICO would then be funneled toward affordable housing initiatives within the city.