Drive up the winding asphalt of California’s Highway 85, past the sprawling, low-slung corporate campuses of Mountain View, and turn onto the residential streets of Los Altos Hills. The air changes here. It smells faintly of eucalyptus and crisp wealth. The houses don’t have numbers; they have names. High gates hide properties where the driveways are longer than city blocks. Behind those gates live people who don't think about the price of gas, or the cost of a gallon of milk, or how much property tax will tick up next year.
Now, drive forty-five minutes north. Cross the Dumbarton Bridge into East Palo Alto. Here, the asphalt is cracked. The air smells of exhaust from the multi-lane freeway that slices the neighborhood in half. In a cramped two-bedroom apartment, a mother named Maria—hypothetical in name but entirely real in circumstance—stares at a spreadsheet on her kitchen table. She is trying to balance three part-time jobs against a
