Rental rates for the 10 metro areas most dominated by tech companies rose by an average of 5.7% year-over-year through January, nearly twice the average 3% increase seen in the nation's 90 other largest cities, according to Trulia. Certain cities have seen far bigger hikes: rents in San Francisco rose by 12.3%, to a median of $3,350 a month in January. So high are rents in San Francisco and neighboring Oakland, in fact, that protestors have taken to blocking the shuttle buses that transport tech workers to the Silicon Valley offices of companies like Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL), blaming the companies and their highly paid workers for a spate of evictions. "At locations along the Google, Apple or Genentech bus stops, most apartments are going to tech workers," said Craig Berendt, a property manager and apartment broker in the city. An apartment in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood that rented for $2,100 in 2010, for example, now rents for $3,200 a month, he said. Many tech workers can afford it.

The average paycheck in Silicon Valley has surged past $100,000, while the median wage for private sector workers nationwide is far smaller at $38,600. Despite the fat paychecks, many young tech workers are choosing to rent over buy, in part because home prices in tech-saturated cities are even more prohibitively expensive than rents. And prices keep rising. Year-over-year, asking prices in San Francisco and Oakland were up 16.2% and 24.4%, respectively, in January, according to Trulia. Weight Loss Johns Island ScThat's compared to a national average gain of 11.4%. Siemens Ac UnitMaking matters worse in places like San Francisco is that little is being done to meet the increase in demand. Hot Tub Independent ReviewsThe city is hemmed in by the sea so there's very little land to build on and strict regulations have been put in place to preserve the low-rise charm of the city.

Instead, in once working class neighborhoods like San Francisco's Castro, South of Market, and the Mission, affordable multifamily rental housing is being converted into high-priced condos, said Victoria Stewart Davis, an agent with Pacific Union. (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT). "There's been a huge influx of people into the city and there's little land left for development," said Jonathan Grant, president of the Tenants Union of Washington State. "Housing in low-income neighborhoods is being converted to high-income rentals." It wasn't like home prices were cheap in these places to begin with. In most tech hubs, home prices were 52% higher than the national average back in 1990 -- and that was before anyone really knew what the Internet was. Now, prices are 82% above the national average, Trulia reported. Even some tech workers are getting displaced. David Stoesz, a 46 year-old website content developer for Microsoft, left his old apartment in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle last October when his new landlord doubled his $1,000 a month rent.

"The apartment was in a complex built in the 1940s and owned by a family," he said. "They sold it to a developer who immediately started to kick out old renters. There's nowhere for them to go. It sends the message that 'This is not your city.'" Ballard was a blue-collar neighborhood of Norwegian fishermen and other working-class people -- the cast members of "Deadliest Catch," drink at a bar there, said Stoesz. Many of his old neighbors, which included a retired librarian and a grocer, were forced to move outside of town. Stoesz was able to stay, but he is now paying $1,800 for a two-bedroom townhouse, which he shares with his daughter. "Now, everyone around me is the same, same age, same demographic, many are tech workers," said Stoesz. The city is losing its character."Ten years ago, San Francisco raised its minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.50 an hour, a 26 percent increase. Since then, it has gone up at regular intervals to its current $10.74 an hour, the highest big-city starting wage in the country.

The city has slapped other mandates on businesses, including paid sick leave and a requirement to provide health-care coverage or pay into a pool for uninsured residents. What have the effects been on employment? Almost none, according to economists at the University of California, Berkeley, who have studied San Francisco, eight other cities that raised their minimum wages in the past decade, and 21 states with higher base pay than the federal minimum. Businesses absorbed the costs through lower turnover, small price increases at restaurants, which have a high concentration of low-wage workers, and higher worker productivity, the researchers found. The average increase among cities raising the minimum wage was 40 percent. The average step increase for a phased-in pay hike was 17 percent. “Our data show that an increase up to $13 an hour has no measurable effect on employment,” said Michael Reich, a Berkeley economics professor with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Still, Reich, whose work has been cited by President Obama in pressing for a higher federal minimum, stopped short of saying there would be no significant impact if Seattle leaders were to raise the minimum wage here to a proposed $15 an hour, a 61 percent jump. “We have not studied what would happen at $15,” Reich said. In San Francisco, nonprofits and businesses with fewer than 10 employees were given two years to implement the higher pay. Santa Fe allowed the phase-in of its 65 percent minimum-wage increase for businesses with fewer than 25 employees. For larger businesses, the minimum jumped from $5.15 to $8.50 an hour in 2004. (It now sits at $10.66.) A study two years later by the University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research found “no discernible impact on employment per firm.” Employment in the city actually went up slightly, and did better when compared with Albuquerque, which didn’t raise its minimum wage. The study was done by Nicholas Potter, now a researcher at Washington State University.

He said some businesses in Santa Fe did close and some said it hurt their competitiveness. But workers were overwhelmingly positive about the pay hike. And the fear of massive restaurant closures didn’t happen, he said, though the cost of eating out did go up some. “It seemed to have helped workers and not hurt business too much,” he said. Potential price increases at restaurants was the biggest negative impact identified by the Berkeley researchers. The cost of eating out went up 2 to 3 percent when the minimum wage rose 25 percent. That means dining out in Seattle could go up as much as 7 percent if the city goes to $15 an hour. But another Berkeley researcher said there isn’t an overwhelmingly negative impact on any type of business where the minimum wage has been raised. “There is considerable churn among small businesses. Firms are going out of business and new businesses are rising all of the time. What is important from the research is that you do not see a net decline in employment as a result of the minimum-wage ordinances,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.

Other economists say there are more negative effects, particularly for the youngest and least-skilled workers who might lose hours and see the number of entry-level positions reduced in favor of more skilled workers. Joseph Sabia, an economics professor at San Diego State University, said his research on the effects of the proposed jump in the federal minimum wage found that fewer than 15 percent of minimum-wage workers live in poverty. “In contrast to the myth that a common minimum- wage worker is a poor single mother head-of-household struggling to make ends meet, the typical minimum-wage worker is actually a second- or third-earner in their 20s from a nonpoor household,” Sabia said. A study by the Congressional Budget Office last month found that raising the federal minimum to $10.10 would boost the earnings of 16.5 million workers, but an estimated half million would lose their jobs. And with Seattle contemplating a 61 percent jump, low-skilled employment could drop as much as 18 percent, Sabia said.

One critic of the minimum-wage hike said it could lead to increased automation at fast-food restaurants, such as touch-screen displays instead of cashiers taking orders, or robots capable of making 360 burgers in an hour. “When talking about a $15 minimum wage, you’re going to a level that’s somewhat unprecedented,” said Michael Saltsman, research director for the Employment Policies Institute, which is partially funded by the restaurant industry. “A 60 percent increase in labor costs doesn’t just wipe out profits at a typical restaurant, it wipes them out four times over,” he said. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray in January convened a 23-member committee of business, labor and civic leaders to consider raising the minimum wage in Seattle to $15 an hour from the current state minimum of $9.32 an hour, the highest state rate in the country. The committee is supposed to deliver a proposal to Murray by the end of April. The City Council also is examining the issue and is expected to consider the mayor’s proposal and make a recommendation.