East Palo Alto has been portrayed as a haven of affordability for a low-income and primarily black and Latino community and alternately as a stubbornly intractable core of poverty and violence amid Silicon Valley’s glittering wealth.

In 1992, the city earned the moniker “Murder Capital of the U.S.A.” after having the highest homicide per capita rate in the country. Three years later, its high school students became the center of the Michelle Pfeiffer movie “Dangerous Minds,” with the Coolio single “Gangsta’s Paradise” on the soundtrack.

But today, with Facebook constructing a Frank Gehry-designed office complex that will let the company support roughly 7,000 workers while Palo Alto and Menlo Park balk at building housing even though median home prices have soared beyond $2 million, East Palo Alto may change enormously over the next decade.

Moreover, the questions being asked today about why the tech industry lacks racial diversity, and what the long-term consequences of gentrification are in the U.S.’s most economically vibrant regions like the San Francisco Bay Area are deeply intertwined in a way that is hard to perceive unless you step back.