Best of the Beat » The top posts on SiliconBeat

For millennials, buying a home is a nightmare

How hard is it for millennials to break into the homebuying market? It’s hard. Especially in San Jose. A new report shows that between 2005 and 2015, the rate of home ownership among millennials in the San Jose metro plunged faster than anywhere else in the country — a 34.8 percent decrease “in the heart of Silicon Valley,” as the report puts it.

The report by the Abodo apartment search website shows that when U.S. metros are ranked for having the most millennial homeowners, San Jose ranks 131st on the list. Only 20.2 percent of millennials in San Jose own homes. That’s even worse than in the San Francisco-Oakland metro, where 20.5 percent of millennials are homeowners.

And ponder this: The average millennial in San Jose would have to sock away 15 percent of his or her annual income for 27.9 years in order to afford a 20 percent down payment on a home. The average value of a millennialowned home in San Jose is $737,077.

Not surprisingly, most millennials rent in the San Jose metro — 79.8 percent of them.

By compiling data from the U.S. Census and crunching numbers from the MLS, Abodo is building on a 2017 report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, showing that 1.4 million recent U.S. homebuyers were under age 35 in 2015. That figure, Abodo notes, “is well below pre-boom levels.” — Richard Scheinin

Startup going whole hog for Frankenmeat

Unicorn meat could be on the menu as soon as the Christmas after next.

That would be meat made by a unicorn, not meat from a unicorn.

San Francisco food startup Hampton Creek, whose $1.1 billion valuation gives it the legendary status of the one-horned beast, and whose alleged affinity for the purchase of its own products once gave it a black eye, claims it will have lab-grown meat on the market within a year and a half, according to a new report.

“For the last year, it has been secretly developing the technology necessary for producing lab-made meat and seafood,” online magazine Quartz reported.

The firm will have “something out there on the marketplace” by the end of 2018, CEO Josh Tetrick told Quartz.

One or two major traditional meat producers will invest in the company soon as a result of ongoing talks, Tetrick said.

Now, Hampton Creek has a hurdle: to make Frankenmeat with current methods, blood sucked from the fetuses of pregnant cows — aka “fetal bovine serum” — must be mixed up in a vat with meat cells and other goodies to trigger the cells to reproduce, according to Quartz. And while fetal bovine serum is not nearly so rare as fetal unicorn serum, supplies are apparently limited.

“But Hampton Creek says its scientists are investigating other ways to trigger cells to reproduce, by replacing the cow blood with nutrients coming from plants,” the magazine reported.

If the company can get a lab-grown meat product to market in the timeframe claimed, it may beat another Bay Area firm, Memphis Meats. Memphis last year said it had made beef meatballs in the lab, and in March announced it had created Frankenchicken and Frankenduck, although it didn’t use those exact words. However, Memphis said it was aiming for a 2021 product launch, long after Hampton Creek’s target date.

Hampton Creek gained a measure of infamy after a report last year alleged that company executives had launched a quiet campaign to pay people to go into grocery stores and buy large amounts of the firm’s “Just Mayo” vegan faux mayonnaise.

More recently, retailer Target yanked Just Mayo and other Hampton Creek products from its shelves over purported food-safety concerns. Hampton Creek strongly disputed that there was any cause for concern over its products. —Ethan Baron

Jobs’ famed mock turtleneck is reborn

It’s back. And it’s a little slimmed down.

The Japanese designer who supplied the late Steve Jobs with his trademark mock turtleneck is bringing it back in updated form, according to a new report.

“Of the many technological and artistic triumphs of the fashion designer Issey Miyake … his most famous piece of work will end up being the black mock turtleneck indelibly associated with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs,” Bloomberg reported.

But after Jobs’ 2011 cancer death, production of the garment was laid to rest as well.

Jobs had obtained some 100 of the mock turtlenecks, worn to iconic effect with jeans and sneakers.

And that exact mock turtleneck model is not emerging from the Eternal Closet — however, Miyake’s new version recalls it strongly.

As Bloomberg put it, the garment is “guaranteed to inspire déjà vu.”

Called the “Semi-Dull T,” it’s 60 percent polyester and 40 percent cotton, and will sell for $270, according to Bloomberg. It has a “trimmer silhouette and higher shoulders” than the model Jobs wore.

Jobs decision to adopt a uniform of sorts for himself came after he failed spectacularly to put Apple employees into matching garments, the business news site reported. After touring Sony headquarters in Japan during the early ’80s and seeing all the employees in the same blue and white jackets, Jobs got Miyake to design a vest Apple workers could all wear.

The proposal did not go over well, Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson.

“Everybody hated the idea.” — Ethan Baron

Parking still an issue since startup dies

Pearl Automation was on a mission to help the parallel-parking challenged — protecting rear bumpers around the country by equipping every car, even the oldest models, with a backup camera.

Instead, Pearl ran out of money and shut down last week, giving a win to all those pesky poles, mailboxes and other cars that seem to jump up just as you’re backing up.

Axios first reported that the company had gone belly up. The issue was a lack of funds, The New York Times reported. “We were probably two years ahead of our time,” cofounder and CEO Bryson Gardner told The Times.

The Scotts Valley-based company, founded by former Apple employees, had raised $50 million, according to Crunchbase.

Pearl’s RearVision camera ($499.99) installs around your license plate. The camera wirelessly connects to your phone, which live streams the footage in real-time from a mount on your dashboard, turning your phone into a backup camera. — Marisa Kendall