San Jose: A Place Where the Poor Once Thrived
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
San Jose (and Santa Clara County for that matter) is remarkably non dense and very, very suburban. There's so much room to expand, and build an adequate housing stock, so that even a crappy 1 bedroom apartment doesn't cost over 2K. I've participated in FB convos in which even non tech Santa Clara County residents think that's a bad idea-oh noes, Manhattanization! Goddamn SC County needs that. Besides, as anyone who's experienced the recessed 1 story office parks offset from 6 lane roads by massive parking lots that are the hallmark of SV, SC County is so very, very far from being Manhattan.
At least in SV the weather is nice and the roads are good and the landscaping in the parking lots is pretty. The office park suburbs of northeastern cities are a desolate and disgusting place.
Cars zoom by, there were two sets of lights which took nearly 15 minutes of waiting to navigate and on top of that drivers look at you as if you're some sort of pariah (felt like it at least!).
Very, very different to what I'm used to in London and sad to be honest. The valley is an incredibly beautiful part of the world and it seems urban planners decided to cover it with miles of single story buildings and car parks.
In America you're probably a bum, have a drunk driving conviction, or are otherwise outcast or not where you should be. If you are waiting (and waiting...) near a bus stop early enough in the day you might be taken for an honest but low-wage worker. But if you are on a dilapidated bike in some parts of town it's a sure bet you are on your way to a mandated alcoholism recovery program.
On the other hand if you're on a $3000 racing bike along the edge of the Bay then chances are you're an "honest" tech-worker commuting down to your job at Google from your swanky apartment in San Francisco's Mission district.
The problem is that the strip malls are designed for access by car. That means being close to multi-laned expressways, at least in most of the suburbs. San Jose proper actually has a decent (for the US) public transit system, including Caltrain, the VTA light rail, and a bunch of buses. They're optimized for commuter service, though, and will only take you few interesting places.
The downtown area of San Jose, though, is pretty walkable and isn't too dull (sure, it's no San Francisco or London, but what is?) San Pedro Square has some nice restaurants, and you can head from there to the park and then up Paseo de San Antonio to the university and cute coffeeshops. If you're up for more of a trek (or a few more stops on the light rail) there's a decent little Japantown a little ways to the north as well.
1) Social inertia: you're going to be the only one doing it, and feel like a pariah. It also feels like you're holding everyone up because they basically expect to be able to turn across a lane that now has a pedestrian.
2) Poor design: you have to take a bizarrely circuitous route that makes you ask, "okay, did anyone actually try using this before final approval?"
Especially sharp contrast going from my office in SF to the Googleplex in Mountain View -- in the former, I could stroll around, take a walk, go wherever. At the Googleplex, you end up having to take unofficial routes between buildings -- walk up a sharp driveway (shared with cars) rather than the out-of-way sidewalk, dart across a busy street while traffic is held up, sometimes waiting on the median for the other side to clear up. Yuck.
[0] Example A: Lived in apartment catty-corner from my (large) university in a small town. Much of the route didn't have a sidewalk, just a curb and some dirt/grass. People would actually ask if you needed a lift! No, just walking to my apartment, 1/3 mile away!
Example B: Lived in an apartment directly across the street (a two-lane, slow one) from a shopping center and less than a half mile from a bar -- but again, drivers don't expect you to cross the street or walk alongside it, and no sidewalk to the bar.
(Just realized this post has a ton of words that are different in British English.)
There is a chicken-and-egg problem getting actually-useful subway service (under 10 minutes apart, 24x7 including holidays) in a place that is currently low-density. Without the density of Manhatten/Tokyo/London you can't afford good service. Without good service, anything above suburban density is misery.
BTW, SF does not have good service. It's much worse than Boston even.
That's like defining "New York City" as the five boroughs plus all of New Jersey, West Virginia, and central Pennsylvania. It's a meaningless mishmash of a definition.
Santa Clara county encompasses most of Silicon Valley "proper."
San Mateo county includes the peninsula which starts at Menlo Park and just NW of Palo Alto/Stanford.
It's hard to define clear boundaries of what San Jose because it sub/urban sprawls into many other communities (Campbell, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Santa Clara), like individual trees growing into one massive tree cluster. Plus, most readers out of the area aren't familiar where Willow Glen, Blossom Valley or Almaden Valley are without maps.
It might've been more interesting to compare the price fluctuations as a heatmap and a function of distance from economic intensive areas.
Right, but San Mateo County is omitted from their list, while San Benito and Monterey are included. It's nuts.
(San Mateo County begins at East Palo Alto and Menlo Park.)
Here's a really great article about their situation, from 2015:
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25290777/san-jose...
And the best part? The press will willingly write article after article snidely implying that it's all the fault of the young tech workers who have the audacity to move here in hopes of having a career. No one will ever mention that it's actually the fat bloated homeowners who are the cause of it all.
Untaxing land - as prop 13 did - is essentially just the privatization of the right to collect tax.
It's like saying the poor moving into an affluent or apartments built in an affluent area have moral considerations because riff raff have a tendency to drive down prices of the real estate of homeowners.
It cuts both ways and neither makes sense.
It's not like they're building weapons like the majority of tech on the east coast.
(And, again, I'm not personally saying that either the tenant or the landlord is at fault. I just don't understand why, if I've just been driven out of my home and I'm looking for someone nearby to blame, I would choose to pin it on the new tenant instead of the landlord.)
Increase in the number of homeless, which I suspect have been pushed out due to rising costs and gentrification from the northern towns and cities, the rise in theft as well as homicides, a downtown that is nowhere near as booming and lively as it once was, make it a much different place.
I'm very happy and thankful to have grown up in San Jose during the better years, but I wouldn't want any of my children to grow up there today.
There are still plenty of homeless that go through our neighborhood like it's any other.
For example, since San Jose is much more car friendly, there are far more homeless people living in cars and RVs: many are employed, while the unemployed have often held working/middle-class jobs in the past. Some have been unemployed homeless since the collapse of the 2000 boom, others from the 2008 economic crisis and the real estate crisis (yes, a few had even home been home owners!).
San Jose was hard hit in the real estate crisis (though less so than some of California's exurbs), in that this is where people who long priced out of other areas (and most risk averse, for good reasons) bought at the very peak -- when it felt the "most safe" and the housing prices, while still high, were lower than those in other communities.
Before tech SJ was just a backwater with a bedroom community in the Almaden for hardware tech companies and then SW arrived and tech migrated north up the peninsula and up to SF. But SJ has never had a booming downtown despite Mcenery's efforts.
Even luckier that my father's small business allowed my attendance for K-3 to a private school, then public SJUSD and finally UC system mostly because the herd was steamrolling onto Harvard, MIT and Stanford (where I later moonlighted between quarters).
As a point of reference, my grandparents paid 30k for a house in the late 60's which is now worthy a megabucks... no middle- or working-class person could afford that today because the global demand to be in SV wasn't what it is today obviously. It is somewhat of goldrush fever, however the density of talent, wealth and customers is a compelling, complete ecosystem which evolves as fast as anywhere, probably with a nod to the historical demographic "filter" of the more open/risk-tolerant persons venturing to the mostly "new" land c. 19th century onwards (take Japanese culture as one example, where misfits and eccentrics tended to flee to other major cities).
Overall, it seems that the quasi differential equational model of resource scarity meets population / technology / wealth gradually leads to better technologies, cheaper goods/services but it becomes gradually harder (but not impossible) to profit from innovation (3000th ToDo list app), afford to pay workers fairly (coupled with decline of unions) and materials tend to become more expensive (before pervasive recycling).
It may be that prices are pushed up as workers get smart and demand higher pay, since fewer living in their cars working minimum wage and exploitation in emigration limbo (hospitality, agriculture, industrial), seems like a Good Thing(tm). Another enabler would be more rapid mass transit such as hyperloop, able to foster more distant suburbs to make city work livable for more families, despite increased distance.
Space and biomedical seem the most promising industries long-term, as are other business models that are durably defensible or decommodifiable (wow, I sound PHB).
Finally, static anything is an illusionary, psychological construct affording apparent safety and continuity; change is but one of the constants.
Yes, it was affordable but there were also few good jobs. Salinas is affordable and San Jose has moved up a bit and the downtown is cleaner a bit, but it's still a vast network of suburbia that says it has a downtown.
The poor "thrived" in san Jose as much as they now "thrive" in Salinas.