I'm grimacing with ironic amusement reading this-I actually quit my job in SF for a slightly better paying one in Portland, precisely because its too expensive to live here (here for me being Fremont, for a few more weeks).
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.
I spent a summer working out of an office in Menlo Park. Having just come from Manhattan, it blew my mind that you had to get in a car to just get lunch. How do people live like that?
As a Londoner visiting San Jose - I was appalled at how difficult it was to simply cross the street to go from one section of strip malls to the other.
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.
> As a Londoner visiting San Jose - I was appalled at how difficult it was to simply cross the street to go from one section of strip malls to the other.
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.
When I moved to the Bay Area I got a little (not terribly priced!) studio apartment walking distance from downtown San Jose. As you say it certainly is no Big City downtown district like SF, but I must say I feel very happy with the decision - there are quite a few good places packed into the small downtown that I can just walk to whenever I feel like it, and the light rail is right there to take me to work. Having a reason to walk every day is actually great, I far prefer it to being stuck in traffic instead. I don't even have a car, but just using buses+light rail+caltrain has worked really quite well thus far for the times I want to go to nearby towns/SF.
I disagree that San Jose has a decent public transit system. Even if you have to use caltrain, you have to drive to the caltrain station which makes it incredibly difficult for tourists and non car owners.
> ...and on top of that drivers look at you as if you're some sort of pariah (felt like it at least!)
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.
> if you are on a dilapidated bike in some parts of town
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.
I know what you mean! I've lived in places in Texas that, by all rights[0], should have been walkable, but in practice weren't for the very same reasons:
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.)
It's gross but it's the [sub]urban development model which seems to be the norm rather than the exception in most of North America.
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.
I can imagine that taking light rail down North First and Tasman would be less pretty if the weather wasn't perpetually sunny (and in recent years, warm during most of the year).
I suppose if you make a good enough salary, you can at least drive an electric/hybrid that isn't so bad on the old GHG scale, but the car centric nature of the Bay Area in general (outside of Oakland/Berkeley and SF) makes living here that much harder if you have to sink a ton of money into car maintenance and gas.
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.
I think part of that resistance is that by giving in to urbanization, they are subsidizing SF's resistance to the same thing. If SF relaxed their laws and allowed for more density, San Jose could go back to being a suburb. As your post alludes, most of the jobs for people in SJ are further up the peninsula and I imagine most would want to live closer if they could.
"(San Jose, for the purposes of the study, was defined as the San Jose commuting zone, which includes the counties of Santa Clara, Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz.)"
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.
The could've called it "Silicon Valley." Including Monterey county is weird because that's inland and costal to the south.
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.
This article is really poorly research when it tries to make historical comparisons. As recently as the 1960s, San Jose was a fraction of its current size. Subsequent city councils and managers gobbled up adjacent towns and almost every unincorporated parcel available (almost 1,400 annexations under Dutch Hamann alone!) Almost all of that growth was residential. Combine that with the difficulties and costs of doing business within SJ, and San Jose became just a "bedroom community" for the smarter-run Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, etc. and SJ was doomed from a tax-base standpoint. Mineta and Hayes presided over the bulk of that.
San Jose is in a really odd position where the people who live there work and spend their money in its neighboring cities like Santa Clara, Cupertino, and Sunnyvale. This means San Jose earns much less tax revenue per resident compared to other cities in the area, yet residents still expect the same services as nearby cities. Even though the valley is in a much better position than it was half a decade ago, San Jose still has a budget deficit and hasn't seen much growth. Plus they spent hundreds of millions renovating an airport that airlines don't want to use, which hasn't paid off. Overall they're in a really unfortunate position.
Here's a really great article about their situation, from 2015:
As the article says, the problem (like everywhere else in the Bay Area) is housing costs. "Rents in San Jose grew a whopping 42.6 percent between 2006 and 2014, which was the largest increase in the country during that time period."
Real Estate is the official state religion of California, and Prop 13 is our gospel. God willing, if we all just lock arms and make sure nothing new ever gets built, we can all enjoy the free money that comes from our artificially-limited housing supply, at least for those lucky enough to have gotten in early. (Everyone else can go pound sand.)
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.
Prop 13 is a blatant wealth transfer from the young, who have to pay taxes based on today's prices, to the old, who got in long ago and pay their taxes based on yesterday's prices.
Well, TBH it is the tech workers driving demand-if you believe as I do that the increased supply of housing will greatly moderate prices, the flip side of that is that demand does exist, and the demand part of supply and demand works. The solution (build more, lots more) is obvious, but its not like accepting 200K/year FB/Apple/etc job doesn't have moral issues attached.
It really does not have any moral issues attached to moving into a given community and paying rent or buying property so long as you're not engaging in illegal behavior like forced evictions, etc.
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.
What baffles me is that rent increases get blamed on the tenant looking for a decent place to live, instead of on the landlord who actually increases the rent. If we're going to blame a human at all, why aren't we blaming the person who is directly making the change?
Why wouldn't the landlord raise rent? There's not a lot of housing alternatives (the supply of housing) and if your average tenant makes 125K instead of 70K, why not gouge them?
I don't understand why people think that "making as much money as possible is the most important thing in the world" is a convincing moral argument. You could, for example, have argued that wealthier tenants lead to rising property values, which means the landlord has to raise his rents just to break even on the property taxes. That would have been a coherent argument that absolves all individual blame. Why would you lead with "greed is good"?
(And, again, I'm not personally saying that either the tenant or the landlord is at fault. I just don't understand why, if Bob has just been driven out of his home and is looking for someone nearby to blame, he would choose to pin it on the new tenant but not the landlord.)
Its a free market. There is no one to blame, any more than there is someone to blame for buying a gallon of orange juice. Supply, demand, prices fluctuate.
I don't necessarily believe that it's either the landlord's or the tenant's fault, but I also think don't like how often people dismiss human suffering with "it's a free market" and a shrug. Markets are meant to serve humans, not the other way around.
Free markets serve them efficiently. You control rent - that doesn't serve the landlord very well, nor the person who would have paid more rent. Just the slob squatting there.
See, this is why unquestioning free-market worship bothers me. The claim is always that free markets provide the greatest good for the greatest number, but in your own hypothetical the person-with-less-money is automatically an undeserving "squatting slob" compared to the person-with-more-money.
As someone who was born and raised in San Jose, I can tell you that this city isn't what it used to be.
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.
It's far more likely that the homeless population has migrated to the San Jose area because there are so many wealthy/generous residents than having been "pushed" out due to rising home values and cost of living.
That is only partially the case: yes, to some extent San Jose has a high homeless population for the same reason SF does (warm climate, access to transportation and social services, more lax enforcement of certain laws), but there are other causes that are unique to San Jose.
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.
I doubt that's the reason at all. I don't live in an affluent San Jose neighborhood. Most of my neighbors are working-class and probably on the lower end of the economic scale. Young families and whatnot.
There are still plenty of homeless that go through our neighborhood like it's any other.
The economic forces at work are supply & demand, and a process referred to as voting with your feet. Every time someone or some society gives more to a homeless person they increase demand - in a sad twist of intentions and results they increase the negative effect they're trying to alleviate. Homeless people are also able to move more easily as they have so few possessions and a lower cost of moving. If San Jose provides relatively better conditions for homeless people than Las Vegas, then San Jose ends up with a correspondingly higher homeless population.
When was San Jose's downtown booming? I recall boarded up burnt out buildings before the first boom of the early 00's.
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.
It seems like a lot of the problems in San Jose are not all that different from the ones afflicting San Francisco, just spread over a larger suburban area, with more parking.
Interesting. I was fortunate to be born in the late 70's in Blossom Valley in SJ because both sets of my grandparents happened to be US military families whom lived in Europe, US and Asia. I remember the wineries along Blossom Hill Road and a couple of the hold-out farmers, one whom had this massive square field at Allen Avenue & Blossom Hill Road, plowing every autumn as a signal school would start soon. Also, occasionally finding rusty shards of nails in the backyard from the turn of the century and roaming the hinterlands of Almaden Valley on a bicycle (flying down Hicks Road at 38 mph while riding the rear tire).
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.
Before the 90s tech boom San Jose was like a big version of Salinas which is further south. Downtown was boarded up and there were lots of vagrants and you'd normally avoid places like the greyhound depot.
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.
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.