
San Jose: A Place Where the Poor Once Thrived - nradov
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-place-where-the-poor-once-thrived/470667/?single_page=true
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ZanyProgrammer
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.

~~~
rayiner
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?

~~~
leonroy
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.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> 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.

~~~
andreyk
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.

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DrScump
"(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.

~~~
wantreprenr007
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.

~~~
DrScump
<San Mateo county includes the peninsula which starts at Menlo Park and just
NW of Palo Alto/Stanford>

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.)

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DrScump
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.

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tristanj
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:

[http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25290777/san-
jose...](http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_25290777/san-jose-mayors-
budget-booming-economy-wont-help)

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ageek123
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."

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bdrool
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.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
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.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
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?

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
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?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
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 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.)

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smaili
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.

~~~
H0n3sty
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.

~~~
jgh
I find this incredibly difficult to believe... Do you have any whatchacallit,
evidence?

~~~
H0n3sty
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.

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Apocryphon
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.

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wantreprenr007
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.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
I think that farm is still there on blossom, but they've turned it sort of
into a museum and park.

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mc32
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.

~~~
kylestlb
Well... I think you have to include all of the surrounding towns. Willow Glen,
Campbell, Sunnyvale, Los Gatos, all have nice 'downtown's.

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sseveran
If its only a few blocks long its not 'downtown'.

~~~
coke12
Los Gatos has a large downtown area, and Campbell's has been growing in the
past few years. (Those are the two I'm familiar with.)

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cozzyd
My impression when I lived there is that Santa Clara county has a dearth of
social services relative to its size. At least they have the Hotel 22...

