Santa Clara County at a Glance

© McCormack's Guides

 

The original Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, population 1,808,056, is located at the south end of San Francisco Bay and includes 15 cities.

Its crime is low, its weather balmy, its school scores mixed but many quite high, its economy the envy of the globe until 2001 when the hi-tech sector, as they say in the trade, suffered a “correction.”

Over the following few years, according to government studies, the county shed about 171,000 jobs but about 2005, led by Google and few other firms, the engine of enterprise and innovation started humming again. As of early 2007, many firms are hiring and commercial-research construction is reviving. Also traffic congestion, an irritating companion to prosperity, is coming back.

Rectangular in shape, Santa Clara covers 1,316 square miles, smaller than Delaware, slightly larger than Rhode Island. There are two Santa Claras: one, the county, encompassing everything; the second, a city, one of the largest in the county.

San Jose, 973,672 residents, is the biggest and most populous city in the county. Monte Sereno, 3,565, has the fewest people. Palo Alto is the brainiest town; Los Altos Hills, the richest; San Jose, increasingly, the most dynamic and becoming recognized as the political leader of the region; Gilroy, in July, the most odoriferous. The town is famous for its garlic festival.

Palo Alto borders Stanford University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and the intellectual force behind the region's prosperity.

Most people reside on the flatland of the Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from the Bay down to beyond Gilroy, the southernmost city. If you want a home with a view, generally you have to head for the hills and mountains that border the bay and the valley.

In housing, Santa Clara favors the suburban tract and the steadiness of the middle class. Crime, even in the larger cities, is very low.

Single homes outnumber apartments 2-to-1. The state in 2007 counted 617,175 residential units: 335,312 single homes, 54,656 single attached, 207,544 multiples, 19,663 mobiles. Santa Clara has its mansions but the typical home, the census reports, is that old workhorse, the three-bedroom unit.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the economy boomed and home prices and rents soared. Then the economy soured but home prices, thanks mainly to low interest rates, kept rising.

As of 2007, the housing market is softening but whether it will just level off or drop remains to be seen. For very modest homes owners are still asking immodest amounts — $650,000 for 60-year-old cottages with less than 1,100 square feet. In the past, they got their price. In the future … we’ll see.

Rarely does the humidity discomfort or the thermometer drop below freezing. Rain confines itself to the winter and snow to the tops of the local mountains, of which Copernicus, 4,360 feet, is the highest.

On the down side, Santa Clara and much of coastal California straddle active faults. Earthquakes are not a matter of if, but a matter of when. For sound advice on earthquakes, read the first section of the local phone directory.

Sports, Activities, Things to Do

Stanford and two other universities greatly enrich cultural life. Movies, opera, plays, pop and rock, professional and collegiate sports, ballet, symphonies, a children's musical theater, classes of all descriptions, performances by top-notch entertainers — in Santa Clara County you can find it all. Almost every year some new cultural ornament presents itself. What you can't find, nearby San Francisco and Oakland usually can provide.

In sports, San Jose is home to the only professional ice hockey team in Northern California, the Sharks. San Jose also fields teams for professional soccer and minor league baseball.

Professional football (the Forty Niners and the Raiders) and major-league baseball (the Giants and the Athletics) and NBA basketball (the Warriors) are within a short drive. Stanford and San Jose State University offer top-notch collegiate sports.

Just about every town offers a smorgasbord of Little League, softball, football, swimming, gymnastics, aerobics, tennis and so on. Among children, soccer is turning into the most popular sport. Parks, large and small, are scattered throughout the county. San Francisco Bay is in the county's back yard but rarely is it used for swimming (too cold; current comes from the Arctic.)

Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and the snow country are four to six hours to the east. Most residents live within 30 to 45 minutes of the fishing boats of Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz and the waves of the Pacific.

Because of the mild weather, outdoor sports run almost year round. Many people delight in gardening and hiking and cycling. Indoors, many a night is spent tinkering with this or that gizmo or computer. Many of the major high-tech firms are headquartered in the county — for one big reason. They want their people to tap into the energy and creativity that abounds in the region.

Silicon Valley More a Frame of Mind

Silicon Valley is a term more indicative of a frame of mind than a geographic location but it used to have fairly precise borders, generally Palo Alto to south San Jose.

Now high-tech firms (Sun, Oracle) have jumped over the county line into Redwood City and Menlo Park, and on the east side of the Valley and across the Bay, into Milpitas, Newark, Fremont, San Ramon, Livermore, Dublin and Pleasanton, and even up to Berkeley and Richmond.

To work in Silicon Valley is to profess an interest in, often a passion for, high-tech. Here is where Stephan Wozniak, between raids on his parents’ refrigerator, built the first Apple computer.

Here is where Stanford grads Bill Hewlett and David Packard, using the former’s master’s thesis, built in a Palo Alto garage an audio oscillator. Their first customer, Walt Disney, ordered eight for the soundtrack of “Fantasia.”

Hewlett-Packard is now one of the biggies in high-tech research, development and manufacturing. Here also is where other firms pursue the golden breakthroughs, the ideas that will transform the ways of multitudes and nations. The latest darling, founded by two Stanford University graduates, Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View, a few miles from its archrival Yahoo, headquartered in Sunnyvale.

Growth Pains

Paradise? Close, but not quite. The freeways are wide and plentiful but inadequate to handle the number of vehicles. In the 1980s, the county added 239,145 people, a number equivalent then to the population of nine of its 15 cities. In the 1990s, it added 185,008 and since 2000, the numbers have gone up at least 91,000.

Many are the fights over development. If you strip away other fights — schools, traffic, taxes, services, rents, home prices — you will find underneath a county that is running hard to keep up with a growing population.

Many schools score high but a large number do not. After years of beggaring its schools, the state of California, thanks to the thriving economy, put up billions to lower class sizes and make other improvements. But the results may take a while to show themselves and funding remains uneven. Despairing of state money, many local districts have passed renovation bonds and special taxes.

Prudent parents will take an active interest in their children's schools and try to make up the shortcomings in funding.

Crime is low, not nonexistent. You should always take precautions. In 2005, the FBI reports, homicides in Santa Clara County totaled 43. By contrast, San Francisco, with less than half the population, recorded 96 homicides.

The Loma Prieta quake in 1989 scared holy hell out of thousands, killed dozens and caused damage in the billions. But few residents quit Santa Clara County. In sum, the good, the promising and the delightful far outweigh the bad and the ominous.

A Changing Ethnic Mix

The county is changing from predominantly Caucasian to minority-majority. The sum of all minorities outnumbers or soon will outnumber Caucasians.

This is often stated in a way that implies that ethnic groups form a bloc that vote, think and act in concert. They don’t. A man from the highlands of Vietnam may have little in common with a man descended from people who roamed the highlands of Scotland. But he also may have little in common with a fellow recently arrived from the Mexican desert.

Or conversely, what they have in common — the hope for a good life — may far outweigh their differences.

As for the politics of the county, in national elections people vote Democratic, in local elections, they vote pragmatic and progressive. School bonds usually win. The city councils are populated by men and women who avoid the flamboyant and generally pay attention to filling potholes, reviewing building applications, funding parks and recreation and solving traffic problems.

The 2000 census counted 744,282 Caucasians, 403,401 people of Hispanic descent, 430,095 of Asian or Pacific Islander heritage, 47,182 African-Americans, 11,350 American Indians and 5,773 Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. Many of the new immigrants are from Mexico, China and India.

Women and Minorities in Seats of Power

Women have discovered what men always knew: It is fun to give orders, command attention and respect, and pull down high salaries. The majority of students at most, if not all, of the county’s colleges and universities are women, and women routinely win seats on school boards, city councils and the board of supervisors. Minorities are also showing up more on city councils and government bodies. In 1998, Ron Gonzales was elected mayor of San Jose.

A Little History

Spanish expeditions arrived in 1769 and 1776, intrepid and brave but late. Having ignored California since claiming it in the 1500s, Spain was dismayed to find other countries interested in her province.

The Spanish explorers and those who followed were supposed to plant the flag, subdue and convert the Indians and colonize the land. The flag was planted, great ranches carved out, but the colonists were few and the Indians, through disease, hostility and misguided benevolence, were almost exterminated.

At a critical time, Spain and Europe were diverted by the Napoleonic wars. On the other side of the continent, the United States secured its independence, bought the Midwest and heard the siren call of California. Over the mountains the Americans came, first for land, then gold. They kicked over the flag (Mexico’s, Spain having been ousted) and by purchase, violence, swindles and squatting drove the rancheros into obscurity.

Left behind were city names and a fondness for romanticized Spanish architecture that has influenced the design of banks, churches, colleges and hamburger stands. Also remaining: a mild sense of guilt about seizing the land from the Mexicans, who in the perverse ways of history reestablished themselves in Santa Clara County through immigration.

Era of Rustic Happiness

The new Californians built roads, cities and railroads, cultivated the county into fabled abundance and — in the great American tradition of boosterism and speculation — spent much time and ink trying to lure others to Santa Clara County. Thousands did come but never enough to turn Santa Clara into a metropolis. Well into the 20th century, the county tended the pear, prune and tomato — an era of rustic happiness, fondly recalled in local histories.

On 13 March, 1884, Leland Stanford Jr., age 16, died of typhoid fever. His saddened mom and dad (grocer, railroad tycoon, governor) founded and endowed Stanford University in memory of their only child. Santa Clara County owes much of its prosperity to Stanford U.

The War Boom

On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, a blunder that inadvertently did more for real estate in Santa Clara County than 90 years of booster hoopla.

War industries blossomed and thousands of servicemen, recalling that pleasant sunshine, returned to the county after the war. The war also made America a superpower, which entailed the support of a military establishment. For decades, defense dollars drove much of the county’s economy. Down went the orchards, up went the housing tracts, slowly at first, with some wringing of hands, then rapidly as people poured in. The population, 290,000 people in 1950, doubled, then tripled.

In 1951, prompted by Fred Terman, vice president of Stanford, the university opened 700 acres for development. Electronics companies, attracted by the proximity of big brains, snapped up parcels. The result: Silicon Valley.

Tinkerers, Entrepreneurs

Actually, it wasn’t quite that easy. Santa Clara County has a soft spot for the tinkerers, the Main Street whiz kids who get an idea into their heads, then spend days and weeks in their garages working it into something practical.

Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wozniak (Apple) epitomize the romance of the garage. They took their ideas and built industries. Of course, they drew on the work of others. The Apple could not have been built without the microprocessor, a 1971 Silicon Valley invention.

The whole technological revolution would have stalled in its tracks without the transistor, developed in Bell Labs, New Jersey, but the co-inventor was William Shockley, Palo Alto native, who came home and formed a group of inventors who later split off on their own and founded some of the top businesses of the world, including Intel.

Modern Santa Clara County

Cheered by Google other ventures, hopeful of starting yet another boom.

Still arguing over development. The days of the fast zonings and marching subdivisions are gone. San Jose has spent the last two decades putting muscle on its downtown. Many towns are going for what is called smart growth, building housing next to the jobs and light-rail stations.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, defense spending was sharply curtailed and this forced painful cutbacks in local industries. The Navy in 1994 quit Moffett Field, its airbase near Mountain View.

Defense industries may make a minor comeback; the world after Sept. 11 seems a more hostile place. But high-tech really is into global markets.

How Government Works

To Sacramento and Washington is where the money goes first these days and that’s where much of the power resides. If you want more or less spent on roads, welfare, warfare, schools or pensions, write your congressman, senator or state legislator. Although weakened, local governments are far from penniless and enjoy considerable powers. Major agencies include:

Board of Supervisors

Five members are elected countywide, but by districts. (Gilroy, south end of the county, votes for its supervisor, Milpitas, northeast, for its supervisor and so on.)

Supervisors are regional and municipal governors. They control spending for courts, animal services, many libraries, social services, public health. In their municipal hats, they build roads, decide zonings and, through the sheriff’s department, provide police protection for unincorporated areas and some cities under contractual arrangements.

If you live outside the limits of any city, you will be governed from San Jose, seat of county government. This sometimes gets confusing. In some areas, the county governs one side of a street and a city the other side.

City Councils

Generally five members (San Jose has 10 plus an elected mayor, the tie breaker, Palo Alto has nine), one council for each of the county’s 15 cities.

Councils are responsible for repairing roads, keeping neighborhoods safe, maintaining parks, providing recreation and other municipal chores. Much of their time goes to planning and development.

Special Service Districts

California grew so fast and chaotically that some regional needs, such as sewer and water, were met on an emergency basis by forming taxing districts with their own elected directors.

School Boards

Generally composed of five persons. There are 32 school districts in Santa Clara County, each with an elected board. A real hodgepodge. Trustees hire or fire principals and superintendents, negotiate teacher salaries, and decide how much should be spent on computers and shop and whether the children should wear uniforms, and more.

What’s in a Name

• Campbell. After Benjamin Campbell, wagon-train pioneer.

• Cupertino. At the time of Spanish expeditions, Catholic Church canonized a priest from the Italian village, Cupertino. Camped beside a stream, Spanish honored saint by calling spot “Arroyo San Jose de Cupertino.”

• Gilroy. John Cameron, Scottish seaman, jumped ship and took his mother’s maiden name, Gilroy. He settled near that town, married into a Spanish land grant, gambled most of it away and left his name.

• Los Altos. After developing firm, Los Altos Land Company.

• Los Gatos (The Cats). Several legends. The most popular: Men searching for water heard two wildcats fighting in the bushes.

• Milpitas. Obscure. May be Aztec for little cornfields.

• Monte Sereno. Peaceful Mountain.

• Morgan Hill. After early rancher, Hiram Morgan Hill, but, yes, Morgan Hill does have a few hills.

• Mountain View. You can see mountains from this city, a vista that impressed an early settler.

• Palo Alto. Spanish for a tall tree. Explorers found one, a coastal redwood, over 1,000 years old, near the present site of Palo Alto city hall. Still standing but it lost part of its trunk in 1909.

• San Jose. After the patron saint of the second Spanish expedition.

• Santa Clara. At this site the Spanish built “Mission Santa Clara de Asis.”

• Saratoga. Several versions, most popular: After Saratoga, New York, which has mineral springs, same as Saratoga, CA.

• Sunnyvale. Founding Realtor saw the sunshine.

Other Names to Know

• The Cardinal. What Stanford teams and rooters are called.

• The Farm. Another name for Stanford.

• Golden Bears or Bears or Old Blues. What UC Berkeley teams and rooters are called.

• Big Game. Football game, held every fall. Decides who is the better: The Cardinal or the Golden Bears. Winner gets the Ax, trophy with ax head.

• Spartans. What teams and rooters of San Jose State University are called.

• The City. San Francisco. Pretentious but appropriate.

• The Peninsula. Generally San Mateo County but some may include Palo Alto.

• East Bay. Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

• South Bay. Santa Clara County.

• Bay Area. San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Marin, Napa, Sonoma. All touch San Francisco Bay.

• Golden Gate. Yes it's the name of the bridge but it's also the name of the opening into San Francisco Bay.