Sunday, May 4, 2008

Santa Clara – A Livable Town

About four years ago, when I interviewed Gary Gillmor for the Weekly, the former mayor described Santa Clara's character this way:

"The personality of Santa Clara is a true middle class community. We cut our city up with the transportation -- Central expressway, Lawrence expressway… We created jobs, we created a tax base. [By contrast] the personality of Los Altos, Saratoga -- they don’t want any industry."

(Cue apoplectic blasts from those who see Gillmor as the evil genie who popped the lid on Pandora's box and let out a swarm of developers.)

Having grown up in one – Brooklyn, NY in the 1950s and 60s -- I'm a big fan of comfortable-for-ordinary-folks communities. And in 2008, what it takes to create or preserve one is different than what it took in 1958.

I've had many conversations on the middle-class-ness of Santa Clara. It comes up whenever you're talking about development – high density or otherwise -- "affordable" housing, or urban planning.

Lots of people pay lip service to this idea, but the pious jaw music is often just a lead in for objecting to whatever project or plan is at hand. I can't help but observe that many who are most hostile to policies and projects that might retain Santa Clara's middle-class quality, wouldn't be here in the first place if it hadn't been that kind of city.

Let me tell you how I came to Santa Clara 25 years ago. (I recognize that some will rest their case against development on this alone.)

It was the tech boom of the 1980s and my new employer, a now-defunct software company, had just moved from pricier real estate in Sunnyvale to brand new – and cheaper -- digs on Mission College Blvd. I rented an apartment 15 minutes away on San Tomas – even in rush hour – and a stone's throw from the Acapulco. My husband and I lived there for three pleasantly affordable years and only moved when we bought our townhouse.

The townhouse was in a new development and within our budget -- unlike the single family detached houses we had looked at. Now, we were hardly struggling at the lower rungs of the Valley economy. My husband was an HR manager for a national retailer and I was a software product manager.

I'm sure there were people then who didn’t want us moving in, as there are people who would prefer not to have my new neighbors moving in. But my new neighbors are the people who make Silicon Valley an exceptionally interesting place.

You know, the kind of place where you might have Dave Packard or the Steves Wozniak and Jobs tinkering in the garage next door, inventing new industries in the process. Way back when ordinary people could still afford to live in Palo Alto and Cupertino.

For example, right next door to me lives Lasandra Brill, author of the Marketing in a Web 2.0 World blog. Brill is not only an evangelist for these new generation ways of bringing things to market, she likely invented some of them, too.

Down the street a bit lives Ivaylo Lenkov, another "Web 2.0" pioneer. You haven't heard his name, but Lenkov is changing the equation for building and operating your website. Lenkov's start-up SiteKreator – also based in Santa Clara -- lets anybody create a professional-looking website by clicking-and-pointing, without any technical knowledge. The price is right, too – the entry level is free.

Another guy you might have found yourself sharing a lunch time walk to the roach coach with is serial entrepreneur Jon Fisher, whose third startup, Internet security company Bharosa, was right next door to the Santa Clara Weekly office. Last year Oracle bought Bharosa and Fisher has gone on to, among other things, teaching the secrets of his success to aspiring entrepreneurs.

They all chose Santa Clara for the same reasons I did – it was a comfortable, affordable town, plus it's easy to do business here.

When I'm having this conversation about livability, I often ask people, "Would you want Santa Clara to be like Los Altos or Woodside?" And sometimes they answer, "What's wrong with Los Altos and Woodside."

Now, I have friends living in both those towns and I don't hold it against them. They made their beds and now they have to lie in them, not to mention paying PG&E and driving 30, 45 minutes to work somewhere else. But by my middle-class barometer, there's plenty wrong with those towns.

First, your neighbors have so much free floating anxiety about the value of their real estate that they will torment you ceaselessly about the color you paint your window frames, the height of your fence or your magnolia tree, your nocturnal escapades in the hot tub, or your kid's friends.

One Los Altos couple I know practically had to put blackout shades on the front of their house to keep the neighbors across the street from spying on their social life to see if they were entertaining "undesirables" -- if you know what I mean and I think you do. My friends, you see, had moved there from San Jose, and you never know about those people.

The deed to their house still has archaic covenants specifying that blacks, Asians and Mexicans will only go to the back door. Santa Clara, on the other hand, was home to one of the county's first black community leaders, William James, and elected him sergeant-at-arms for the volunteer fire department.

Second, those towns are like living in a museum.

Sure your next-door neighbor could be some guy (and it will almost certainly be a guy, and often a shiny new trophy wife) who changed the semiconductor industry, developed the first commercially successful database software or wrote the first online shopping cart program. But these triumphs happened 10, 20, 30 years ago or longer. Learn about it at the Tech or Computer History Museum – it's cheaper.

Right here in Santa Clara I'm next door to people who are doing things today that are changing business and the world now. And that makes it an exceptionally interesting place to be. So my view is, let's make sure that future Brills, Fishers and Lenkovs will always be attracted to this comfortable-for-ordinary-people town.

And for those who disagree? Well there's always Woodside.

8 comments:

  1. Sorry, but saying Santa Clara is middle class is not very accurate. I would say upper-middle class is about as far as I would go. Middle class homes do not sell for $800K, for a 3/2 fixer upper.

    While there are more expensive part than others, look at the businesses in Santa Clara, the development, and the arrogance the City Council has....not middle class...maybe middle class want-to-be.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm not a fan of anonymous comments. If it's valid, why be anonymous?

    However, to Mx. Anonymous' point: No, $800K isn't remotely an affordable house. But the $50K, $100K, or even $500K single family detached house on a quarter-acre lot ain't coming back -- ever. Unless we have another Great Depression, and in that case our problems will be far worse than the price of real estate.

    So there are choices:

    1. The "I got mine and the hell with you. Now go away while I stick my head in the sand" approach (not unheard of in Santa Clara, especially in anti-development circles), or...

    2. Make the town unattractive enough to spawn a mass exodus (too bad we don't have a nuclear power plant), or....

    3. Higher density new and re-development that makes affordable homes financially possible. And I don't mean senior housing. I mean multi-family houses and condos for -- you guessed it -- ordinary folks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sorry...just hitting "anonymous" is just easier. But, since you have issues with that, I'll gladly sign.

    I, too, am from NY. I believe in solid density. I think the Santana Row approach (not pricey like that) is the best. Having mixed/light retail with living over head is the *ONLY* way to scale a society.

    Sticking your head in the sand is what many people around here do, including some not-so visionaries in official positions in Santa Clara. Trying to support more horizontal growth instead of encouraging vertical growth is just what you described...sticking your head in the sand and hoping it all just "works out."

    Building a nuclear plant is actually a good thing from an energy perspective, but that is a different discussion. I think your point was a negative one.

    The City should take some responsibility in guiding how it will grow long term and not simply let it happen. The officials are there for a reason, to show leadership and make decisions. Lately, those decisions have been questionable at best and down right selfish and unethical at worst.

    You want a city to grow properly, look back at your root in NYC. See how it grew. How many sign family homes are there? How many 3 car households are there? How many public transportation users are there?

    All the local cities around here need to work together, not just focus on their own little sandbox boundaries. We do not live in boundaries, we move around. Cities should be encouraged and rewarded for working together. I have yet to see this demonstrated here. There have been many opportunities for cities to work together on projects that span cities, but no one steps up.

    That is the perfect example of one's "head in the sand."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Excellent points, all of them. We do have to start thinking regionally and there's no real incentive to do so.

    And I agree about nuclear power -- France and Japan both rely heavily on nuclear power and have had no accidents. (I was thinking of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island when I wrote. It's a sad reflection on us that the U.S. is more like the Soviet Union than the developed world in this respect. And since the Bush imprisonment, things have only gotten worse.)

    Thanks for writing:)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yeah...Three Mile Island is a thing of the past. We needed to start building nuclear facilities years ago. If we powered the stationary things (e.g., homes, businesses, etc.) with nuclear, we could use oil based products for mobile applications (e.g., cars, trucks, planes, etc.). Natural gas can be used more effectively and coal can be eliminated, which will be very hard to do for our economy since it is so very cheap for us.

    But, we are all too busy with protecting our political careers, so suggesting nuclear power on any level is no on anyone's priority list. Oh well...when (not if) we run out of oil and gas becomes $25 a gallon, we can all dig up our back yards and start growing our own food, because truck aren't going to be bringing food or supplies anymore. That "head in the sand" is far more devastating than building on land incorrectly. You can't tear something down and get more oil.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think it is worth pointing out that now it occurs to me there is less and less job opportunities in Santa Clara - the Big Sun is slowly setting and as soon as it can get out of the deal it struck with the city it too will complete go into darkness. Extreme is on the books to move. The Tech industry might still be having a mini boom but they are not staying in the area - and as such commutes will end up being longer. We have lived here over 12 years and not one of our two income family jobs has been in Santa Clara - it's just not an option - might sound like a great ideal - but it's truly pie in the sky if you are young and trying to raise kids, have a job and buy a house! sorry Carolyn you are more fortunate than the norm. Lucky for you and your husband living and working in the area - us younger ones have to still do the commute and then we have to send out kids to private schools because the school in Santa Clara frankly speaking are just dreadful unless you have the chance of getting into Milliken - which is "Fat Chance"!

    And I prefer to be anonymous because I prefer my privacy in this super invasive tech world

    ReplyDelete
  7. You make a lot of good points. I'm interested in your take on the tech industry and would like to hear more about that.

    You're correct in saying that I couldn't afford to buy my house today -- a two-bedroom townhouse. And one of my reasons for writing this post was to counter the "I've got mine, the hell with you" attitude that characterizes many of those who are anti-development, anti-higher density.

    The question is: how can we return real estate to affordability for the average family?

    A complete collapse in prices would do it, although it would likely be caused by a situation where no one is buying, like a major depression, so the only people who would benefit are those with cash or access to it -- like people who already own a house and speculators.

    Another answer is higher density development that adds significantly to the housing stock -- i.e. thousands, not hundreds, and not "senior housing," which is a dodge. This would bring prices down in a more natural way. But developers have to be willing to help pay for the infrastructure and services needed to support this development.

    RE your comment about schools. I have to disagree with your assessment. My experience with the public schools has been generally good. We're in the Campbell school district (west of Pruneridge). My son went to Village School (parent participation elementary school) and that was a great experience. Now he's a senior at Prospect and in general the teachers and classes have been excellent.

    ReplyDelete
  8. You make a lot of good points. I'm interested in your take on the tech industry and would like to hear more about that.

    You're correct in saying that I couldn't afford to buy my house today -- a two-bedroom townhouse. And one of my reasons for writing this post was to counter the "I've got mine, the hell with you" attitude that characterizes many of those who are anti-development, anti-higher density.

    The question is: how can we return real estate to affordability for the average family?

    A complete collapse in prices would do it, although it would likely be caused by a situation where no one is buying, like a major depression, so the only people who would benefit are those with cash or access to it -- like people who already own a house and speculators.

    Another answer is higher density development that adds significantly to the housing stock -- i.e. thousands, not hundreds, and not "senior housing," which is a dodge. This would bring prices down in a more natural way. But developers have to be willing to help pay for the infrastructure and services needed to support this development.

    RE your comment about schools. I have to disagree with your assessment. My experience with the public schools has been generally good. We're in the Campbell school district (west of Pruneridge). My son went to Village School (parent participation elementary school) and that was a great experience. Now he's a senior at Prospect and in general the teachers and classes have been excellent.

    ReplyDelete