Two weeks left of this fast and things are moving right along. Quite glad I have not had to hear about any crypto news for 19 days. The good news is good but the bad news is tiring. I think that long term the cryptos will have an amazing run for the ages.
So what is there to talk about today? How about the City of Santa Clara, which is ground zero for Silicon Valley. The city is bordered by mudflats along San Francisco Bay to the north, the city of San Jose to the east and south, and the cities of Cupertino and Sunnyvale to the west.
Santa Clara has about 119,000 residents. While the city is almost entirely built-out, Santa Clara generally has a more pro-development planning environment than most cities in Silicon Valley, and significant new housing has been created in recent years mainly via adaptive re-use projects or by removing older, low-intensity uses to make way for higher-intensity development.
Unlike many suburbs, Santa Clara is a vital employment center. Reversing the jobs-housing imbalance of many suburbs, the city has more than one job per employed resident. Major employers headquartered in the city include Intel, Applied Materials, NVIDIA, and Agilent Technologies. The City of Santa Clara is home to the University of Santa Clara (below).
Employment densities in the central district tend to be relatively low (30 to 40 employees per acre), as much of the area was built-out with warehouses and other relatively low intensity industrial uses in the 1950s and 1960s. More recent developments have consisted almost exclusively of research & development projects of much greater intensity (more than 100 employees per acre). Those projects usually consist of one- or two-story concrete tilt-up or steel frame structures with surface parking at a ratio of one space per 200 to 400 square feet of rentable building area. Many people don't know that the Great America theme park is also located in the City of Santa Clara (below).
The development of office, warehouse and retail facilities in the subject's district over the years partly reflects the influence of the proximity of San Jose International Airport (SJC). The SJC facility is owned and operated by the City of San Jose, and is the only major airport in Santa Clara County. In addition to the SJC, the City of Santa Clara is home to Levi Stadium (below).
