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San Jose, California
San José (officially the City of San José; prounounced [sæn hoʊˈzeɪ] (see IPA) or, in rapid speech, [sænəˈzeɪ]) is the third largest city in the U.S. state of California and is the county seat of Santa Clara County. On April 3, 1979, the city council adopted San José as the spelling of the city name on the city seal and official stationery. However, it is still more commonly spelled without the diacritic mark. The city is located at the south end of the San Francisco Bay, within the informal boundaries of Silicon Valley, and is the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area. As of 2005, it reported an estimated population of 904,522, making it the most populous city in Northern California (it surpassed San Francisco in 1989) and third most populous city in the state, after Los Angeles and San Diego. The Census Bureau update for 2005 indicates San Jose has overtaken Detroit as the United States' tenth most populous city. All of these figures refer to the area within the city limits, which is the sense in which the word "city" is normally used in the U.S. and not to the urban area. The San Francisco Bay Area, of which San Jose forms part, is the fourth largest in the U.S. San José was the first town in the Spanish colony of Nueva California (later Alta California), founded in 1777 as a farming community to provide food for nearby military installations. It served as the first capital of California after statehood was granted in 1850. After over 150 years as an agricultural center, increased demand for housing from soldiers and other veterans returning from World War II and starting families, as well as aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s led first to San Jose being a bedroom community for Silicon Valley in the 1970s, then attracting businesses to the city; by 1990 the city was calling itself the Capital of Silicon Valley.
HistorySite chosen by De AnzaFor thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers, the area now known as San Jose was inhabited by several groups of Ohlone Native Americans. Permanent European presence in the area came with the 1770 founding of the Presidio of Monterey and Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo by Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra, about sixty miles (100 km) to the south. It is likely that Don Pedro Fages, the military governor at Monterey, passed through the area on his 1772 expedition to explore the East Bay. Late in 1775, Juan Bautista de Anza led an expedition to bring colonists from New Spain to California and to locate sites for two missions, one presidio, and one pueblo (town). He left the colonists at Monterey in 1776, and explored north with a small group. He selected the sites of the Presidio of San Francisco and Mission San Francisco de Asís in what is now San Francisco; on his way back to Monterey, he sited Mission Santa Clara de Asís and the pueblo San José in the Santa Clara Valley. De Anza returned to Mexico City before any of the settlements were actually founded, but his name lives on in many buildings and street names. Early Spanish puebloEl Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe was founded by José Joaquin Moraga on November 29, 1777, the first settlement not associated with a mission or a military post (presidio) in Alta California. (Mission Santa Clara, the closest mission, was founded earlier in 1777, three miles (5 km) from the original pueblo site in neighboring Santa Clara. Mission San José de Guadalupe was not founded until 1797, about 20 miles (30 km) north of San Jose in what is now Fremont.) The town was founded by the colonists led to California by de Anza, as a farming community to provide food for the presidios of San Francisco and Monterey. In 1778, the pueblo had a population of 68. In 1797, the pueblo was moved from its original location, near the present-day intersection of Guadalupe Parkway and Taylor Street, to a location in what is now Downtown San Jose, surrounding Pueblo Plaza (now Plaza de César Chávez). Early statehood  During the Bear Flag Revolt, Captain Thomas Fallon led a small force from Santa Cruz and captured the pueblo without bloodshed on July 11, 1846. Fallon received an American flag from John D. Sloat, and raised it over the pueblo on July 14, as the California Republic agreed to join the United States following the start of the Mexican-American War. Fallon would later become the tenth mayor of San Jose. During the California Gold Rush period, the New Almaden Mines just south of the city were the largest mercury mines in North America (mercury was used to help separate gold from ore). The cinnabar deposits had been discovered during the Mexican era, and mining operations began in 1845, the first operating mine in the province. The importance of the mercury industry at the time explains why the local newspaper is named the Mercury News. On March 27, 1850, San Jose became the first incorporated city in the U.S. state of California, the first mayor was Josiah Belden. It also served as the state's first capital with the first and second sessions of the California Legislature, known as the Legislature of a Thousand Drinks, being held there in 1850 and 1851. The legislature was unhappy with the location, as no buildings suitable for a state government were available in the city, and took up State Senator Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo's offer to build a new capital on land he donated to the state in what is now Benicia. Notable events In 1881, because of a forceful campaign by editor J.J. Owen of the San Jose Mercury News, the city council authorized the construction of the San Jose Electric Light Tower, ostensibly to replace the gas streetlights that had illuminated downtown San Jose since 1861. It didn't provide sufficient illumination, and by 1884 was used only for ceremonial purposes. It collapsed during a gale in 1915. In 1989, the city of San Jose filed suit against France and the Eiffel estate, claiming that the Eiffel Tower was a copyright infringement of the Electric Light Tower; the suit was eventually dismissed. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, with its epicenter near Daly City [1] between San Jose and San Francisco, devastated the few large buildings in San Jose. The city was still primarily rural and the population much smaller than San Francisco, so houses and businesses were not so closely built, providing no opportunity for a major fire like the one that destroyed the city up the Peninsula. The all-brick Agnews Asylum (later Agnews State Hospital) suffered possibly the worst damage in the San Jose area, killing over 100 people as the walls and roof collapsed. The 8-year-old San Jose High School's three-story stone and brick structure also collapsed, and many other buildings were severely damaged. The 1933 kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart resulted in mob violence in San Jose. About 10,000 residents (approximately 1/6 of the city's population at the time) stormed the jail and lynched the two men who had confessed to the killing. The case drew international attention to San Jose, for the kidnapping, lynching, and for the praise that Governor James Rolph directed to those who participated. It is also notable as the last public lynching in California's history. Photos of the lynchings were even used as Nazi propaganda. Transition from agriculture to technologyFor nearly two centuries a farming community, San Jose produced a significant amount of fruits and vegetables until the 1960s, and many past and current names of teams, streets, buildings, and so on reflect its agricultural beginnings. Prunes, grapes, and apricots were some of the major crops. In 1922, the first commercial farming of broccoli in the US was started in San Jose, by brothers Stephano and Andrea D'Arrigo. The Del Monte cannery in Midtown was the largest employer in the city for many years. 1 Food Machinery Corporation (FMC) was founded in San Jose as the Bean Spray Pump Company in 1883. [2] [3] In 1941 the company received an order from the United States War Department for one thousand LVTs, bringing defense contracts to San Jose for the first time. FMC's military business would later be spun off into United Defense. [4] IBM established their west coast headquarters in San Jose in 1943. In 1952 they opened a research and development facility in downtown, where Reynold Johnson and his team invented RAMAC. In 1956 IBM opened its Cottle Road manufacturing facility in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, where disc drives were invented in 1962. IBM moved the research and development operation out of downtown, opeining the Santa Teresa Laboratories in the Coyote Valley in 1976, and the Almaden Research Center in 1986.2 Major growth A. P. Hamann (nicknamed "Dutch") became city manager in 1950. At the time, the city had a population of 95,000 and a total area of only 17 mi². Hamann instituted an aggressive growth program by annexation of adjacent areas, such as Alviso, Cambrian Park, and other neighborhoods, and a program of dispersed urbanization, sometimes called "los angelization". Hamann also spent significant time on the East Coast, selling San Jose as an ideal place for businesses to expand into. Hamann's efforts resulted in an annual population growth rate of over eight percent. When Hamann left office in 1969, San Jose had grown to 495,000 residents and 136 mi². 1 Following Hamann's retirement, anti-growth city councils came to power, cemented with the 1971 election of Norman Mineta as mayor. Under Mineta, the city adopted the "General Plan" that restricted development of land inside the incorporated area of San Jose and banned development in an additional 200 mi² east and south of the city, an area known as San Jose's sphere of influence. To the west, communities such as Campbell and Cupertino had incorporated as cities to avoid being annexed to San Jose, while expansion to the north was impossible because of San Francisco Bay. The result was that there was no land available to build housing. The plan's goal was to bring population growth down to a more manageable level. 3 However, with the boom of the electronics industry, specifically personal computers and integrated circuits, San Jose and the surrounding areas' population continued to grow rapidly. By 1980, the city's population was 630,000; it reached 782,000 by 1990; and 894,943 by 2000—at which point Santa Clara County as a whole had 1,682,585 residents. However, the city council passed another General Plan in 1994 with the original 1974 urban growth boundaries intact. As a result, housing costs in San Jose and the rest of the Bay Area rose faster than the national average in the 1980s and 1990s; between 1976 and 2001, San Jose's housing costs increased by 936 percent, the fastest growth in the nation over that time. The average 2003 home price in Santa Clara County was approximately 330 percent of the national average. 3 Many people's view of San Jose is still formed by the Dionne Warwick hit from the 1960s, "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David (neither of whom had spent time there and chose the name because it suited the tune), it includes the lyrics, "there's a lot of space in San Jose; there'll be a place where I can stay" and "I may go wrong and lose my way," and contrasts it to Los Angeles, "a great big freeway." In 1960, the population of San Jose was only 204,000, just over a fifth of the 2003 population. The only freeway through or near San Jose was U.S. Highway 101, which touched only the outermost edges of the city and was still a rural route or controlled by traffic lights in some areas. A large portion of the Santa Clara Valley still contained commercial orchards. Law and government
 San Jose is a charter city under California law, giving it the power to enact local ordinances that may conflict with state law, within the limits provided by the charter. The city has a council-manager government with a city manager nominated by the mayor and elected by the city council.  The San Jose City Council is made up of ten council members elected by districts, and a mayor elected in an at-large election. During city council meetings, the mayor presides, and all eleven members can vote on any issue. The mayor has no veto powers. Council members and the mayor are elected to four-year terms; the even-numbered district council members beginning in 1994; the mayor and the odd-numbered district council members beginning in 1996. Council members and the mayor are limited to two successive terms in office, although a council member that has reached the term limit can be elected mayor, and vice versa. The council elects a vice-mayor from the members of the council at the second meeting of the year following a council election. This council member has the right to act as mayor during the temporary absence of the mayor, but does not have the right of succession to the mayor's office upon a vacancy.4 The city manager is the chief administrative officer of the city, and must present an annual budget for approval by the city council. The council elects the manager for an indefinite term, and may at any time remove the manager, or the electorate may remove the manager through a recall election. Other city officers elected by the council are the city attorney, city auditor, and city clerk. 4  Like all California cities except San Francisco, both the levels and the boundaries of what the city government controls is determined by the local county Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO). The goal of a LAFCO is to try to avoid uncontrolled urban sprawl. The Santa Clara County LAFCO has set boundaries of San Jose's 'Sphere of Influence' (indicated by the blue line in the map near the top of the page) as a superset of the actual city limits (the yellow area in the map), plus parts of the surrounding unincorporated county land, where San Jose can, for example, prevent development of fringe areas to concentrate city growth closer to the city's core. The LAFCO also defines a subset of the Sphere as an 'Urban Service Area' (indicated by the red line in the map), effectively limiting development to areas where urban infrastructure (sewers, electrical service, etc.) already exists. San Jose has consistently been ranked as one of the safest large cities in the United States. During the 1990s and 2000s, the crime rate has consistently fallen. [5] In 2003 and 2004 the city was ranked as the safest American city with a population over 500,000 by the Morgan Quitno Awards. [6] However, reports of police brutality have become more common. [7] [8] [9] The Office of Economic Development coordinates the San Jose Sister City Program. As of 2005, there are seven sister cities (aka twinned towns): Okayama, Japan (established in 1957); San José, Costa Rica (1961); Veracruz, Veracruz, Mexico (1975); Tainan, Taiwan (1975); Dublin, Ireland (1986); Pune, India (1992); and Ekaterinburg, Russia (1992). Geography  San Jose is located at 37°18'15" North, 121°52'22" West (37.304051, −121.872734)¹. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 461.5 km² (178.2 mi²)1. 452.9 km² (174.9 mi²) of it is land and 8.6 km² (3.3 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 1.86% water. San Jose lies near the San Andreas Fault; a major source of earthquake activity in California. The most serious earthquake, in 1906, damaged many buildings in San Jose as described earlier. Earlier significant quakes rocked the city in 1839, 1851, 1858, 1864, 1865, 1868, and 1891. The Daly City Earthquake of 1957 caused some damage. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 also did some damage to parts of the city. The other faults near San Jose are the Monte Vista Fault, South Hayward Fault, Northern Calaveras Fault, and Central Calaveras Fault. The Guadalupe River runs from the Santa Cruz Mountains (which separate the South Bay from the Pacific Coast) flowing north through San Jose, ending in the San Francisco Bay at Alviso. Along the southern part of the river is the neighborhood of Almaden Valley, originally named for the mercury mines which produced mercury needed for gold extraction from quartz during the California gold rush as well as mercury fulminate blasting caps and detonators for the U.S. military from 1870 to 1945. The lowest point in San Jose is at sea level at the San Francisco Bay in Alviso; the highest is 4,372 feet (1,333 m) at Copernicus Peak, Mount Hamilton. Due to the proximity to Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton, San Jose has taken several steps to reduce light pollution, including replacing all street lamps with low pressure sodium lamps. To recognize the city's efforts, the asteroid 6216 San Jose was named after the city. Some residents object to the deep yellow color of the streetlights, saying they are distracting because they are the same shade of yellow as traffic lights and other illuminated traffic warnings--image of the similarity here. Climate San Jose, like most of the Bay Area, has a Mediterranean climate tempered by the presence of the San Francisco Bay. Unlike San Francisco, which is exposed to the ocean or Bay on three sides and whose temperature therefore varies relatively little year-round and overnight, San Jose lies more inland, protected on three sides by mountains. This shelters the city from rain and makes it more of a semiarid, near-desert area, with a mean annual rainfall of only 14.4 inches (366 mm), compared to some other parts of the Bay Area, which can get up to four times that amount. It also avoids San Francisco's omnipresent fog most of the year.  However, temperatures are generally moderate. January's average high is 59 °F (15 °C) and average low is 42 °F (6 °C), with overnight freezes several nights each year; July's average high is 84 °F (29 °C) and average low is 58 °F (14 °C), with heat exceeding 100 °F (38 °C) several days each year. The highest temperature ever recorded in San Jose was 109 °F (42.8°C); the lowest was 21 °F (-6 °C). Temperatures between night and day can vary by 30 or 40 °F (17 to 22 °C). With the light rainfall, San Jose experiences over 300 days a year of full or significant sunshine. Rain occurs primarily in the months from October through April or May, with hardly any rainfall from June through September. During the winter, hillsides and fields turn green with native grasses and vegetation, although deciduous trees are bare; with the coming of the annual summer dry period, the vegetation dies and dries, giving the hills a golden cover, which some find beautiful but which also provides fuel for frequent grass fires. The snow level drops as low as 2,000 ft (610 m) above sea level occasionally each winter, coating nearby Mount Hamilton with light snow that seldom lasts a day> This sometimes snarls traffic travelling on State Route 17 towards Santa Cruz. Snow fell on the valley floor in San Jose most recently in January of 1976, about an inch (25 mm) that melted soon after the sun rose. Again, like most of the Bay Area, San Jose is made up of dozens of microclimates. Downtown San Jose experiences the lightest rainfall in the city, while South San Jose, only 10 miles (16 km) distant, experiences more rainfall and slightly more extreme temperatures. EconomySan Jose considers itself "the Capital of Silicon Valley." As such, its economy rises and falls with high-tech employment in the Bay Area. During the peak of the tech bubble, employment, housing prices, and traffic congestion peaked, but all eased as the economy slowed during the first few years of the 21st century. As of 2003, the city reported 355,000 jobs within the city limits and an unemployment rate of 8.7%.  The city lists 25 companies with 1,000 employees or more, including the headquarters of Adobe Systems, BEA Systems, Cisco, and eBay, as well as major facilities for Flextronics, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Hitachi and Lockheed Martin. Sizable government employers include the city, Santa Clara County, and San José State University. [10] The cost of living in San Jose and the surrounding areas is among the highest in California and the nation; in the U.S. only New York City and San Francisco are more expensive. [11] Housing costs in the city are the primary reason for the high cost of living, although the costs in all areas tracked by ACCRA are above the national average. Despite the high cost of living, San Jose households have the highest disposable income of any large American city. San Jose residents produce more U.S. patents than any other city, the average worker productivity in San Jose is double the national average, and 35 percent of venture capital funds in the U.S. are invested in San Jose and Silicon Valley companies. [12] Demographics
 As of the census2 of 2000, there are 894,943 people, 276,598 households, and 203,576 families residing in the city. The population density is 1,976.1/km² (5,117.9/mi²). There are 281,841 housing units at an average density of 622.3/km² (1,611.8/mi²). The racial makeup of the city is 47.49% White, 3.50% African American, 0.77% Native American, 26.86% Asian, 0.40% Pacific Islander, 15.94% from other races, and 5.04% from two or more races. 30.17% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race. There are 276,598 households out of which 38.3% have children under the age of 18 living with them, 56.0% are married couples living together, 11.7% have a female householder with no husband present, and 26.4% are non-families. 18.4% of all households are made up of individuals and 4.9% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age or older. The average household size is 3.20 and the average family size is 3.62.  In the city the population is spread out with 26.4% under the age of 18, 9.9% from 18 to 24, 35.4% from 25 to 44, 20.0% from 45 to 64, and 8.3% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 33 years. For every 100 females there are 103.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 102.5 males. The median income for a household in the city is $70,243, and the median income for a family is $74,813. Males have a median income of $49,347 versus $36,936 for females. The | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
