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Pew Research: Bay Area Economics: Poor Get Poorer; Middle Class Shrinks

14May

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Demographics

Pew Research: Bay Area Economics: Poor Get Poorer; Middle Class Shrinks

Median incomes have fallen for everyone, but they’ve fallen most for the lowest income households. New research finds that income inequality suppresses economic growth. By Sharon Simonson The middle-class is shrinking in hundreds of U.S. cities including the San Francisco-Oakland and San Jose-Sunnyvale metro areas, according to new Pew Research Center analysis encompassing three-quarters of the American population. In the Bay Area metros, not only is the middle class shrinking but fewer than half of adults now live in middle-class households, a change in conditions from five years ago. In addition, while more Bay Area adults joined the upper-income ranks, helping reduce the size of the middle class, median household incomes fell. The decline was greatest for lower-income house...

San Jose City Adds Vietnamese-American Small Business Advisor

5May

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Demographics, The Web

San Jose City Adds Vietnamese-American Small Business Advisor

By Sharon Simonson Xuan Ha, former director of San Jose's Vietnamese American Business Association, has joined the city of San Jose’s Small Business Ally Program as a small business coach. She speaks fluent Vietnamese. The Business Ally program helps San Jose entrepreneurs find the best location and then navigate the city permit process to complete remodeling or other work including new business registration. Immigrants own about half of San Jose’s 56,000 small businesses—those employing fewer than 35 people. Vietnamese-Americans, including refugees, immigrants and their U.S.-born children, constitute the largest Asian population in the city of San Jose with 104,000 people, according to the most recent Census Bureau statistics. Seventy-five percent are foreign-born and near...

2May

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Culture, Demographics

No Garden of Earthly Delights

By Sharon Simonson EAST SAN JOSE— Eleven years after the city and the Viet Heritage Society agreed to terms for the VHS to build the four-acre Vietnamese Heritage Gardens in San Jose’s Kelley Park, the city says that the unfinished project has become a health and safety hazard and that it must take control to finish the work. But directors of the Vietnamese community organization led by Dr. Ngai X. Nguyen are contesting the pullback. They say in a letter to City Manager Norberto Duenas that the city “has always had total control,” including selecting the project contractor in 2011, and has “under-funded” the effort by more than $1.5 million. They allege that the city foisted millions of dollars in infrastructure to prepare the property for development on the nonprofit while er...

Judge Allows Chinese Professor Zhang to Subpoena Records from Tech Company

28Apr

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Demographics

Judge Allows Chinese Professor Zhang to Subpoena Records from Tech Company

window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-166654327-1'); Judge tells Avago Technologies Ltd., an alleged victim in the trade-secret theft case, that it can contest the demand. By Sharon Simonson SAN JOSE—A federal magistrate judge has granted a request from defense attorneys for Chinese professor Hao Zhang to issue a subpoena to Avago Technologies to demand Avago’s production of confidential records. San Jose-based Avago is a purported victim of Zhang’s trade-secret theft. Judge Nathanael Cousins told counsel for Avago, Michael Martinez, in federal court on Wednesday that the company had until May 11 to seek to quash the subpoena in whole or in part. He also instructed Avago and Zha...

Berkeley Workers Bike More Than Anyone Else

27Apr

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Demographics, The Web

Berkeley Workers Bike More Than Anyone Else

By Sharon Simonson A greater proportion of people bike to work in Berkeley than in any other American city with a population of 100,000 or more, according to new calculations from the U.S. Census Bureau. Work commuters in San Francisco and Oakland are also among the most likely to turn to pedal power compared to their peers in other large American cities. To commemorate Bike to Work Week from May 16 to May 20, the bureau ranked the top 20 U.S. cities based on what percentage of their workforce ride a bike to work. Not quite one in 10 Berkeley workers ride bicycles to their jobs. That compares to about 5 percent of workers in San Francisco and slightly less in the East Bay’s Oakland. No South Bay city made the Top 20 list. College towns appear most prominently in the ranking...

San Francisco Leads Nation in Employment Gains in Large Counties

21Apr

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Demographics, The Web

San Francisco Leads Nation in Employment Gains in Large Counties

Information businesses, including software publishers, and building construction are setting the job-growth pace By Sharon Simonson New economy is driving old in San Francisco, making the county the fastest growing in the country as measured by annual employment gains. Travis County, home to Austin, Texas, and another U.S. technology industry center, is the country’s second-fastest growing. Information businesses are among those adding jobs in the home county of the University of Texas, but businesses in other sectors are adding them faster. According to industry data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau on the 50 largest U.S. counties by employment, companies that specialize in Internet publishing including online software sellers and web-search portals are adding workers...

California Has the Most Foreign-Born Residents

20Apr

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Demographics, The Web

California Has the Most Foreign-Born Residents

By Sharon Simonson A record 42.2 million foreign-born people live in the United States making up 13.2 percent of the population, according to new findings from The Pew Research Center based on U.S. Census data. With 27 percent of California's total population foreign-born — or not quite 10.5 million people — the state has more immigrants numerically than any other state and the greatest proportion of its total residents who are immigrants. One in five people (or nearly that many) living in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Nevada also are foreign-born. West Virginia has the lowest portion of foreign-born people at 1.4 percent of the state's total 1.8 million residents, Pew reports. The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. has grown fourfold since 1960 when not quite 10 millio...

U.S.-Born Son of Refugees Tests San Jose’s Appetite for Next-Gen Viet Leaders

17Apr

By Editor2 Comments

Culture, Demographics

U.S.-Born Son of Refugees Tests San Jose’s Appetite for Next-Gen Viet Leaders

window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-166654327-1'); By Sharon Simonson April 6, EAST SAN JOSE — In college, Lan Diep told people to call him Ethan. He is probably the whitest Vietnamese man I had ever met, or would meet, he tells me. He dresses in khaki pants, brown loafers and a Tattersall button-down collared shirt, tucked in, with belt. In the morning, he includes a dark sports coat. In his “real” life, Diep is a legal-aid attorney whose fluency in Vietnamese took him to Biloxi, Miss., after the April 2010 BP oil spill as a legal fellow at the Mississippi Center for Justice. (“I detest the billable hour,” he says.) A third of the fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico states — Texas, L...