Demographics – Page 7 – Silicon Valley One World

15Sep

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Demographics

Talent flows

Santa Clara County is drawing tech and other crucial workplace talent from elite universities and emerging technology clusters nationwide even as it is losing the local war for workers to San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties. By Sharon Simonson Santa Clara County is the biggest supplier to San Francisco and neighboring counties of the high-value tech and other skilled workers who drive the region’s economy. According to new U.S. Census Bureau migration data, San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties draw the largest share of their new high-skill workers, including tech employees, business managers, scientists and industrial artists, from Santa Clara County. Based on net flows — the difference between the number of workers moving in and the number of workers moving out...

Hispanic Leaders Exhort City Managers to Change

27Aug

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Demographics

Hispanic Leaders Exhort City Managers to Change

By Sharon Simonson DOWNTOWN SAN JOSE — If city governments nationwide don’t address the disconnect between their largely white, male chief executives and their increasingly racially and ethnically mixed populations, riots such as those in Ferguson, Mo., could become commonplace; even government overthrow is possible. That was the somber message Aug. 22 in San Jose from the president-elect of the country’s largest professional city management association. Speaking before the 2014 California Regional Summit of the International Hispanic Network, Jim Bennett described himself as “a white guy from the whitest state, Maine.” Like Silicon Valley’s technology companies — which have been pressed to release their workforce demographics and have largely conceded that they are mostly whi...

13Aug

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Demographics

A World Grows in Sunnyvale

By Sharon Simonson SUNNYVALE and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The Silicon Valley Asian Indian population is growing faster than all other racial and ethnic groups countywide and will shortly overtake the Vietnamese as the valley's second-largest Asian population after the Chinese, despite the Vietnamese population’s own substantial growth. With an estimated 120,000 people, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the increased Indian population is manifesting across business and social institutions in multiple valley cities. Storefronts along El Camino Real, a central Silicon Valley thoroughfare connecting multiple communities, reflect the change, with new restaurants, clothiers and grocers selling Indian foods, spices and traditional garments filling more and more spaces. At...

12Aug

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Demographics

Change Comes in Colorful Garb

By Sharon Simonson Sagar Exclusive bills its Sunnyvale showroom as the largest for Indian apparel in the United States. It is 8,000 square feet at 939 W. El Camino Real, next door to the Chaat House, whose savory Indian snacks drew Sagar’s owners, Varsha Patel and Reuben Kanhai, to the location in the first place. “I have surveyed Chicago, Los Angeles — also Australia, New Zealand and Canada — wherever I travel, I look for Indian stores. There are about 1,000 Indian clothing stores in the United States,” Patel said. Based on square footage and diversity of offerings, she has concluded that Sunnyvale’s is the largest. It is her second Bay Area showroom — the first still operates in Hayward — and caters to customers from Los Gatos and Saratoga to Los Altos, for whom Hayward is a...

31Jul

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Demographics

Vital Valley, Struggling Valley

By Sharon Simonson SAN JOSE and PALO ALTO—As San Francisco and Silicon Valley lead California job growth, Bay Area economic recovery remains irregular. San Francisco and the South Bay have regained their 2007 peak employment—but not their dot-com peaks—while the East Bay, Oakland and Marin County have only begun to recover from the financial crisis, according to Palo Alto’s Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy and state data. Thirteen years after the dot-com boom, at not quite $91,000 a year, Santa Clara County’s median household income remained 11 percent below what it was in 1999, while 7 percent fewer households, or more than 12,000, earned above $150,000 a year, according to the most current Census Bureau data. San Francisco has 13,000 fewer employed residents toda...

29Jul

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Culture, Demographics

Historic Burbank Positioned for Change

By Sharon Simonson BURBANK, Unincorporated Santa Clara County — What’s in a number? Not everything, said 35-year-old Shirley Chan, who purchased her Burbank neighborhood home near West San Carlos Street and Bascom Avenue in 2011. The boundaries for the Burbank Community Association, which Chan leads, encompass neighborhoods that have some of the lowest median household incomes in Santa Clara County. But Chan grew up in West San Jose and attended the neighborhood’s Luther Burbank School. As leader of her neighborhood’s association, she is working to drive its gentrification. “I moved to Burbank because I think there is a lot of opportunity, and I want to tap into that,” she said. Chan cites proximity to downtown San Jose; Mineta San Jose International Airport; Westfield Valley ...

Census 2020 Seeks to Unravel Race from Ethnicity

16Jul

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Demographics

Census 2020 Seeks to Unravel Race from Ethnicity

By Sharon Simonson Tech companies releasing demographic data about their workforces are entering an emerging and potentially fraught conversation, though perhaps not at all about what they imagine. Since the end of May, Silicon Valley’s Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and Menlo Park’s Facebook Inc. have released “diversity” counts by gender, race and ethnicity about their national and global workers. They have uniformly criticized themselves for their largely white and Asian male populations and pledged to broaden their human spectrum. But in their information releases — in particular their graphical representations of their workforces’ statistical makeup — the companies have used nomenclature that differs from that used by the federal government, conflating two histor...