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Tag: Demographics

No Garden of Earthly Delights
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
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
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
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
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
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...
Oh Baby! San Francisco Births on the Rise
Demographics

Oh Baby! San Francisco Births on the Rise

State demographers said San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda counties would experience declining births. They were wrong. By Sharon Simonson With wildly expensive housing and poorly perceived public schools, San Francisco has not enjoyed a reputation as a child-rearing mecca. As recently as 2010, state demographers predicted the number of births in the city each year would drop by a quarter over the coming decade. Trend lines were the same in Alameda and San Mateo counties. New U.S. Census Bureau birth estimates illustrate anew the pitfalls of future-telling: the number of babies born each year in both San Francisco and Alameda counties in fact rose from 2010 through 2015 and stayed steady in San Mateo County. A state demographer says their estimates erred in two, relate...
An Iranian-American Walks Common Ground with West Oakland’s Homeless
Demographics, Events

An Iranian-American Walks Common Ground with West Oakland’s Homeless

By Sharon Simonson The mean streets of West Oakland seem an odd place to uncover kinship and hope. But that’s what Iranian-American filmmaker Amir Soltani found as he made his 95-minute documentary, “Dogtown Redemption,” about the homeless recyclers who make their lives there. Though his family came to America when he was 16 years old, pushed from their homeland by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and he attended high school in Boston and later Harvard University in Cambridge on a scholarship, it wasn’t until he moved to Oakland eight years ago that he felt true community in the U.S. What he discovered in West Oakland were people, who — like immigrants and refugees — had lost their connections to family and friends and their lifelines to better lives. As he learned the daily ri...