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San Mateo County Leads Bay Area Economic Growth

28May

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Demographics

San Mateo County Leads Bay Area Economic Growth

Federal data charting five years' business growth suggest San Mateo County is the Bay Area’s true economic sweet spot. (Photo of the Facebook campus the month the company moved in, courtesy Flickr and Jitze Couperus.) By Sharon Simonson For all the debate about the relative economic strength and stature of traditional Silicon Valley (Santa Clara County) versus the new Silicon Valley (including San Francisco), San Mateo County is arguably outrunning both. Nationally, the information-technology sector is leading economic recovery. Industry payrolls expanded more than 20 percent in the five years ending in 2013, reaching $273 billion a year. Internet and software publishers and data storage and processing companies are growing the fastest. The Bay Area’s information-technology...

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...

Social Conditioning and the Corporate Campus

By Sharon Simonson For the urbanist, the Apple Inc. campus being built in Silicon Valley is a tragedy: a 176-acre tear in the community fabric delineated with security fencing and destined to last. For the architectural historian, it is that plus a reminder: The stark separations in land use that characterize most of modern America have had — and have — purposes of people separation too. “(Apple, Google and Facebook) have created these closed enclaves where you have only badged access. It’s not exclusive in race or age or economics, or by intent to have a homogenous population, but it does create these prestigious enclaves where they control the access." Bryant Rice, business and workplace-design consultant Despite its futuristic design and association with one of the world’s most r...