San Francisco Bay Area – Silicon Valley One World

24May

By EditorNo Comments

Demographics

70,000 New Homes But Still Not Enough

By Sharon Simonson Same as it ever was. Even with nearly 70,000 new homes built in the Bay Area in the last five years, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data, 2015 population counts exclaim the continuing and huge disconnect between demand to live in the region and the production of new abodes. To keep pace with population growth of more than 450,000 since 2010, the region’s five primary counties—Santa Clara, Alameda, San Francisco, Contra Costa and San Mateo—should have built 155,630 new homes, based on an average of three people per household. That’s 83,000 homes more than were produced. The existing housing stock absorbed at least some of the difference, with the average number of people per home rising in every county. Nationally, the average number of people per ho...

San Francisco, Silicon Valley Yogis Join International Yoga Day

By Sharon Simonson Can yoga help solve the world’s biggest problems? Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi thinks so. Thousands more people in the San Francisco Bay Area seem to agree — or perhaps yoga in the California sun and sea breeze just sounds like a pretty good time. Five thousand people — each bearing yoga mat — are expected at San Francisco’s Marina Green Park on Sunday for the first International Day of Yoga, an event proposed by Modi before the United Nations last fall. Hundreds, perhaps thousands more yogis are expected to gather in Silicon Valley, at San Jose City Hall, Sunnyvale’s Baylands Park and at events in Morgan Hill, Cupertino and Pleasanton. In all, more than 100,000 yogis in 160 cities across the globe are expected to share the experience, according to...

Afghan Sisters in Silicon Valley

By Sharon Simonson SANTA CLARA, Calif.—As young children, Afghan sisters Hasina and Somaya Qaderi scampered through dusty streets once shared by soldiers under command of Alexander the Great. In their native Herat, an enormous citadel built in the early 14th century still occupies the same site as Alexander’s fort. The citadel's turreted walls rise high and stern from the central hilltop, a weighty symbol of the 2,500 years of civilized history that underlie the modern city’s expression. Herat is 7,500 miles from the suburban Santa Clara ranch home that the women now own and share with their parents. Even that enormous distance doesn’t measure the intellectual, psychological and emotional chasm that the sisters have leapt in the last 12 years, and in some ways since their births. The ...