Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley: Fill & Download for Free

San Francisco is a world-famous city which is also its own county, and is 49 square miles bounded on 3 sides by the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. Housing for a family of 2 adults and 2 children averages over $3100 a month. Its blue-collar roots are as an international port and transportation hub, a base for fishing, crabbing and shell fish production, an Army base, Naval shipyard and port of embarkation for US service personnel leaving for the Pacific theater of WWII, the Korean War and the Viet Nam War. It is famous for its LGBTQ community, Chinatown, fine arts community, founding location for the UN, beatnik poets and writers, the 1960s hippies, psychedelic music and the Summer of Love, post-WWII baseball and (American) football teams, investment and finance sector, a hub of US biotechnology and a major home of software companies that are called “tech” these days. (Salesforce, Lyft, Uber, Linked-In, Rosetta Stone) It has an Opera and a Ballet company, an Orchestra, music and comedy venues, a Cruise Line port, The Exploratorium, the Asian Art Musuem, the de Young art museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a large Zoo, a large urban park, a hot-house conservatory, cable-cars, Muni trolley cars, CalTrain on former Southern Pacific tracks, and BART. San Francisco is a tourist destination and has featured as a location in books and films. It also has a large homeless and indigent population camping or living outdoors throughout the city, and an annual Fleet Week when it hosts Navy warships and a 3 day airshow featuring the Blue Angels.By contrast, San Jose is a sprawling post-war suburbia which merges nearly imperceptibly into the adjacent cities of Campbell, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and Fremont. Suburban streets with sidewalks cross all of these borders. The cities of Monte Sereno, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto don’t contact San Jose directly but are connected in the sidewalk and suburban street network. A passel of cities in San Mateo county connect from Palo Alto to the north, and a further passel in Alameda County connect to Fremont, which is in Alameda County, across both city and county boundary from San Jose. While physically the largest and most populous city in Santa Clara County, San Jose served primarily as a bedroom community for the hard core Silicon Valley of the 1960s–1980s. San Jose had an IBM disk drive factory, and an IBM research facility, but Fairchild, Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD, AMI, MMI, Western Digital and the like were all in the Sunnyvale-Mountain View-Santa Clara-Palo Alto corridor along highway 101. Which had been an Aerospace and Defense corridor anchored by Stanford University, NASA (Ames Research Center) and before that NACA, and Moffett Naval Air Station. Zylog and Atari started down in Los Gatos. Radar, radio, satellite and rocket companies, Hewlet-Packard, Lockheed Missiles and Space, Aeroneutronic Ford, Westinghouse, Singer-Link, Ampex, GTE, Sylvania, California Microwave, and United Technologies Chemical Rocket division, etc. laid the foundation for the semiconductor boom. San Jose’s blue collar roots are the New Almaden mercury mines, which served the 1849 and subsequent gold-rushes, fruit growing, wineries, vegetable canning, and the Perminente Cement works in the foothills above Cupertino. Ford moved its Richmond factory down to San Jose in the 1950s, providing another blue collar back story. The neighborhood of Milpitas incorporated itself to prevent San Jose from annexing it, and then set up zoning to exclude the African Americans who had worked at Ford in Richmond from moving to live near the new Ford facility. All legal, back then. San Jose had a small Chinatown, until the massacre. Japanese immigrants moved in, and the 6–8 block Japantown survived the WWII internment and still boasts a tofu factory. The multi-block tomato cannery that was next to Japantown is now condos.“Low Density” is the root of many of San Jose’s difficulties, but was also its charm for many years. Everything beyond one grocery store and gas stations required a 20–40 minute drive, but a nice home in Willow Glen or Almaden Valley or along the Campbell / Los Gatos borders was surrounded by many other nice homes. The most recent development dollars have all been funneled into North San Jose, up to the Bay and the Sunnyvale / Milpitas / Fremont border. Green fields turned into tech campuses and high density housing, with light rail and semi-random strip malls. As a child, we lived in Almaden, which my parents could afford, and my dad drove 45 minutes, each way, to Sunnyvale, for work. We bought clothes at Valley Fair, bicycles on The Alameda near the Rose Garden / Rosecrucian Museum. The pediatrician’s office was in Los Gatos, across from Oak Meadow Park, next to Vasona Park. There were more businesses with non-retail jobs on Los Gatos blvd, or University Avenue, than all of Almaden. People with a higher standard of living were in Sunnyvale / Mountain View / Santa Clara / Palo Alto, near their jobs. Along Blossom Hill, from Camden Ave to 101, was farms, orchards, housing developments, and later, apartments.

There's one town that I think a lot of people overlook, and that's Santa Clara. It's close enough for commuting to any South Bay located tech company, and has one huge advantage over the other towns for the tech geeks that have lots of tech equipment. Santa Clara has its own power utility company and does not rely on PG&E. Since it runs it's own utility, the rates are more than half off PG&E's rates, which if you know anything about electric rates in Silicon Valley, are some of the highest in the nation. By comparison SVP (Silicon Valley Power - Santa Clara's utility) is charging about 10 cents/kwh for electricity currently compared to around 32 cents/kwh for PG&E (based on what I've read on some electric car charging sites). This also translates to lower solar costs too (apparently SVP subsidizes solar costs more than PG&E), I got my solar system back in 2012, and comparing with everyone I know who got solar systems, my cost was significantly lower (by half or more).Another reason for Santa Clara is more choice in education. There's a study that includes Santa Clara as having more private schools per capita than most anywhere else. See These Are The 10 Snobbiest Cities In America That Probably Think They're Better Than You (snobbiness was rated on number of private schools as one of the factors). If you're looking for a great public school education, Santa Clara has the elementary school that consistently ranked at the top or near the top of the list in California Millikin Basics + Elementary: Home Page But you do have to enter a lottery to get into Millikin.The city is also now home to the 49ers and is close enough to San Jose downtown to easily enjoy the culture it has to offer (museums, Broadway San Jose, Silicon Valley Ballet, etc).

All of this is based on old data, do with it what you will. I did all my pre university schooling in San Jose ( north Valley/Berryessa) my husband did his in Santa Cruz (Corralitos/Aptos). Looking back at class photos my classmates were way more diverse in terms of language spoken at home, religion, country of family origin and the like, his classmates weren't a single block but it was much more of a Hispanic or white binary. He had access to really beautiful redwood forest and beaches close by. I used to drive with my parents and later my friends to these same places ( but not as frequently) since they were in addition to other beautiful open spaces nearer by. He definitely has more cachet coming from a beach town ( it is cool, and imparts a bit of extra awesome by association) but my I felt like I had much easier access to cool summer internships, all the cultural events that happen in SF (ballet, opera, major legeaue sports) and taking flight was less of a drag (Santa Cruz doesn't have a commercial airport). Since "Silicon Valley" might mean all or part of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties depending on who says it I can't even give a concise answer to this question as some cities and neighborhoods therein are super for various quality of life measures while others are much less so but I'd say to definitely consider whether the commute would be an issue, if you work remotely Santa Cruz would get a serious advantage but driving over highway 17 everyday might be a serious drag.