Community-Wealth City: San Jose, CA

Located just south of San Francisco Bay in the heart of Silicon Valley, San Jose has grown to become northern California’s largest city. The city’s population in 2000 was 895,000, exceeding San Francisco’s population by about 120,000. Like most large California cities, San Jose has a diverse population: 36% are non-Hispanic whites, 30% are Latino, 29% are Asian, 4% are African-American and 1% are Native American. As would be expected for the central city of the Silicon Valley, San Jose enjoys considerable wealth, but it also has a large low-income population. According to the 2000 census, over 30 percent of households had incomes of over $100,000, but another fifth earned less than $35,000. With a median house price of $394,000 (as of 2000), it should come as no surprise that housing affordability is a major issue, with over a fifth of the population spending more than 35 percent of household income on housing.

Although not as strong as neighboring Oakland or San Francisco in terms of traditional community wealth building strategies such as cooperatives and community development corporations, San Jose has a wide range of community wealth building institutions and policies. San Jose-based Lenders for Community Development is one of California’s leading community development financial institutions, the Valley Transportation Agency has actively pursued transit oriented development, and the city has also developed policies to provide affordable housing for teachers (www.sjhousing.org/program/thp.html) and green building codes (www.sanjoseca.gov/esd/natural-energy-resources/gb-policy.htm).

An overview of community wealth building efforts follows:

Community Development

First Community Housing
www.firsthousing.org
Founded in 1986 by two San Jose developers, this nonprofit has creating housing for over 800 families with another 200 units in development. The firm has been recognized for its incorporation of green building materials in numerous green building journals.

Housing Trust of Santa Clara County
www.housingtrustfund.org
Many cities and counties have housing trust funds, but the structure of Santa Clara County’s housing trust fund is unique. Between 1999 and 2001, an initial $20 million fund endowment was raised through a collaborative public-private effort. Contributions came from private citizens, employers and employer foundations, County government, the City of San Jose, and 14 other Santa Clara County cities and towns. To date, the Trust has invested more than $22.7 million in loans and grants to non-profit developers and to first-time homebuyers, creating 5,688 affordable housing opportunities valued at more than $1.018 billion.

Lenders for Community Development
www.l4cd.com
Founded in 1993, Lenders for Community Development (LCD) has assisted over 100 families become homeowners through its individual development account program, has made 250 small business loans to low-income individuals, financed the construction of 3,600 units of affordable housing, provided 15 loans for community facilities, and helped finance the construction of one of the first permanent facility for San Jose’s National Hispanic University.

Neighborhood Housing Services Silicon Valley
www.nhssv.org
NHSSV is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation providing programs and services that promote and support responsible home ownership as a means of revitalizing lower-income neighborhoods. NHSSV was organized in 1995 by a group of local citizens with support from the City of San José Department of Housing and is a member of the national Neighborhood Works network of over two hundred community based organizations. To date, NHSSV's HomeOwnership Center has educated and counseled over 5,000 prospective homebuyers.

Cooperatives and Credit Unions

CommonWealth Central Credit Union
www.wealthcu.org
CommonWealth Central Credit Union has served Santa Clara County since 1958. The credit union has over 100 employees, six locations, and serves more than 40,000 members. Membership is open to anyone who lives or works in the Santa Clara County.

EcoCare Professional Housecleaning
www.wagescooperatives.org/eco-care.html
Founded in 1999 with the aid of the Oakland-based nonprofit Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES) and owned by nine women from the San Jose southern suburbs of Morgan Hill, Hollister, and San Martin, Eco-Care Professional Housecleaning is now a separate workers’ cooperative. Its business provides residential and commercial cleaning services from Hollister to South San Jose using ecologically friendly methods.

Technology Credit Union
www.techcu.com
In April of 1960, employees at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Semiconductor Division assembled in the cafeteria and decided to form a credit union. By the end of that year they had 600 members holding $65,000. By 1970, membership was up to 6,320 with $3.5 million in assets. Today, Tech CU is now among the top 1% of the nation’s largest credit unions with seven full service branches in the Silicon Valley and more than $1 billion in assets.

Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) Companies

Norcal Waste Services of San Jose, Inc.
www.factsontrash.com
Norcal provides garbage, recycling, bulky goods, yard waste, and residential street sweeping service to approximately 150,000 homes in the City of San Jose. These services are brought to San Jose as part of the City's Recycle Plus Clean 'n' Green San Jose program. Founded in 1921, Norcal Waste Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, is parent to subsidiary companies providing all facets of solid waste management. Norcal is 100% employee-owned and operated and is the largest employee-owned company in the solid waste industry with over 570,000 residential customers and 55,000 commercial customers.

Rosendin Electric Motor Works
www.rosendin.com
Founded in 1919, Rosendin Electric has grown to have over 1,500 employees with annual sales in excess of $300 million. In 2000, the Rosendin Electric employee's completed their buyout of the Rosendin family to become the nation’s largest employee-owned electrical contractor.

Swinerton Builders
www.swinerton.com
San Francisco-based Swinerton Builders provides the full range of pre-construction and construction services to clients, including commercial construction, tenant improvements, renovation, design-build services and value management. Founded in 1888, Swinerton Builders is an employee-owned firm, which posted sales of $2.4 billion in 2002. Among its many construction projects was the renovation of the California Theater, home of the San Jose Opera.

Thoits Insurance Service
www.thoits-insurance.com
Thoits Insurance started in 1891 as one of the many Thoits family enterprises. It served the personal insurance needs of local residents from the Palo Alto - Stanford University area as well as the commercial insurance needs of their small businesses. In 1975, with revenues of $225,000, the five employees bought out the Thoits family interests and began the journey into employee ownership. Today the company has 75 employee owners who service over $150 million in premium from offices in nearby Mountain View and Santa Cruz.

Municipal Enterprises

San Jose Water
www.sjmuniwater.com
San Jose Water is owned and operated by the City of San Jose and is entirely self-supporting. It was created in 1961 when the City purchased the Evergreen Water Company to ensure that the rapidly growing Evergreen community would have a reliable source of water. Today, the company serves 25,000 households (roughly 10 percent of the city’s population) in four city neighborhoods: North San Jose/Alviso, Evergreen, Edenvale and Coyote.

Valley Transportation Agency
www.vta.org/projects/tod.html
Santa Clara County’s Valley Transportation Agency operates many bus routes and a 3-line, 30.5 mile light rail system, which operates 24 hours a day. The transit system has heavily promoted transit-oriented development, seeking to increase ridership by designing higher-density housing and community services to be located near transit stops. Key projects include the Tamien Child Care Center (which allows commuters to drop off their children at childcare on the way to work), Almaden Lake Village Housing and the Ohlone-Chynoweth Mixed-Use Project.Program Related Investments and Philanthropy

Skoll Foundation
www.skollfoundation.org
In addition to its international grant-making, the Skoll Foundation also disburses over a million a year in grant dollars to support projects in Silicon Valley, where it is based. Additionally, Skoll makes program-related investments in some of its grantees. For instance, in 2005, Skoll made a $1 million, 5-year 1% interest PRI loan to enable Lenders for Community Development to further expand its micro-enterprise, affordable housing, and community facility loan programs.

Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2 Partners)
www.sv2.org/about-sv2
Set up by the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, SV2 Partners distributes grants from its pooled fund using the principles of strategic philanthropy to invest some of the wealth that is being created in Silicon Valley back into the community.

Social Enterprises

Hope Services
www.hopeservices.org
HOPE Services provides job training programs, developmental activities, counseling, infant services, senior services, supported and independent living services, and mobility training for approximately 2,500 children, adults and seniors. The half dozen businesses it runs provide employment for its clients and yielded over $6 million in FY 2005, close to 20 percent of total revenues. Its Production Services enterprise is the largest of these with 10 facilities and some 700 workers who assemble, pack, store, and ship material for area businesses.
State and Local Innovations

Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network
www.jointventure.org
Founded in 1992 to create a neutral forum to bring together leaders from business, labor, government, the universities, and the non-profit sector, Joint Venture aims to think outside the box and build creative solutions. Among its efforts in 2006 the group has taken a leadership role to develop a multi-city wireless network that would provide free or low cost broadband access to a 1,500 square mile area encompassing San Jose and nearly 40 other cities.

Working Partnerships USA
www.wpusa.org
Formed in 1995 in response to the widening income gap between high and low income earners, Working Partnerships has developed into a labor-community coalition that crafts innovative solutions to the problems of the New Economy. Among its achievements has been winning passage of one of the nation’s strongest "Living Wage" ordinances; getting a countywide universal health system for children enacted, which has insured 50,000 children to date; launching a community-wide initiative to increase the availability of affordable housing; and increasing accountability requirements for corporate recipients of public subsidies.

University-Community Partnerships

National Hispanic University, Early Childhood Education Center
www.nhu.edu
Founded in 1981, San Jose’s National Hispanic University aims to serve the needs of Hispanics, women, other minorities and other learners. The University works closely with community groups and in September 2005 won a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development to purchase and renovate a property adjacent to the University to develop El Centro de Excelencia – an Early Childhood Education Center—in cooperation with area nonprofits and government agencies. The Center will consist of three high-quality preschool classrooms; two infant/toddler childcare classrooms; an on-the-job training center for adults seeking certification or university degrees in early childhood education, and an adult education center for parents of children in the center and community.

San Jose State University, Center for Service Learning
www.sjsu.edu/csl
San Jose State’s Center for Service Learning was established in January 2000. The CSL helps students develop the knowledge, skills and motivation to become lifelong participants in public life, with a focus on solving community problems. The program aims to integrate academics and community service, support faculty and empower students to help solve community problems, instill an ethic of moral and civic responsibility, inspire leaders in social justice, and build community as a metropolitan university in a diverse urban environment.