I grew up in SJ. I don't think it will ever be a 'thing' if you're young and want things to do in a vibrant city, even if it does have Pedro square, Santana Row, close access to Santa Cruz and SF, etc. That being said, if you're looking for a quiet place to live with your family then it's a great city. IBM Research has a couple campuses in between SJ and Morgan Hill - probably interesting places to work.
I grew up in the Bay Area and lived in Daly City + SF among other places. (live in Portland, OR at the moment)
I actually seriously dig downtown San Jose, would live there. It's right next to SJSU (which yeah, is mostly commuter school, but still gives an energy.)
It does have a real downtown, bigger than any other BA city's downtown (except SF), and it's super diverse, which is important to me. (Diverse not just in ethnic makeup, but in terms of what everybody does for a living. SJ is not all computer people as much as other towns up north.)
I like going to DIY/indie-ish music things... I would probably go to SF for that, but SJ has more of a scene than most places in-between. It also has the sort of neighborhoods/housing (not all condos, not all new basement-less ranches) that is conducive people creating when they don't have much money. (I've also just described Portland, hmm...)
Still, the article is fair enough: most young geeks who aren't art nerds would probably rather live in Palo Alto than SJ. But for other types, SJ is better than anywhere in-between except for SF. And depending on other things, it's even better than SF.
I also like how bike friendly SJ is, but PA isn't bad for that.
Well, if you consider South Bay, that's not true. Spent one summer interning at IBM, living in South San Jose (capital expressway). Had an absolutely horrible time. Even getting a bottle of milk was 2 mile walk. Buses were once every hour.
I used to think that. I think it less now. SJ definitely does not have the taste and cosmopolitan charm of SF, but as places to live go, it's really pretty good. Access to the ocean and amazing open spaces, etc.
If you're looking for places to live, I really like San Jose. Sure, it's not, The City(tm), but down town does have a lovely little, urban lite feel to it. There are plenty of working class people and plenty of hackers in the area. It's not the sexy place to live, but heck, for what people are paying for a one bedroom apartment up in SF, I'm getting a 4 bed/2 bath house with a yard and an office big enough for 3 people. And, if I want to go up to Yoshi's and hear some really great jazz, it's only 80 minutes away.
There’s nothing wrong with San Jose, it’s not amazing but it’s definitely not nowhere. Look at Japantown, a central neighborhood with nice well maintained apartments and condo developments well integrated in the street grid. Five minutes walk to dozens of shops and restaurants. Good network of bike routes including protected bike lanes on stroads. 12 minute bike ride to BART, 15 minute bike ride to CalTrain. 20 minute walk to downtown (adequate nightlife, San Pedro Square is walkable, etc). 20 minute bike ride to The Alameda and Willow Glen gives variety of walkable business districts. Plenty of parks with tall trees within a 20 bike ride (eg. Guadalupe River, Overfelt Gardens). Excellent Asian food, pretty good food in general. Fairly frequent city buses and a light rail (candidly, though, I have never used them).
That’s all^ for if you don’t have a car. Yea with a car you can access all the suburban stuff of which there is a lot (eg. shopping and restaurants at Westfield, The Pruneyard, eg. amazing hiking at New Almaden, Saratoga Quarry Park, eg. the vast amenities of nearby small cities). I recommend a car, it gives you access to more stuff, but is definitely not necessary, and even if you have one you don’t need to drive for everyday needs.
My one complaint about San Jose is not enough of a base of everyday cultural events, specifically live music and stand up comedy. The only small music venue I am familiar with that has regular bands is Mama Kin’s. There is no good regular stand up comedy to my knowledge. I guess SF and Oakland suck that energy out of SJ, but that’s a real deficiency.
I live in San Jose and boring is _good_. I don't want parties up and down the street and stuff happening all night outside my windows. I don't even live in downtown San Jose, but in northern San Jose in the middle of a tech park. There's nothing around, and that's a good thing.
I had an internship in San Francisco before I graduated, I'm never living in that city.
My wife dragged me kicking and screaming from Berkeley to Los Gatos in 2006. We lived there for 5 years. While San Jose has too much concrete, I must say I surprised myself by being deeply moved by the profound natural beauty of the valley, and even the suburban architecture there.
Suburban architecture is easy to ridicule (Kunstler does a good job), especially when you're a young professional looking for a mate. When you're raising two kids you start to understand it better. Today I see it as a fantastic setup -- almost utopian.
Sure, I appreciated being in the green and walkable Los Gatos downtown rather than San Jose proper. But the San Jose downtown is pretty nice! Not my type of scene, but it beats the zombies, human poo, getting mugged, ice cold fog, and dilapidated, frantic streets of San Francisco. Which is -- objectively, it must be noted -- a far better target for a nuke test.[1]
San Francisco (and Oakland) are the only real dense urban areas. The rest of the Bay Area is a suburb. San Jose is mostly houses and shopping centers.
Most of the young people I know who work in tech want to live in or near San Francisco -- it has nightlife, restaurants, cultural events, etc. This is especially the case for people who are not from the Bay Area originally. When they start looking into buying property or having children a lot of them leave San Francisco and move closer to the suburbs.
Yeah sure let's move to the South Bay and live in the 12th circle of Hell, a.k.a., the worst abomination of city planning known to North America. San Jose used to be a city on the upswing but after the riots and COVID it has the feeling of a shell of a city that is being kept alive by the nice infrastructure they built there a short while ago. Sunnyvale is peak suburbia -- endless tracts of suburban homes and strip malls with not a single good piece of public transit infrastructure to speak of (VTA has terrible station planning and trains from CalTrain comes every few millennia). Cupertino is basically a walled community where only people with incomes of over $500k gain access. Milpitas is a city that essentially doesn't exist, not even the people who I know live there admit its existence. Los Altos is like Cupertino but everyone has a Stanford education and is a next-level evolved NIMBY, and Los Gatos is kinda like that but with more wine and pretentiousness. Saratoga and Campbell are so deep inside the suburban critical mass that it takes ~30 minutes to drive to anything of note, and you'll be blasting your AC while you do so because the coastal fog burns off very quickly in those parts. Outside of the aforementioned tech conferences there aren't many things to do in the Bay Area -- people who live there have been drawn in by either the good schools or jobs.
... all that being said, I have lived in the Bay Area for a long time and do not intend to leave anytime soon. There aren't many other places in the world that can be called hubs of biotech, software and semiconductors all at the same time. Many parts of the South Bay are S-tier in terms of safety while maintaining the same price point as SF, so if you prioritize safety over having a life outside the confines of your computer terminal you return to after your 8-6 job, then the South Bay is actually pretty good. If you want to be able to hit the beach after a night of raving and clubbing preceded by 5-star dining and zuck-surfing on the Bay, while being willfully ignorant about the constant risk of a homeless man jumping out of the bushes at you, then SF is your best bet.
San Jose, like any major US city, has its awesome points and its disgusting monstrosities (Santana Row, I'm talking to you). And come on, San Francisco has its share of fake and cliche (North Beach? Haight? The area around PacBell Park?).
Since the link focused on the negatives, I'll throw some positives out there (coming from a San Jose native who has lived in SF, LA, Chicago, and now Morgan Hill - mushroom capital of the world).
1. There are some cool little neighborhoods in the San Jose metropolitan area: Willow Glen, Rose Garden/Burbank, Campbell, Saratoga, Almaden Valley.
2. Good ethnic food, especially from Latin America, Vietnam, India, and China. Even some good fine dining opportunities (La Foret in New Almaden comes to mind).
3. A great Latino/Chicano cultural scene.
4. Decent transit that's been getting better (much, much better than LA, lagging a little behind SF and WAY behind Chicago/New York).
5. Retail tech stores all over (even SF lacks this).- Central Computer, any number of Fry's.
6. A developing downtown. If you'd been here ten years ago, this place was dead. If you'd been here 20 years ago...well, you wouldn't have been downtown. The fact that you can go there at night at all now is AMAZING considering what this place was like when I was a kid. It's fairly jumping now, with a decent selection of restaurants and good parking.
7. Cheaper than SF by a bunch.
San Jose is great, especially if you aren't into the trendy hipster scene and don't mind heading into "scary" (aka non-Anglo) parts of town like East San Jose, Little Saigon, etc.
Definitely. You can always visit SF, but remember that from SJ <-> SF is a series of populated cities, some of which you've heard of (e.g. Palo Alto). San Mateo is nice (great downtown), as is Foster City, parts of Redwood City, San Carlos, even Half Moon Bay.
While San Jose pales in comparison to San Francisco, as a Bay Area native I've always enjoyed Santana Row, some parts of downtown (near 1st Street) and some of the outskirt cities like Campbell and Los Gatos. The only thing about the South Bay is that since everything is so spread apart, cab/uber rides are a bit pricier than SF.
If you're in town for Startup School, I highly recommend journeying up to SF afterward.
I moved to San Jose from a small NY town back in 2007. What I quickly realized that is that 30-45 mins away is very wide spread and there are times when driving an hour might not get you very far :-)
If the job is in Mountain View, maybe consider Sunnyvale, Cupertino. Morgan Hill would take you 45-1hr with good traffic. Longer at times. Santa Clara.
There is Fremont/Union City but that is outside 30-45 mins usually, I would say. I dont know about the schools.
Really good schools in Cupertino, but higher rent and house prices for sure.
I hope OP listens to this. Spend 80% of your time in SF/Oakland/Berkeley and 20% at most in SV. The former is one of the most interesting, beautiful metropolitan areas in the world.; The later is a fairly mundane suburb.
When I'm visiting the Bay Area I like to go to coworking spaces as well.
SJ has an immense amount of densification potential, should it choose to exercise it. The housing stock is even more sparse than SF.
I've long marvelled at why Oakland rather than SF is not the natural hub of the SF Bay Area. It has everything SF lacks: indigenous water (EBMUD), a working port, space, improved climate (still gets fog, but not as socked in as SF), transporation (highways, BART, airport), a major technical university at its doorstep (Cal), and bedroom communities at its back (MorInDette, Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, Concord), as well as the east-bay communities to the south, and a direct BART link to downtown San Jose (as of quite recently).
But somehow it's SF, PA, MV, and Santa Clara that own tech.
It's something very roughly and geographically like if SF is DC, then SJ is Baltimore. You could theoretically commute between them, but it's quite impractical.
SJ is part of the Bay Area and absolutely has skyrocketing costs; it usually tops the lists of cities with the fastest growing housing prices.
When I got a job in Redwood City (in between the two), I thought about moving there from SF, but found the costs to be about the same to live there versus SF.
So I stayed in SF; it's definitely the anchor of culture of the Bay Area. For everything outside of work it's a much better place to be (for me, a single queer person, especially). I since got a job in SF and have no intention to move or work south again.
In fact, the general trend has been for companies to move towards SF away from the peninsula, but mostly because it's where workers want to be. It's much more easier to get by without a car in the city than in the peninsula, it has much better clubs/nightlife, etc. For a young person, the city (meaning SF) is often much more appealing, though of course different people have different preferences.
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