The San Francisco Peninsula is a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area that separates San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. On its northern tip is the City and County of San Francisco. Its southern base is in northern Santa Clara County, including the cities of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Los Altos. Most of the Peninsula is occupied by San Mateo County, between San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, and including the cities and towns of Atherton, Belmont, Brisbane, Burlingame, Colma, Daly City, East Palo Alto, El Granada, Foster City, Hillsborough, Half Moon Bay, La Honda, Loma Mar, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Millbrae, Mountain View, Pacifica, Palo Alto, Pescadero, Portola Valley, Redwood City, San Bruno, San Carlos, San Mateo, South San Francisco, Sunnyvale, and Woodside.
Silicon Valley is a region in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. It corresponds roughly to the geographical Santa Clara Valley. San Jose is Silicon Valley's largest city, the third-largest in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States; other major Silicon Valley cities include Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino. The San Jose Metropolitan Area has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world, according to the Brookings Institution.
San Jose, officially San José, is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley, and the largest city in Northern California by both population and area.
Morgan Hill is a city in Santa Clara County, California, at the southern tip of Silicon Valley, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Morgan Hill is a residential community for Silicon Valley, as well as the seat of several high-tech companies. Morgan Hill is a dining, entertainment, and recreational destination in Silicon Valley, owing to its Michelin-star chefs, luxury hospitality, wineries, nature parks, and events the city hosts, such as the Tour of California. According to Forbes, Morgan Hill is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. Business Insider ranked Morgan Hill as the 17th most expensive housing market in the United States, owing to its concentration of high-net-worth individuals and restrictive growth policies.
The Santa Clara Valley runs south-southeast from the southern end of San Francisco Bay in Northern California in the United States. The northern, urbanized end of the valley is part of a region locally known as the "South Bay" and also part of the electronics, research, and technology area known as Silicon Valley. Santa Clara Valley consists of most of Santa Clara County, including its county seat, San Jose, as well as a small portion of San Benito County. The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was for a time known as the Valley of Heart's Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries.
Downtown San Jose is the central business district of San Jose, California, in Silicon Valley. It is the largest urban center of Silicon Valley. Downtown is one of the largest tech clusters in Silicon Valley, as well as the cultural and political center of San Jose.
Transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area is reliant on a complex multimodal infrastructure consisting of roads, bridges, highways, rail, tunnels, airports, and bike and pedestrian paths. The development, maintenance, and operation of these different modes of transportation are overseen by various agencies, including the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the Association of Bay Area Governments, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. These and other organizations collectively manage several interstate highways and state routes, two subway networks, two commuter rail agencies, eight trans-bay bridges, transbay ferry service, local bus service, three international airports, and an extensive network of roads, tunnels, and bike paths.
Cindy Chavez is an American politician who serves as President of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and as a Santa Clara County supervisor represents close to 400,000 residents in Downtown, East, and South San Jose. Her public service career began in the 1990s as a policy analyst for health care, public health, human services and transportation for the Board of Supervisors. She served two terms on the San Jose City Council, where she was also Vice Mayor, and also served on the board leadership of public agencies such as the San Jose Redevelopment Agency, and executive director of Working Partnerships USA and the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council. She is a graduate of San Jose State University, is married and has a son in high school.
San José City Hall is the seat of the municipal government of San Jose, California. Located in Downtown San Jose, it was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier in a Postmodern style. It consists of an 18-story tower, an iconic glass rotunda, and a city council chamber wing, laid out within a two-block-long public square known as San José Civic Plaza. The tower rises 285 feet (87 m) above the plaza, making it the second tallest building in San Jose.
Anderson Lake, also known as Anderson Reservoir, is an artificial lake in Santa Clara County, California, United States, near Morgan Hill. The reservoir is formed by the damming of Coyote Creek just below its confluence with Las Animas Creek. A 4,275-acre (1,730 ha) county park surrounds the reservoir and provides limited fishing, picnicking, and hiking activities. Although swimming is prohibited, boating, water-skiing and jet-skiing are permitted in the reservoir.
Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is California's 6th most populous county, with a population of 1,781,642, as of the 2010 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together form the U.S. Census Bureau's San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is a component of the larger San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area. Santa Clara is the most populous county in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Northern California.
Berryessa/North San José station is an intermodal transit center located in the Berryessa District of San Jose, California. The station is served by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) buses. The transit center opened for bus service on December 28, 2019, and subsequently for BART service on June 13, 2020.
The Silicon Valley BART extension is an ongoing effort to expand service by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) into Santa Clara County from its former terminus at the Fremont station in Alameda County. Planned since at least 1981, the project has seven stations in three sequential phases. The first phase was the Warm Springs BART extension, built by BART at a cost of $790 million, terminating at the new Warm Springs/South Fremont station that opened in 2017. The Warm Springs extension broke ground in 2009, and was originally scheduled for completion in 2014.
Samuel Theodore Liccardo is an American attorney and politician from California, serving as Mayor of San Jose, California. A member of the Democratic Party, Liccardo was elected mayor in November 2014. He was reelected in 2018 with 75.8% of the vote. As the leader of the California Big City Mayors Coalition, Liccardo has advocated on statewide issues including homelessness and COVID-19 response.
Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF), headquartered in San Jose, California, is a non-profit organization that creates resources and programs for students and educators in Silicon Valley in Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The SVEF was founded as a result of a merger of the San Jose Education Foundation and Santa Clara County Education Foundation.
Economic conditions in Silicon Valley have led to categorization of the region as an hourglass economy, a type of socioeconomic phenomenon that favors the disproportionate growth of the upper and lower classes with comparatively weak development of the middle class. This economy is typically a characteristic of highly developed nations and regions that experience a steady influx of capital, invest heavily in research and development, and have a high cost of living.
San Jose, California has various cycling routes on roads and trails used by both commuters and recreational riders. The city has plans to expand the current 285 miles (459 km) of bike lanes to 400 miles (640 km), and the current 60 miles (97 km) of trails to 100 miles (160 km). San Jose was ranked as a bronze-level bicycle-friendly community by the League of American Bicyclists.
