![]() ![]() But here’s a fun fact: The price of an average home in Santa Clara is $1.5 million. In many ways, Santa Clara is an ordinary example of 20th century urbanism. Or, more likely, no one was allowed to add any housing. And yet, apparently, no one thought to add any housing on all of those acres. The place was built less than a decade ago, with the housing crisis already on full blast. ![]() My lunchtime quarry was a one-story strip mall the size of a city block with a parking lot the size of a football field (and no discernible way to enter on foot other than through a driveway in the middle of the block). (This landscape was depicted brutally, and accurately, in The Dropout.) The parking is crucial, of course, because their employees deserve a convenient place to store their cars after driving in from Livermore. Those buildings are, in turn, surrounded by parking lots. It’s surrounded by two-story office buildings housing companies that have “technologies” or “networks” in their names. I stayed at the Embassy Suites, in a part of town whose most notable landmark is the 101 Freeway (excuse me, “El Camino Real”). But Santa Clara is, somehow, even more bleak than that, a whole less than the sum of its parts. Recently I visited Santa Clara and was met with a standard collection of mid-density apartment complexes and, of course, office parks, and shopping complexes. Related Article Emotional Architecture: How Contextual Solutions Can Fight against the "Epidemic of Boringness" It makes you want to put on VR goggles and never take them off. The real Silicon Valley is so dull it makes you want to climb atop the nearest standing desk and hurl yourself off headfirst. Silicon Valley should look dazzling, with techies doing cool tech things on every sidewalk, in every restaurant and juice bar, in every garage and loft, on every bus, train, scooter, and hoverboard. And a distinctly 20th-century brand of urbanism. Those ranch houses and corporate headquarters represent a distinctly 21st-century brand of power. Santa Clara is, arguably, the city at the heart of Silicon Valley, a globally famous urban region that is so ill-defined as to deny its own existence. You can’t get much higher than Santa Clara, California, and you can’t get much more deserving. One of the principles of comedy is that you “punch up.” If you have to make fun of someone or something, make sure it’s more prominent than you, and deserving. This article was originally published on Common Edge. ![]()
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