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#1 ·
Most Santa Clara County residents soon will speak a language other than English at home
By Mike Swift
MEDIANEWS STAFF

Inside a San Jose industrial shop, Mason Lin stands amid the tart smell of natural gas, holding a glass tube over a hissing blue flame. Lin waits until the tube glows orange before twisting it into the serpentine swirls and bows of a Mandarin character.

Within three hours, a colorful neon sign that will blaze the name of a Chinese-owned business into the night emerges between Lin's patient fingers.

The words "Now Hiring" appear over the door of Allen Signs, the sign-making company owned by Mason Lin's brother Allen. When Allen Lin arrived in San Jose from Taiwan in 1981, there was enough work to support one man making Chinese signs, no more. Mason joined him in 1986, and Allen Signs is now a seven-person shop, with Lin looking for a few more workers.

"Ever since 1990, I can see it, it's steady -- irregardless of the economy, our growth is very steady," said Allen Lin, who makes signs in both Chinese and English -- frequently in both -- for everything from yogurt shops and American fast-food franchises to flooring companies. "In 1981, I'm the only one doing that."

As it grows as a global technology hub, Silicon Valley has become one of the most polyglot places in the United States. Santa Clara County is on the brink of a linguistic milestone: Within the next few years, more people will speak a foreign language at home than the number who speak English, recently released census data shows. Given the statistical uncertainty, that threshold may already have been crossed.

Santa Clara County has the largest population of Hindi speakers among all counties in the United States, the second largest population of Vietnamese speakers, the third largest population of Persian/Farsi speakers, and the fifth biggest number of Chinese speakers, a MediaNews analysis of 2005 census data shows.

Since 2000, Santa Clara County has passed Los Angeles and San Francisco to become the California county with the highest percentage of immigrants, with 36 percent of its population born outside of the United States. Miami is the only metropolitan region in the United States with a higher percentage of immigrants than the San Jose area.


There are about a dozen large counties in the United States -- including Los Angeles, Miami-Dade and the New York City boroughs of Queens and the Bronx -- where English-speakers are in the minority. But perhaps only urban Queens has the global shuffle of suburban Santa Clara County, with its multiple South and East Asian languages and sizable Spanish-speaking population.

Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, which has a new 2007 Index report, calls the linguistic mix an economic advantage, allowing collaboration with emerging "spikes" of high-tech innovation and venture capital investment in regions like Bangalore, India; Shanghai, China; and Helsinki, Finland.

"If you think about Miami or L.A., those are places that are characterized in some sense by ethnic tension, and that's not the case in Silicon Valley," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley.

Perhaps, but language was at the heart of two recent community battles in Silicon Valley -- Palo Alto's debate over a Mandarin language immersion program in its public schools, and the city of Santa Clara's dust-up over a proposal to designate a stretch of El Camino Real as a Koreatown, with a Korean-language police officer and requirements that Korean-American merchants post signs in English as well as Korean.

Both ideas met with an emotional backlash from residents. Koreatown opponents, who said the plan could splinter Santa Clara along ethnic lines, gathered more than 1,000 petition signatures under the banner "Santa Clara Unity" to oppose the idea, which the city killed in January.

Santa Clara resident Ron Johnstone said Koreatown was an example of something that erodes the nation's common identity.

When Johnstone's father arrived in New York wearing a hat as an immigrant from England in the 1930s, he looked down from his ship and "he didn't see a single person wearing a hat. He had decided he was going to be an American, so he took the hat and he threw it overboard. That was an example of a man who wanted to become an American," Johnstone said. Proposals such as Koreatown aren't "doing us a bit of good. We don't try to get people to fit in, it would be much better for them if we did."

In San Jose, City Council member Madison Nguyen wants to designate a Vietnamtown but said she doesn't want segregation.

"We're not just focusing on our community, we're integrating into this country," Nguyen said of San Jose's Vietnamese. "I think in a way it's nice to have that sort of (Vietnamtown) designation, but at the same time, it's nice to sort of blend in, blend in with the city and know there is a large group of Vietnamese-Americans, of Filipino-Americans or Indo-Americans here but at the same time integrating into the city."

By some measures of race and ethnicity, Los Angeles, Miami or New York City all have more diversity than Silicon Valley.

"They don't have a sizeable black population. They don't have the Latino population" of Los Angeles or Miami, said Albert Camarillo, a Stanford history professor who studies immigrant and Latino issues. In Los Angeles and parts of New York City, a majority of residents speak languages other than English at home.

What is remarkable about Santa Clara County is the number of languages spoken by a sizeable number of people -- from Asian languages such as Tagalog, Korean and Gujarathi, to European languages such as German, Russian and Portuguese. The San Jose Unified School District teaches English to a student population that speaks about 40 languages at home, from Arabic to Tigrinya, a language spoken by an ethnic group that originates in Eritrea and parts of neighboring Ethiopia in eastern Africa.

Although Asian languages are growing more quickly, Spanish remains the most common foreign language in Santa Clara County, spoken by about 18 percent of the population, up from about 14 percent in 1990. Mandarin and other dialects of Chinese are next, spoken by about 8 percent of the population -- double its share in 1990. Vietnamese and Tagalog come next.

Silicon Valley is also essentially suburban in character, unlike the dense and tribal urban neighborhoods of the Northeast that were the beachheads of an earlier generation of immigrants and remain so in places such as Queens.

Silicon Valley immigrants also are more likely to be bilingual. In Los Angeles, San Francisco and Queens, 40 percent or less of Chinese-speakers speak English "very well," 2005 census numbers show. In Santa Clara County, about 50 percent of Chinese-speakers speak English very well. According to the Joint Venture: Silicon Valley report's analysis of census data, 80 percent of the region's immigrants speak English "well" or "very well."

San Jose has the best-educated suburbs in the United States in terms of people with a four-year college degree, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey, and it is the leading edge of a transformation that increasingly makes it tougher for politicians seeking national office to capture "the suburban vote" with a single strategy.

"Back in the 1950s, the suburbs were distinct in terms of their demographics," Frey said. "You could say you were from the suburbs and people would conjure up that you were white, middle class, had a family and lived in a single-family house. Now it's almost the reverse ... you talk about the suburbs and that's a microcosm of America."

About 55 percent of Silicon Valley's science and engineering talent was born abroad, the Joint Venture report says, with 40 percent of the region's total work force foreign-born.

The Babelian stew of languages is so ingrained to the economic life of Silicon Valley that the view from Hilda Balakhane's storefront is hardly remarkable anymore.

Balakhane and her husband, Albert Sedighpour, own Fantasy Collection, a store in a nondescript strip mall on Union Avenue that sells unique gifts -- Persian CDs, videos, crossword puzzles, books, evil eyes and other charms, and a vast array of pots to cook Persian rice dishes. The store is stacked high with the ceremonial objects crucial to any Persian wedding. People come from as far as Sacramento and Monterey to rent or buy, but also just to hear their own language spoken.

Fantasy Collection "is like the home to a lot of homesicks who come here," Balakhane said in her store one recent afternoon.

Looking out toward Union Avenue, Balakhane has a view of an Indian-owned liquor store, a Palestinian-owned food market, a Vietnamese-owned nail salon, a Mexican taqueria, a Brazilian self-defense school and Ed's Gourmet, a restaurant owned by Korean-born Eddie Ha.

On any afternoon, a visitor to the plaza might hear Arabic, Vietnamese, Hindi, Farsi, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin -- and always English. Ha says 90 percent of his customers are white. Even with the growth in non-English-speaking households in Silicon Valley, census data says the number of bilingual Asian and European-language households has grown more since 2000.

Allen Lin says when Chinese merchants ask him to make a sign in Mandarin, he urges them to use English whenever possible.

"I tell them this is still America," Lin said. Often it's not possible to fit both languages on a sign because zoning regulations limit the size, forcing businesses to choose. About 60 percent of Lin's business is Mandarin, but Lin said the split is slowly shifting toward English.

"The higher educated Asian people," he said, "they don't need to rely on the Chinese language to communicate anymore."
 
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#2 ·
Santa Clara County adding Asians at nation's fastest pace

Considering the $880,000 median home price in Santa Clara County, this is impressive

Santa Clara County adding Asians at nation's fastest pace
BIRTHS, ECONOMY, IMMIGRATION FUEL CONTINUING RISE
By Mike Swift
Mercury News
Article Launched: 08/09/2007 01:31:31 AM PDT

For a suburban county smaller than multi-ethnic urban giants like Los Angeles, Miami-Dade and Queens, N.Y., Santa Clara County recorded a notable population milestone last year: It gained more Asians than any county in the United States.

Population estimates being released today by the U.S. Census Bureau say Santa Clara County gained nearly 18,000 new Asian residents in the year ending July 1, 2006, a 3.3 percent increase from 2005. That was nearly 2,000 more than the U.S. county with the second-largest growth, Los Angeles.


Santa Clara County's Asian population has jumped by 20 percent, or about 91,000 people, so far this decade, the Census Bureau estimates. The county is fast overtaking San Francisco, with more than a century of Asian history, as the county in the continental United States with the largest share of Asians.

"It points out how unique Santa Clara (county) is and Silicon Valley is in general," said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California.

Leader in births

Santa Clara County's continuing Asian boom is being fueled by births, immigration and economic growth, demographers say. In California, only Los Angeles County had more Asian births than Santa Clara County's 8,395 in 2005, according to state Department of Public Health records. And although Asians for now still make up a slightly larger share of the population in San Francisco, a baby born there is less likely to be Asian than one born in Santa Clara County.

The booming Asian population is diversifying the culture, forcing non-Asians to adapt and spawning business opportunities across ethnic lines.

Loann Tran, a real estate agent with Judy Wang Realtors in Milpitas and San Jose, says an influx of young Asian families buying homes has insulated her from some of the pain of this year's real estate slowdown.

"Most of the buyers are either from China or India; they are a majority of those that are still buying," said Tran, whose clientele is predominantly Asian.

There are now about 40 Asian ethnic media outlets based in the South Bay, including multiple newspapers serving South Asians, Vietnamese and Chinese readers, according to New American Media, a San Francisco-based collaboration of ethnic media organizations.

Wells Fargo Bank this year began outdoor advertising in all-Chinese characters in San Jose neighborhoods with large numbers of Chinese speakers. "You're seeing more of a concerted focus and effort to reach out to customers and those that may be willing to do business with Wells Fargo in their language of choice," said Chris Hammond, a Wells Fargo vice president.

To be sure, Santa Clara County's large Asian population is not new. But in informal discussions this week, residents said the volume of the growth and the persistent evolution of the South Bay's population over the past decade and a half continue to rewrite personal and business relationships in myriad ways.

"I'm going to a Vietnamese restaurant right now, and I'm going to order in Vietnamese," said Alex Rodriguez of San Jose, a Mexican-American business developer. He took college courses to learn Vietnamese because of religious outreach he does as a Jehovah's Witness.

Growing pains

Mike Riggsby, co-owner of West Coast Store Fixtures, a San Jose company that sells everything from store counters to mannequins, said he is having to learn new ways of bargaining and negotiating on the job. He estimates half his customers are now Asian, up 50 percent in the past decade.

"I'm learning as I'm going along," Riggsby said. "It's us understanding them and them understanding our culture, and working together so we don't offend each other."

Nevertheless, he still has misunderstandings, and it bothers him sometimes when customers speak to one another in a language he doesn't understand.

A fourth-generation Californian who is ethnically Chinese, Cindy Colbert of Campbell often felt out of place as a baby boomer growing up in San Jose. She thinks the growth of the Asian population has made people here less likely to stereotype.

"When I was growing up, you needed to blend in - you needed to be white. If you weren't white, you stuck out like a sore thumb," said Colbert, whose great grandfather came to California from China to work on the railroads.

"I used to walk up to the supermarket checkout and the clerk would be hostile until I opened my mouth and he saw I was a native English-speaker," she said. "They are kind of more accepting now because of the volume of (Asian) people here."

Five of the 10 U.S. counties with the largest Asian population growth in the past year were in California, including Santa Clara and Alameda counties. Asian immigrants have been somewhat slower than Latinos to spread out across the United States, demographers say.

Asians "are still very heavily attracted to areas which have been the traditional gateways to the United States," said Bill Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

From Chinese actresses like Gong Li starring in mainstream Hollywood movies like "Miami Vice," to the rise of five-star Asian restaurants and the ubiquity of Pokemon, marketing experts say there is increasing cross-pollination between Asian and non-Asian cultures across the country, especially in places like the South Bay.

Mainstream absorption

Conventional wisdom has been that the rapid growth of ethnic supermarkets like 99 Ranch Market would make them takeover targets for mainstream supermarket chains, said Saul Gitlin, executive vice president with Kang & Lee, a New York advertising firm that helps organizations from AT&T to the NBA target Asian consumers. But Gitlin isn't sure that will happen.

"I can't tell you it'll be the mainstream stores that acquire the Asian stores. It could very well be the reverse," Gitlin said.

Lee's Sandwiches, a chain of Vietnamese eateries headquartered in San Jose, began in 1983 with a largely Vietnamese clientele, said Jimmy Le, assistant to the chief executive. Those stores featured an array of traditional Vietnamese foods and flavors.

But its newer stores are intended to feel more like standard American fast-food outlets. The chain has now expanded to Arizona and Texas and will open in Oklahoma City this year.

"No matter what nationality you are, everyone is willing to try new things," Le said. "Our focus is not just Vietnamese customers or Asians any more, but any nationality. Just like McDonald's or Burger King."





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Mike Swift at mswift@mercurynews.com or (408) 271-3648.
 
#14 · (Edited)
#25 ·
Here in Arizona, Maricopa County's Asian Population has increased by 25% from 2000 until 2007. That is a 25,000 numerical increase!! My boss's church (Korean) has tripled in size since 2004, and has opened another branch! The majority seem to be people fed-up with California's sky-high living costs. Mostly Vietnamese and Chinese (mainland, Mandarin speaking) it seems, although the Korean community is growing fast too.
 
#27 ·
Wow all of that got approved during this recession? That's pretty amazing! My job is very close to Milpitas so I look forward to watching all of this stuff rise.

I'm curious about the redevelopment of Milpitas Square. There doesn't seem to be any room for it to expand.
 
#30 ·
Early on in this thread there was a post about the Moffett Towers in Sunnyvale, and the Wall St Journal had a new article about them yesterday:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704729304576287241623208406.html

When San Francisco developer Jay Paul left town for a Pacific Ocean yacht voyage about 10 weeks ago, his shiny new office complex in Sunnyvale, Calif., had been sitting mostly empty since it was completed in late 2008.

But by the time Mr. Paul returned last week, most of the Moffett Towers project's 1.6 million square feet of space had been accounted for.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. snapped up more than 600,000 square feet of space, while Microsoft Corp. was close to signing a lease for as much as 300,000 square feet, say people familiar with the matter. Brokers in the area now expect Mr. Paul to break ground on a 230,000-square-foot third phase of the Moffett project by next year, even if he doesn't sign a tenant ahead of time.

[...]

A downtown Palo Alto office building, once home to engineers developing the AltaVista search engine and the Java programming language, was sold this month to RREEF, Deutsche Bank's real-estate investment division, for $65 million, or more than $900 a square foot. That deal is in a tie with a sale in downtown Washington as this year's most expensive sale of a U.S. office building over 15,000 square feet, according to Real Capital Analytics.

[...]

In response to the new demand, Sobrato Organization, one of the largest office-building owners in Silicon Valley, decided recently to restart a 300,000 square-foot speculative office project in Santa Clara that had been on hold since 2008, says the company's head of real estate, Michael Field.
Also from yesterday, news of Facebook's plans for the old Sun campus in Menlo Park, complete with a crazy bridge over Bayfront Expwy and the old freight railroad: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_17927981

 
#32 ·
LinkedIn prices IPO at $45 a share; venture backers rejoice

By Peter Delevett
Mercury News Columnist
Posted: 05/18/2011 03:38:26 PM PDT
Updated: 05/19/2011 05:34:06 AM PDT


LinkedIn has finally settled on a price at which it plans to debut its shares: For a mere $45 apiece, you too can (try to) get in on Silicon Valley's most anticipated IPO in years.

So with the company valued at a theoretical $4.2 billion, who's shaping up as the big winners? Try looking along Sand Hill Road.

Three of the venture capital firms that have invested in the professional networking site -- Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Ventures and Greylock Partners, where LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman now works -- will own a collective 38 percent of the company after Thursday, when it's expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD. And they've all made out very nicely on their investments.

Interestingly, those three venture firms aren't unloading any shares in the offering.

Nobody at the trio would talk this week, citing the Securities and Exchange Commission's quiet period. But Bill Gurley, a partner at another top Sand Hill Road firm, said it's fairly common for VC funds to hold on to the shares of their portfolio companies.

Because stock prices tend to go up over time (sorry, Pets.com), "The best returns in venture are from companies held way past the initial IPO," said Gurley, of Benchmark Capital. Social-networking startups in his firm's portfolio include microblogging site Twitter, review hub Yelp and question-and-answer clearinghouse.

"If you have a company with a sound competitive advantage -- and LinkedIn certainly qualifies -- you would definitely hold the stock and not participate in the actual IPO," Gurley added.

Launched in 2003, LinkedIn's muscular online Rolodex now tops 100 million users who can add colleagues and contacts to their networks, then troll their contacts' networks for introductions. Though the basic service is free, the company makes money in a variety of ways, including premium subscriptions, advertising and job postings.

Last year, the Mountain View outfit bagged revenue of $243 million; revenue totaled $94 million in the first three months of this year, more than double the same period last year. Hence Gurley's point about competitive advantage.
To be sure, other LinkedIn backers are looking for liquidity: Goldman Sachs, for instance, is selling its entire allotment of 871,000 shares, and another early VC backer, Bain Capital, is selling 15 percent of its 4.3 million shares. Still another VC who's poised to reap a windfall is Joe Kraus, the Excite co-founder who's now at Google (GOOG) Ventures and was an early angel investor in LinkedIn.

Kraus, according to SEC documents, is selling 15,000 shares Thursday but is hanging on to more than 62,000. That's the same game plan being deployed by LinkedIn founder Hoffman, who with his wife, Michelle, is selling 115,000 shares but will retain nearly 19 million -- about 20 percent of the company -- after the offering.

Although Hoffman works at Greylock, LinkedIn says he won't have any sway over the firm's shares: Partner David Sze represents the firm on the company's board. Greylock, by the way, is coming out pretty well on the deal, according to data compiled by Thomson Reuters: It's put just $6 million into LinkedIn over the years, but its stake is worth $632 million at the IPO price.
By contrast, Bessemer -- which didn't invest in LinkedIn until after Greylock and Sequoia -- has invested more than $29 million, but its post-IPO stake is worth "just" $206 million on paper.

As for Sequoia, the company's earliest venture backer, its $27.3 million investment is suddenly valued at $757 million. I'll bet getting dissed in "The Social Network" suddenly doesn't sting as much. (Sequoia was famously turned down by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who showed up to the pitch meeting in a bathrobe.)

Still, even if the stock enjoys a hefty first-day run-up, Hoffman and the three venture firms are taking a risk: SEC rules bar them from selling any shares for six months after the IPO. One prominent social-networking firm that went public this month on the NYSE, China's Renren, saw its shares plunge back to earth just days after its IPO, though they regained a bit of momentum Wednesday.

On the other hand, it looks increasingly likely that LinkedIn is going to clear the way for other social heavyweights such as Groupon, Zynga and Facebook to go public in the next year or so. So if there's no letdown in the investor fervor for those stocks, Hoffman and Co. just might end up looking like geniuses.

Clearly, management isn't lacking for confidence: after hiking its estimated share price range Tuesday, they priced the stock at the very top of the new range. For those keeping score, that means the $352 million IPO would be the valley's biggest since VMware raised nearly $1 billion in 2007 -- and the biggest Internet IPO since Google's in 2004.
 
#33 ·
Santa Clara County is a county located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. As of 2010 it had a population of 1,781,642. The county seat is San Jose. The highly urbanized Santa Clara Valley within Santa Clara County is also known as Silicon Valley. Santa Clara is the most populous county in the Bay Area region.

Cities, towns, and neighborhoods

There are 15 incorporated cities and towns in the county:

San Jose, which includes the former cities/communities of:

Alum Rock,
Cambrian Park,
Willow Glen,
East San Jose, and
Alviso
Campbell
Cupertino
Gilroy
Los Altos
Los Altos Hills
Los Gatos
Milpitas
Monte Sereno
Morgan Hill
Mountain View
Palo Alto
Santa Clara
Saratoga
Sunnyvale
 
#34 ·
Stanford Hospital: Baby Steps as Hospital Moves Forward













by Philip Ferrato


It's only been four years, but in planning years, the merest blip in time, as Stanford University tries to expand its hospital into a complex encompassing the medical school, Stanford Hospital and the Lucille Packard Children's Hospital. They've already expanded on the 1960's-vintage facility by Edward Durell Stone, which will demolished at some point in the future for failure to meet current seismic standards. The new complex, designed by Rafael Viñoly, is expected to break ground this year, and this week Stanford seems to have hammered out a deal with Palo Alto to get the project going- a deal which will probably include a fund for future preservation projects.

Stone started his project at Stanford 1959 and went on to design a public library in Palo Alto as well as the city hall, a forerunner of New York's iconic GM Building- now better known for its mid-plaza Apple Store. Stone's work is not very popular these days, despite the resurgent interest in Mid-Century Modern, and his Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. is subject to regular, ongoing derision; his museum for Huntington Hartford in New York underwent a controversial renovation. Stanford remains a virtual survey of 20th Century American architecture and is well worth a visit if that's how you roll, and Stone's low-slung hospital is an interesting artifact.
 
#35 ·
Stanford hospital project takes another big step

By Diana Samuels

The finish line is quickly approaching for the approval of Stanford University's $3.5 billion hospital expansion project.

The project, which would add 1.3 million square feet to Stanford and Lucile Packard Children's Hospitals and the School of Medicine, took another key step Wednesday. Palo Alto's Planning and Transportation Commission voted 6-0, with Chairman Samir Tuma recusing himself, to recommend a zoning change, a development agreement and other amendments and permits that will allow the project to move forward.

The final hurdle will come June 6, when the city council is scheduled to review and potentially approve the expansion.

"On a whole, I think we probably have the best project that we could have at this point in time," Commissioner Arthur Keller said.

Stanford says it needs to modernize and expand its hospitals to fulfill state seismic requirements and meet patient demand.

Though commissioners had some quibbles Wednesday, the project appeared to be too far along for many changes. It has undergone review for almost four years and has been the subject of nearly 100 meetings in Palo Alto and neighboring cities.

Commissioner Susan Fineberg asked Wednesday to require that Stanford establish a "historic preservation fund" as part of the development agreement.
The fund could pay for various historic renovation projects in the city in an effort to offset the loss of the 1959 Edward Durell Stone building, which will be demolished as part of the hospital expansion.

Other commissioners said it was too late to add the request to the development agreement, which was intensely negotiated over the past two years.

"We're getting into the middle of the negotiations," Commissioner Eduardo Martinez said. "I agree with the sentiment and the idea, but I think it should have come up a long time ago."

Stanford has agreed to a slew of conditions in the development agreement, ranging from giving Palo Alto $23 million for city infrastructure, to paying nearly $91 million for Caltrain passes for hospital employees for 51 years. Advance Planning Manager Steven Turner said the package totals close to $175 million.

Commissioners voted Wednesday to recommend the creation of a new zoning district specifically for the hospital. The new "Hospital District" would allow buildings of up to 130 feet in height on the main Stanford University Medical Site, and maximum heights of 60 feet for new structures on the Hoover Pavilion at the corner of Palo and Quarry Roads. Stanford plans to remodel the 84,000-square-foot Hoover Pavilion building and continue using it as clinic space, while adding an additional 60,000-square-foot medical office building northwest of the site.

Stanford officials showed commissioners at Wednesday's meeting a "fly-through" video of the project, noting architectural details and providing an idea of how people will move through the property.

Commission Vice Chair Lee Lippert said he was worried the proposed 1.1 million-square-foot hospital building might be difficult for visitors to navigate.
Though he called the approval process an "incredible journey," he was not "bowled over by what I see here today."

"I am going to say that it's satisfactory and I will move to support what is presented here," Lippert said.

Email Diana Samuels at dsamuels@dailynewsgroup.com.
 
#36 ·
Rafael Viñoly’s New Stanford Hospital Design Features Modular, Daylight Filled Cubes [renders on the link]

Stanford Medical Center has always been known for educating some of the brightest minds in medicine, but their facility is rapidly becoming out of date. To stay ahead of technology and the times, a new $2 billion hospital, designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects is in the works. Preliminary construction is expected to start in 2011 and progress in stages for about 6 years. A plan based on modular sections will allow the building to adapt to a variety of uses and allow for incremental expansion over the years. Daylighting is a one of the key design elements to encourage healing and the project is expected to target LEED certification.

Read more: Rafael Viñoly's Plans For The New Stanford Hospital Reveal Modular and Daylight Filled Cubes | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World
 
#38 ·
Apple's new campus plans

Apple is trying to build a new campus in Cupertino. It will be large enough to hold 12,000 employees.

I love the building design and landscape. The main building looks like spaceship with a huge courtyard in the middle, and an apricot orchard. Much different than any campus I've seen. It will be interesting to see once it is done. Check it out.

 
#39 ·
Apple is trying to build a new campus in Cupertino. It will be large enough to hold 12,000 employees.

I love the building design and landscape. The main building looks like spaceship with a huge courtyard in the middle, and an apricot orchard. Much different than any campus I've seen. It will be interesting to see once it is done. Check it out.

Anyone want to take a stab at the price tag? I'm going to say $2.5 billion.
 
#43 ·
I'm pretty sure all of these projects are on hold until the economy rebounds.

On a more positive note - I read that the Joe Montana-led development team is making their hotel pitch to Santa Clara on July 13th! I can't wait to see the renders. It would be pretty cool if they also built a connecting walkway to tie the hotel, golf course convention center, stadium, and theme park all together.
 
#46 ·
More news on the hotel:

"Joe Montana scores land deal with Santa Clara City Council
Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal - by David Goll
Date: Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 10:20pm PDT - Last Modified: Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 5:21am PDT
Related: Sports Business, Commercial Real Estate, Retailing & Restaurants, Santa Clara
Enlarge Image

Vicki Thompson
The Santa Clara City Council approved an exclusive negotiating agreement with former San Francisco 49er Joe Montana on Tuesday.

Citing his celebrity and the financial prowess of his investment group, the Santa Clara City Council approved an exclusive negotiating agreement with legendary quarterback-turned developer Joe Montana on Tuesday.
The vote was 5-1, with Jamie McLeod casting the only dissenting vote.
The former San Francisco 49er, who became a household name by winning four Super Bowl championships during his 16 seasons with the team, wants to build a project on seven acres across Tasman Drive from his former team's new stadium in Santa Clara — a 68,500-seat, $987 million facility scheduled to open in 2015. Montana's proposed development could include a luxury hotel, sports bar, restaurant and entertainment venue.
Council members approved the exclusive agreement over an 18-month period with the Montana Group , which includes Eddie DeBartolo Jr., who owned the team during the quarterback's glory years. On the insistence of Vice Mayor Patricia Mahan, council members also asked the Montana Group to provide a holding payment of undetermined size to the city during the course of the agreement.
Montana himself spoke briefly to the council.
"This is a great location," he said of the development site. "Mr. DeBartolo told me to find the best (investment) opportunity for us to do something together. This makes sense."
The council went against the advice of City Manager Jennifer Sparacino, who had recommended a competitive bidding process on the city-owned land.
Tuesday's meeting was attended by nearly a full house of residents and 49er fans who heaped praise on Montana's athletic exploits of days gone by and his predicted future business success. Many of the council members echoed those sentiments.
"You have the unparalleled success of Eddie DeBartolo in commercial projects and the star power of Joe Montana," said Lisa Gillmor, who before returning to the council last year participated in the campaign to get the stadium approved by city voters. "This (Montana Group) is not seeking any subsidies from the city. It would be a market-rate development."
 
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