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 2010 was 945,000, exceeding San Francisco's population by about 140,000. Like most large California cities, San Jose has a diverse population: 43% are white, 32% are Asian, and 3% are African-American. 33% of San Jose's residents identify as Hispanic or latino. 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.
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 and green building codes (www.sanjoseca.gov/esd/natural-energy-resources/gb-policy.htm).
An overview of community wealth building efforts follows:
