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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

Unlike SF, SJ is actually height-limited due to the airport. (Not that's it's fully built right now)

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.

The reason for that is that is Santa Clara and Stanford Universities. IBM and and cold war era defense contractors.

The reason SF and not Oakland is simple racism.

So, Stanford, obviously.

But ... what's Santa Clara University's significance? It's always seemed a minor local school to my knowledge.

If anything, SJ State would be a bigger factor, turning out armies of technical and applied (rather than theoretical) engineers.

I think the OP was focusing on Santa Clara the city/county not the university. Either way my understanding is that the aerospace industry was the root of the tech industry and was based out of the South Bay, notably Moffett field. I wonder if land was also not just insanely cheap in the South Bay in the 60’s when all this got going.

Also Fairchild semiconductor was in Sunnyvale and was a hub for a lot of the following Silicon Valley development. Finally William Shockley moved to Mountain View to be closer to his ailing mother and founded Shockley semiconductor.

These are all why peninsula and not Oakland, but SF vs SJ I am less clear on. When I moved to the bay about 13y ago the center of tech was on the peninsula but people were starting to look to SF. I think the refocus north is relatively more recent.

Land was vastly cheaper on the Penninsula & south bay generally, yes. Most especially than San Francisco. It was both denser and had more opportunities for expansion at the same time than Marin. Why the South Bay won out over the East Bay (Mare Island Naval Base, Concord Naval Weapons Station, Alameda Air Base), I'm not entirely sure, though Stanford and Terman and electronics and that whole history (see Steve Bank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" https://steveblank.com/secret-history/) likely had something to do with that.

Then Shockley, and Intel, and we're off to the races.

The move to SF is definitely more recent. South Park, Reddit, and Twitter led much of that.

  Finally William Shockley moved to Mountain View to be closer to his ailing mother and founded Shockley semiconductor.

No, Shockley preceded Fairchild Semi. The latter was founded by the "traitorous eight" who fled Shockley.

Santa Clara University is a private Jesuit university.

SF had the working port until the era of containerization, and that plus inertia drove pretty much everything else.

SF had a working port, but because of rail access, Oakland was the preferred hub.

Until the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge was built, railcars were ferried across the Bay (though yes, the Peninsula SP lines also existed, and have some interesting corporate legal landmark case history and shenanigans). Then, after the tracks were torn up for the lower-deck reverse auto flow, Oakland and Richmond served as the principle railyards on the East Bay, for the Santa Fe.

I don't know what port tonnage compared across the years in SF and Oakland, but I'd be surprised if Oakland hadn't surpassed SF at least during WWII, if not before.

> During the decade between 1921 and 1931, the ports in Oakland and San Francisco both experienced explosive growth in commercial shipping, although the pace of growth favored Oakland. Prior to 1927 (when the Port of Oakland was formally organized), shipping tonnage in San Francisco more than doubled that in Oakland. By 1921 [sic] the gap had narrowed: Oakland handled about three-quarters the tonnage of San Francisco. Oakland's port would continue to outgrow San Francisco's through World War II before overwhelming it during the 1950s and 1960s.

Source: A Tale of Two Bridges, p. 20, https://books.google.com/books?id=XiyVDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT20

Thanks!

Pier 80 in SF is actually used today, for roll-on, roll-off cargo like cars (Teslas are shipped from there)

MorInDette? I lived in Lafayette. Never heard that... you’re talking Lamorinda right?

Yes.

Is it intentional to sound like "more in debt"?

Most of SF has a 45 foot height limit :\

Glen Park, a neighborhood near multiple rapid transit lines, has an even lower 40ft limit for the commercial area near the BART station.

Look in California SB-50: https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/10/18563360/senate-bill-50-char...

Only a fraction of San Jose is subject to airport height restrictions. And even in the downtown area most buildings are shorter than the limit.

Like SF, most buildings in SJ are much, much shorter than the tallest existing buildings in the respective city.

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