No. 285: The wealth and vigor of Silicon Valley of 2001 run alongside East Palo Alto

285.

Published news advisory by Lurene Helzer for Bay City News, August 11, 2001, “Two Shot in East Palo Alto Saturday Morning”. Three paragraphs reporting two drivers shot after midnight by suspects on street. There were fewer of these small crime advisories by mid-2001 when we reported it.

East Palo Alto has/had it all if you want to read the history of race relations in the San Francisco Bay Area – extremely high crime, low-income minorities, discrimination in real estate and finance, municipal unincorporation, poorly-performing schools, and, by 2000, slow gentrification, commercial redevelopment and demographic change.

When I refer to low-income minority communities, I am discussing African-Americans, Hispanics or Pacific Islanders. Greater numbers in the latter two groups lived in East Palo Alto by the 1990s, and it’s still largely true in 2008, if the statistics I read are accurate.

Gentrification/commercial redevelopment was triggered by the rise of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara County, or, more specifically, the Dot-Com Revolution. That is, the increasing economic influence and residence of highly-educated, prosperous groups. Gentrification is too often misunderstood for meaning an increasing number of white Americans in an urban area, but in reality, that definition is off in Silicon Valley.

The Silicon Valley today is an area that has a considerable number of smart, rich, and cosmopolitan computer geeks from Asia. They probably do not, or may not, automatically, emotionally relate to the battles for black civil rights of 1962.