A salute to our veterans who willingly sacrifice for our safety and freedom! If you are a veteran please accept my admiration for your service.
Today I am going to share about the City of Sunnyvale.
Sunnyvale is bordered by portions of San Jose to the north, Moffett Federal Airfield to the northwest, Mountain View to the west, Los Altos to the southwest, Cupertino to the south, and Santa Clara to the east. It lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101. Sunnyvale has a population of about 148,000 residents.
During the 1970s, Sunnyvale saw itself as principally a community of single-family detached homes, with a goal to provide a job for every resident. Nevertheless, it was not long before most of the land available to housing was developed. As jobs continued to grow in the city, employees were increasingly forced to find housing outside its boundaries. Pressures for apartment style living to provide housing for an increasingly diverse employment sector gradually changed the focus from a suburb of single-family homes to a community with a full range of housing choices.
During the 1980s, Sunnyvale’s economy experience yet another large shift, as high technology companies launched the Silicon Valley era. The federal downsizing of defense development and manufacturing resulted in a loss of defense and aerospace jobs, which were quickly replaced with jobs designing and manufacturing circuits and computers. These, in turn, gave way to more high-value and knowledge-based jobs in computer programming, administration, and sophisticated research and design functions. The Mid-Peninsula and South Bay Area became known as Silicon Valley. Located in the very heart of this area, Sunnyvale attracted successful companies such as AMD, Network Appliance, Juniper Networks and Yahoo.
Sunnyvale’s major industry clusters are software, hardware, innovation services, biomedical and electronic components. Six Fortune 1,000 companies have headquarters in Sunnyvale. Four businesses employ more than 1,000 people each and the 20 largest private employers employ a total of 30,000 people (City of Sunnyvale, Business License Database). Sunnyvale has five major geographical areas of workforce concentrations: Moffett Park, The Woods, Fair Oaks, Peery Park, and Oakmead.
The key employment areas in Sunnyvale were generally developed earlier in time than similar areas in adjacent cities. Sunnyvale has, therefore, a relatively fewer number of modern structures for office or research and development use. On a floor area basis, only 17% of such structures are rated as Class A, which is new or high-end and suitable for large corporate headquarters. About 34% are rated Class B, which are less modern and less spacious, and do not provide the signature architecture sought by corporate headquarters. Class C space amounts to 49% of existing floor area, which is in the oldest, most affordable buildings, suitable for start-up companies and service businesses (City of Sunnyvale, Community Development Department).
On the other hand, retail provides important services to the residents and businesses of Sunnyvale, and contributes substantially to the City’s fiscal stability through generation of sales tax. In most retail subsectors, there are insufficient establishments within the City to meet the community’s demand for retail products and services. This means Sunnyvale residents and businesses must meet their needs by making purchases in other nearby communities, thereby exporting their retail purchase dollars and the sales tax which goes with them.
The City’s transportation system is a mixture of roads, public transit, and bike and pedestrian paths. Sunnyvale has about 300 miles of roadways, including major freeways, expressways, arterial streets, and neighborhood streets (City of Sunnyvale, Department of Public Works). The city is well served by regional freeways: U.S. 101 and S.R. 237 on the north, SR 85 on the west, and I-280 on the south. The two most heavily traveled arterial streets; Mathilda/Sunnyvale-Saratoga flowing north/south and El Camino Real flowing east/west intersect in the middle of the City and essentially divide it into four large quadrants.
Public transit serves only 4% of the daily commute trips in Sunnyvale. This is similar to the transit share of work trips in Santa Clara County (4%) and in the state as a whole (5%). Almost all residents have transit access within walking distance of their homes. The major transit service provider is the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) which provides 17 bus routes, with nearly 400 bus stops. The main transit destinations in Sunnyvale are Downtown, Moffett Park, and El Camino Real. Buses have approximately 14,000 boardings per day in Sunnyvale. There are also 1,500 light rail boardings every work day in Sunnyvale, along the Mountain View/Winchester line running through the extreme northern part of the City, serving Moffett.