San Jose Children and Community Groups Deliver Demands to Google for San Jose Mega-Campus

Yesterday, San Jose community groups gathered at Google’s Mountain View headquarters to release a comprehensive set of community demands for the tech giant’s proposed San Jose mega-campus. The demands are the result of Silicon Valley Rising engaging more than 1,500 San Jose residents through town hall meetings and community surveys.

Key findings from the survey include:

• 73% think Google has a responsibility to protect current residents from being displaced.
• 82% think Google has a responsibility to provide jobs with livable wages for residents.
• 54% say they do not believe their family will be able to continue living in San Jose 10 years from now.

Based on this input, Silicon Valley Rising developed a set of community demands for any deal with Google. These include:

• Funding a community-administered affordable housing fund, allocating 25% of units in any residential developments for the lowest-income residents, supporting legal defense for tenants facing eviction, and supporting stronger tenants’ rights policies.
• Committing to responsible contracting standards for subcontracted service workers, ensuring workers have a fair process to form a union, agreeing to a project labor agreement, and giving local residents first consideration for jobs.
• Supporting local schools, quality early childhood education and childcare, and housing access for teachers.
• Mitigating traffic impacts and providing funding for public bus services.

Google’s plans rely on significant public contributions from residents in San Jose, including:

• Selling Google over 20 acres of the City’s most valuable public lands.
• Investing over $10 billion in taxpayer dollars to make Diridon Station the biggest transit hub on the West Coast.
• Allowing Google to build much higher and more densely than is currently permitted, increasing the value of the land by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Do you have a news tip you would like to share? Would you like to contribute to The Left Hook? Email us at LeftHookBlog@gmail.com