In Los Altos, Silicon Valley’s largest property owner snapped up the city’s newest apartment complex, then jolted aspiring renters by reserving every unit for its own employees. In Palo Alto’s tony College Terrace neighborhood, it spent tens of millions to buy almost three-dozen single-family homes — but puzzled neighbors by leaving many of them empty. Nearby, it continues raking in cash from its high-end mall, where shoppers ogle luxury goods from Hermes and Coach.
The force behind these eye-catching moves is not a development firm, tech corporation or landed billionaire — it’s a university. Stanford’s $19.7 billion taxable property portfolio dwarfs the more celebrated acquisitions of the area’s tech titans and has an outsized but little-understood impact on how valley residents work, shop and live.
A year-long reporting project to identify Silicon Valley’s largest property owners revealed Stanford as the top owner not merely of academic buildings and sprawling campus land, but nearly every other type of property as well. While the university’s role in churning out billion-dollar companies such as Google and Hewlett-Packard — minting both the engineers who power them and the investors who fund them — has long been acknowledged, this analysis reveals a hidden picture of influence springing from the university’s immense real estate footprint.
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