In a region where real estate equals influence, prestige and prosperity, just 10 power brokers — a mix of technology behemoths, commercial and residential developers and one private university — own about $59.2 billion in taxable property, making them the largest landowners in Silicon Valley.
Their concentrated wealth provides a window into how tech and real estate companies — and the university, Stanford — have shaped the valley into an economic powerhouse but also helped create the housing crisis now threatening Silicon Valley’s money-making engine, straining its middle class and displacing people who have lived here their whole lives.
These findings come from an analysis by a collaboration of local and national media, including this news organization, of more than half a million property records from the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office during a year-long reporting project. Much of the property is owned by a web of corporations and trusts, requiring deeper reporting into thousands of records to reveal the true ownership.
As both large players and smaller buyers bid up the price of land and consolidated their holdings over the last decade, who can afford to buy — and who can’t — has become perhaps the region’s most critical dynamic. The 10 largest owners alone control more than 11 percent of all the taxable property in the county.
“The increase in land values has almost single-handedly caused the increase in property values and then everything that goes with that in terms of rent (and) cost of housing,” said Larry Stone, Santa Clara County’s assessor.
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