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Today we attended Google’s annual shareholder meeting in the company’s hometown of Mountain View to deliver a strong message to the company on behalf of San Jose.

Shareholders driving to the meeting would have seen this banner over the 101 freeway, and upon arrival were met by community members handing out leaflets and holding signs.

Once inside the meeting, two Silicon Valley Rising representatives asked the board of directors to address the impact its planned San Jose mega-campus would have on current residents.

The chair of the board of directors acknowledged that private companies like Google must play a role in solving the Bay Area’s housing crisis, but the board directors wouldn’t commit to a no-displacement policy.

Mountain View is terrifying case study for what can happen to a city where Google is a huge employer. Since 2011, homelessness has increased by 1,000% in the city, and the average rent has gone up by $1,500 to more than $4,000 per month. San Jose already has a dire housing crisis and we can’t risk making it worse. 

That’s why we’ve collectively come up with our demands for Google to come to San Jose in a responsible way that would not result in huge increases in evictions, homelessness and inequality. If you haven’t added your name to these demands yet, sign the petition now.

Last week, the San Jose City Council voted to ban landlords from intimidating tenants by threatening to call immigration authorities, and ensured that tenants in rent-controlled apartment complexes pay only their fair share of utility bills.

These welcome victories are on top of earlier wins in San Jose to reduce how much landlords can increase rents and stop landlords from unfairly evicting tenants for no good reason.

However it wasn’t all good news last week. The powerful landlord lobby pushed through measures to make some evictions easier and weaken some rent control laws.

We know that if San Jose is going to make real progress on combatting our region’s housing crisis, more action is needed. We need to protect our most vulnerable residents, build far more affordable housing and preserve the reasonably priced housing we already have.

After nine months of conversations with San Jose communities, today a delegation of local children delivered our community plan to Google.

These are the protections that we expect to be built in to any deal with Google over the development of their new mega-campus in San Jose. We say that if Google wants to come to town, it can’t just bring yet more tech-fuelled gentrification.

Instead it must work with our communities and create affordable housing to ease our housing crisis, protect existing residents from evictions and homelessness, provide access to good jobs for local workers and ensure that San Jose traffic does not grind to a halt.

While the City and Google tried to conduct their backroom deal behind closed doors and shady non-disclosure agreements, more than 1,500 people of San Jose said loudly and clearly that if Google wants to come to town, it has to be a good neighbor.

We’ve come together, discussed each others’ views and presented a positive and fair vision for the future of our city that we want Google and the City Council to adopt.

We will not sit back and let the Mayor and City Council sell valuable public land – our land – for a huge corporate development that will hurt the people of San Jose. We must not let this deal hike already unaffordable rents, create a spike in evictions, force communities of color out of the area, fail to provide good jobs for local workers, and lead to gridlocked roads and overcrowded schools.

We know we can win these demands. Other nearby cities have won victories for residents when dealing with major developments. They won because community members like you stood up.

Together, we can shape a better future for San Jose. It’s time to set a new direction for inclusive tech growth.

We’re on track to make history by qualifying an initiative to reform Proposition 13 for the first time in 40 years.

This is our opportunity to close commercial property tax loopholes and hold corporations accountable to paying their fair share for the services we all rely on.

We have decided to qualify this initiative for the 2020 ballot. This is an epic battle, and taking on the fight in 2020 will best set us up to win — this gives us two years to lay the foundation against a fierce opposition that has pledged to spend over $100 million to fight any reforms.

Our work continues now to qualify for 2020: we have until mid-June to gather the 900,000 signatures statewide we need to get on the ballot, and we’ve already hit 25% of our goal.

The sooner we qualify, the higher on the ballot we’ll be. We need to keep growing, keep our momentum up, and keep having conversations with our family, friends, and allies about what closing commercial property tax loopholes in Proposition 13 will mean to our communities.

Last night, the San Jose City Council passed a groundbreaking set of policies to raise job quality and create career opportunities in construction, Silicon Valley’s second-fastest growing industry.

These policies will help San Jose’s construction workers support their families, and provide a pathway into the skilled construction trades for underrepresented communities, by:

• Setting standards for fair wages, hiring local workers, and creating career opportunities on private developments that receive taxpayer subsidies.
• Strengthening worker protections and expanding access to middle-class construction careers on public works projects.

While Silicon Valley is best known for programmers and software engineers, the tech boom has also spurred demand for construction. More than 32,000 people in Santa Clara County work in construction, but the industry is split between high-road contractors that invest in their workforce, and low-road contractors that exploit workers and have widespread safety violations.

In 2016, our study found San Jose’s public construction projects fell short in providing career opportunities to our diverse local communities.

Last month, we exposed how the two-tiered character of San Jose’s construction industry has driven tens of thousands into working poverty — and contributed to occupational segregation through major race and gender disparities in pay and representation.

San Jose is now one of the first cities in California to help level this playing field by establishing workforce and hiring standards on private developments receiving public subsides. The win also builds on the community workforce policies we’ve won at VTA and the County of Santa Clara.

In 1978, an underhanded tax law was passed to let huge corporations get away with paying artificially low commercial taxes.

Forty years later, Proposition 13 has drained our state’s finances and deteriorated our public services.

Billionaires and huge multinational corporations have raked in billions that once funded our schools, health clinics, parks and other vital services. Our public education system used to be the best in the nation – now it is among the worst.

By 2019, this loophole will cost Santa Clara County alone over $1 billion every year.

This year we can do something about it. California voters will have the chance to finally close this corporate loophole and make big businesses and billionaires pay their share – but to get this on the ballot, we need to gather 900,000 signatures statewide by April 24, 2018.

Every single signature we can get helps us towards our goal of reclaiming this funding from the deep pockets of major corporations to help fund a state with a world-class public education system and better health clinics, roads, parks, libraries and other public services.

This measure will only affect corporate properties benefiting from this brazen tax loophole. It would not affect homeowners, small businesses or agricultural properties.