suburb.
Chapter 4, “That ‘Monster House’ Is My Home,” examines controversies over the building of large homes, or what some derisively call “McMansions” or “monster homes,” in established neighborhoods. Fremont’s large home debates reveal the different norms and values for single-family suburban homes and neighborhoods held by many Asian American and White residents in Silicon Valley. The chapter shows that the planning processes, development standards, and design guidelines adopted to deal with these conflicts largely reflected the interests of established White residents while marginalizing those expressed by Asian Americans. The debate highlights how planning processes and seeming neutral regulations often employ dominant social and cultural norms about “good” and “appropriate” design that reinforce suburbia’s established racial and class order.
Finally, Chapter 5, “Charting New Suburban Storylines,” examines the lessons from this exploration of social and spatial change in Silicon Valley for suburban development, design, and community building. This case study challenges communities to examine the ways in which they are making space for minorities, immigrants, and other suburban newcomers. In an era characterized by global metropolitan diversity, the conditions that gave rise to development contests in Fremont are not unique. To welcome new suburban migrants, communities must wrestle with the standards and tools of regulation that govern their landscapes. They must shift their spatial norms from those that celebrate conformity, consensus, and stability to those that respect difference, contestation, and change. If the 21st-century migrant metropolis is to become more sustainable and more just, these principles must be central to efforts to regenerate and redesign suburbia.42
Suburbia is clearly not what it used to be. Scholars, residents, planners, and policy makers, however, have yet to develop shared vocabularies to describe what it is or is becoming. As Xavier de Sousa Briggs pointed out, suburbia offers an opportunity to think about old urban issues in new ways.43 It is my hope that within these pages, readers will discover fresh ways of thinking about the challenges of inequality and social justice in the contemporary metropolis and new possibilities for improving our collective capacity to live at home together.
ONE
The New Gold Mountain
Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes. … Dwelling is primarily saving, in the older sense of setting something free to become itself, what it essentially is.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
THE CHANS MOVED TO SILICON VALLEY in the early 1980s when Dan, an engineer at Ford Aerospace in Detroit, received a job transfer to Palo Alto.1 Dan and his wife Elaine had both emigrated from Taiwan in the 1960s and did their graduate work in the United States. Like most professional couples, they wanted the best home in the best neighborhood they could afford for their budding family. For them this was Mission San Jose, a neighborhood in the Fremont foothills with a mix of stately and modest single-family homes interspersed among vast stretches of rural farmland.
In their early days, the Chans were the only Asian American family they knew in Mission San Jose. While they never intended to be suburban pioneers, they also did not consider moving to denser urban neighborhoods in San Jose or San Francisco. They liked Mission San Jose’s semirural appeal, accessibility to Dan’s work, relatively affordable new homes, and up-and-coming schools. There they purchased a spacious three year-old home for $200,000—less than they would have paid for a row house in San Francisco or a smaller older home in Palo Alto. On a good day, Dan was able to get to his office in about 30 minutes. More important for them, Mission San Jose’s schools, where their son would enroll in three years, were well regarded and getting better.
Soon after the Chans got settled, Mission San Jose and the larger region changed in ways that they had not anticipated. One by one their neighbors sold their homes to professional Chinese American and Indian American families. Residential development and home prices boomed. Dan and Elaine’s success in their professions and the housing market allowed them to trade their first home for a much larger newer house in a more esteemed section of the neighborhood. By the late 2000s, their home value had increased nearly fivefold. And by the time their son graduated from Mission San Jose High School, it was a majority Asian American school in a majority Asian American neighborhood and was considered to be among the most competitive schools in the state.
These changes convinced Dan and Elaine that Silicon Valley was the place for educated middle-class Taiwanese American families like themselves. While back in the 1980s they questioned whether they had made the right move, 20 years later they could not imagine living anywhere else. “I don’t know where we’d go,” Dan told me. The Chans loved their home overlooking the San Francisco Bay—”great feng shui,” Dan noted. Though over the years the neighborhood had lost some of its rural charm, it was still nothing like the crowded cities where they had grown up in Taiwan. Besides, Fremont’s popularity among other Asian Americans was what allowed their most cherished amenities to flourish. Dan and Elaine now had a Chinese-language newspaper delivered to their front door, watched all the same television stations they had in Taiwan, ate out regularly in nearby Chinese restaurants, and shopped primarily at Asian supermarkets right down the street. Dan even retained his love of badminton, playing three times a week at the Fremont Community Center. The Chans had come to feel close to their culture and homeland in the valley. “We have all the conveniences we want and don’t have to speak English,” Dan explained, noting that Fremont’s newfound amenities saved them from the regular trips they used to make to Oakland’s Chinatown—a drive they had not made in over a decade.
The Chans’ love for their Silicon Valley lifestyle was not rooted in nostalgia for their lives in Taiwan but rather in their belief that the region offered the best of both Asian and American cultures. Dan observed, with some pride, that Fremont was “not like Monterey Park,” the suburb of Los Angeles that Timothy Fong dubbed “America’s first suburban Chinatown.”2 Dan complained that “People tried to make [Monterey Park] exactly like Taiwan.” Instead, he appreciated the small-town feel of Fremont’s neighborhoods and the highly educated population they drew from all over the world. The Chans enjoyed the high-quality lifestyle that their privileged class status afforded them and, equally so, the diversity of faces and places that had become the norm in their well-to-do community.
Dan was not alone. Over the last half of the 20th century, Asian Americans emerged among Silicon Valley’s largest and fastest-growing groups, largely consisting of well-educated, high-income, professional immigrants from Taiwan, China, and India. These newcomers were part of a population boom that changed many of the region’s cauliflower fields, orange groves, and predominately White middle-class communities into Silicon Valley suburbs with Asian American majorities. Like the Chans, these newcomers not only settled on the land; they embedded themselves in it. They raised their families, built new businesses, got hired and fired, met lifelong friends, made their fortunes, and saw some of it decline during the dot-com bust and the Great Recession.
What drew the Chans and so many other middle-class Asian Americans to Silicon Valley and to suburbs such as Fremont in the latter half of the 20th century? And how did these suburban migrants establish a sense of place and community on unfamiliar turf? This chapter traces four decades of unprecedented growth, development, and demographic change in the valley, underscoring how these forces helped to shape Asian Americans’ evolving suburban dreams.
Indeed, Asian Americans’ pursuit of the suburban dream, replete with its material pleasures and personal freedoms, and their perception of Silicon Valley as a productive place in which to pursue it have been just as central to shaping the demographics of the region as larger structural forces. The valley’s booming technology industry has often been described as a “New Gold Rush.”3 For many Asian Americans, the region’s plentiful economic opportunities loosened the epicenter of their vision of the abundant riches of California’s “Gold Mountain”
