Santa Clara Valley was a popular site for postwar growth.18 Core Bay Area cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley, which before the war contained up to four-fifths of the region’s population, lost their favored status to expanding suburbs.19 Leaving behind increasingly overcrowded, dilapidated inner-city housing, many young middle-class families moved into suburban homes and neighborhoods being built on the South Bay’s former agricultural empire. In San Jose, the population increased more than sixfold in only three decades—from fewer than 70,000 in 1940 to nearly 450,000 in 1970—as the city annexed surrounding farms to make room for new neighborhoods of single-family homes. While the Bay Area doubled in size between 1930 and 1960 to over 2.6 million residents, the percentage of residents living in core Bay Area cities shrunk to less than half.20
Postwar suburbanization, however, did little to relieve Silicon Valley’s entrenched patterns of racial segregation. If anything, it deepened them. While Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration loans drove an unprecedented suburban building boom that accommodated returning White veterans and provided new homeownership options for many White working- and middle-class families, such loans were systematically denied to neighborhoods of color, particularly those in the inner city with older housing stock such as San Francisco’s Chinatown. For many White Americans, suburbanization represented a class shift up that, according to anthropologist Rachel Heiman, “sealed their whiteness” and their identity with the middle-class American Dream. In the postwar period, this dream came to include good schools, nice homes, quiet neighborhoods, and the absence of lower-class and non-White residents.21
New transportation technologies and federally underwritten infrastructure investments encouraged South Bay suburbanization, while federal policy favoring slum clearance and the dispersion of “blighted” poor and minority communities razed inner-city housing in neighborhoods whose residents had few options in suburbia. In the 1940s San Francisco’s Japantown was part of the urban renewal plans for the Western Addition, which became one of the largest slum-clearance projects in the nation. By the end of the 1960s, over 8,000 residents and 6,000 housing units in Japantown had been displaced. Replaced by large-scale commercial buildings and upscale residential condominiums, few residents or affordable housing units returned to the neighborhood.22
Discriminatory lending and real estate practices such as racial steering, blockbusting, and redlining as well as individual and collective acts of discrimination and violence often denied Asian Americans and other racial minorities access to suburban housing and a growing number of suburban jobs. Racially restrictive covenants, which were applied with increasing frequency in the immediate postwar period, were ruled unconstitutional in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer, yet many remained on home deeds. Moreover, homeowners who were intent on avoiding integration continued practices promoting de facto segregation well into the 1970s.23 While exclusionary measures were in place before the war, postwar suburbanization crystalized America’s racial order across metropolitan spaces as never before.24
Fremont followed a pattern of postwar racial and class segregation similar to that of many other South Bay suburbs. These battles often began at the time of municipal incorporation. As Robert Self has shown, incorporation proved to be among the most effective means of exclusion that many South Bay municipalities had at their disposal. As both industry and their working-class employees expanded out of cities such as Oakland and San Francisco, suburban municipalities incorporated to control growth and adopt standards for development that secured their borders against poor and minority encroachment.25
Leaders of the incorporation movement in Washington Township clearly understood issues of race and class integration to be at stake. By the mid-1950s several cities north and south of the township had incorporated, and residents were feeling the pressures of growth, including potential annexation from fast-growing neighboring municipalities. Supporters of incorporation trumpeted the value of local control over the character of growth, taxes, and their “way of life.”26 A 1952 editorial titled “Halt Toadstool Growth” exemplified the tone of the debates: “This Township wants its master plan [from the County Planning Commission] and wants it in a hurry—before shacks over-run our industrial land, before factories are jammed against our homes.”27 The Citizens’ Committee, which favored incorporation, suggested that it would allow the township to solve “the troublesome ‘fringe’ problem which vexes so many communities.”28 The “urban-rural fringe problem,” as California agricultural economist Stephen Smith explained during the period, was clearly about the desire of suburbanites to protect their property values against decline, including that brought about by race and class integration. Yet the problem was often posed as issues related to public health, welfare, amenity values, and, in Washington Township, maintaining their “way of life.”29 While praising growth liberalism that would allow the township to capitalize off of impending development, many officials and residents emphasized strong local control over the character of that growth, in part to restrict the influx of lower-class minority residents and other “undesirables.”
In 1956, five of the eight unincorporated towns coalesced to form the City of Fremont—the third-largest city by land area in California at the time. While the new city was geographically large, its population was small and largely White. It had only about 22,000 residents and, according to the 1960 census, less than a 2% non-White population. With incorporation, the city took control of its land use and the power to shape new development. Officials inscribed their vision of the city as a middle-class suburb by zoning many of its neighborhoods for large lots of about two to four and a half families per acre. Seeking to boost its tax base, the city also zoned about 5,400 acres of land in its southern border for light industry. For its active planning efforts, Fremont received national recognition with an award from the American Institute of Planners in 1962.
Jack Stevenson, the first mayor, argued that Fremont was to be an antidote to the problems of city life. “Fremont stirs the imagination of those who fled the city to seek a better life beyond. It must excite those who look upon the tangled problems of the nation’s older cities and wish they could start again,” he proclaimed.30 With the Second Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to western cities such as San Francisco well under way, the “tangled problems” that many White suburbanites fled included the increasing interracial mix of urban neighborhoods.
Though a few Asian Americans were able to bypass Fremont’s exclusive planning regime and various other discriminatory housing practices during the city’s early years, their experiences were far different than the experiences of their White neighbors. Paula Jones and Sam Phillips, both middle-class Whites raised in Fremont in the 1960s, described the city as an idyllic place to grow up. Paula likened her experience to “growing up in a Garden of Eden.” She recalled that most of her childhood in Mission San Jose was spent playing outside and climbing fruit trees. “It was a bucolic environment for a child,” she explained. Likewise Sam, who grew up just down the road in Irvington, recalled that it had the feeling of a small agricultural community where a curious kid on a bike could roam free, as he did. But Asian Americans lived in the shadows of Silicon Valley. Their experiences were marked by daily social and psychological indignities and a clear sense that they were “alien neighbors” in their own communities.31 Despite their hardships, pioneers such as the Nikitas, Hondas, and Fudennas paved important pathways for the next waves of Asian American suburbanites who would forever change the face of the valley.
CIVIL RIGHTS SUBURBANIZATION (1965–1980)
As in much of the rest of the country, Silicon Valley suburbia was the site of sometimes violent resistance to integration during the civil rights era.32 To a far lesser degree than African Americans, but no less important, Asian Americans faced fierce opposition when purchasing homes and otherwise settling in suburbia. But the same period marked Asian Americans’ first widespread success in pushing out of the urban center. As they broke through many historic dividing lines, communities such as Fremont became the front lines of debate over Asian Americans’ new claims to their rights as suburbanites.
