The Milken report is about to come out with its annual survey of the economies of the nation’s metro areas, and the survey will rank Santa Clara County as the best performing economy in the nation.
The report states some things that I’ve blogged about before. Every new high-tech job we add results in five additional support jobs on average, and a tech boom tends to precede both a housing boom and a retail boom. Since Sunnyvale is already built out, “housing boom” is a relative term. But the retail boom in particular will be a welcome addition to Sunnyvale.
And, of course, it has been Sunnyvale that is mostly driving the economic boom that we’re experiencing, with some help from Mountain View. I was recently informed that Sunnyvale has created more jobs over the past year than all of the other cities in the county combined. That’s a trend that won’t continue much longer. The high tech growth has been migrating south over the past couple of months as the best available opportunities get grabbed up, with San Jose and Santa Clara seeing increased industrial development, and San Jose in particular seeing an increase in housing growth – they’ve got a couple more downtown housing towers that will be going up. I’d expect to see job growth in San Jose and Santa Clara outpace us over the next year, although it will be interesting to see how successful those two cities are now that they don’t have redevelopment funds to entice companies (something that those two cities used quite heavily in the past).
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