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East San Jose businesses and nonprofits struggling to survive may have gained a new lease on life through a new community COVID-19 relief fund. San Jose Planning Commissioner Rolando Bonilla said the East San Jose business community, which has experienced difficulty accessing government aid, was left out of conversations about solutions to help them weather...
Study: Silicon Valley is mostly working from home — and service industry is paying the price
In non-pandemic times, Voyager Cafe in downtown San Jose would be teeming with customers, often workers lined up looking to get their morning coffee or something to go with their lunch. Not anymore. Revenue is down 40% to 50%, according to co-owner Sameer Shah. Voyager’s location inside the San Pedro Square Market means it’s walking...
San José Spotlight’s top 10 stories of the year: COVID-19, homeless, hate crimes
To many people, 2020 felt like one of the longest years ever. South Bay residents contended with a deadly pandemic that got worse as the year wore on, the economic and social fallout of measures to contain the disease, civil unrest in the streets and wildfire smoke in the sky. There was no shortage of news....
San Jose business owners hit hard by COVID-19 now have another worry — the end of an eviction moratorium
Businesses that barely survived 2020 have another tough blow ahead — the end of the county’s moratorium on evictions. The measure bars landlords from evicting commercial tenants who haven’t been paying their rent. It expires on March 31 and, when it does, businesses that haven’t paid rent are on the hook for paying all of...
San Jose restaurants still waiting for DoorDash grants — one month later
San Jose restaurant owner Jennifer Echeverri was promised a $5,000 grant to help her survive the winter amid tightening COVID-19 restrictions. One month passed. The money never came. As of Dec. 22, none of the 30 San Jose restaurants that were notified of a grant had received one. They also were not told when the...
Silicon Valley’s share of tech jobs slips for second year in row, survey finds
For decades, Silicon Valley has been the center of tech jobs and innovation. But several companies have been uprooting their Bay Area digs over the past few weeks — Tesla and Hewlett-Packard to name a few — and relocating to cheaper pastures such as Austin, Texas and Seattle. Turns out workers themselves might be on...
San Jose business leaders see a thriving downtown — just not right now
With many businesses shuttered and trash mounting, it is hard to imagine how downtown San Jose will evolve into the metropolis city leaders are hoping for. But experts at a recent San José Spotlight panel were confident that with a little patience, a lot of housing and eager investment from local developers, a vibrant downtown core...
South Bay’s Black-owned businesses turn to networking to survive pandemic
Small businesses have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, but Black businesses have been hit even harder. According to a report by the New York Fed in April, nearly half of all small Black-owned businesses had closed or were likely to close due to the pandemic. Walter Wilson, co-founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley...
Silicon Valley will recover faster from COVID-19, report says; local economists unsure
A Bloomberg report found that according to economic infrastructure and demographic metrics, Silicon Valley ranks first among the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas most likely to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic the quickest. “Known for their information technology, electronics manufacturing, venture-capital funding and research universities, the economies in the Bay Area boast industries that have...
Google project won’t improve San Jose’s jobs-housing imbalance much, officials say
Google’s massive downtown San Jose campus won’t make as big a dent in the city’s jobs-to-housing imbalance as city officials had hoped. That was one of the revelations from a Planning Commission meeting studying the proposed project on Dec. 9. “Even with the addition of these 20,000 jobs at full build-out, it makes a very small change...