Economy
Cupertino is one of many cities that claim to be the "heart" of Silicon Valley, as many semi-conductor and computer companies were founded here and in the surrounding areas. The worldwide headquarters for Apple Inc. is located here in a modern complex circled by the Infinite Loop. Apple has announced that it plans to build a new 150-acre (610,000 m2) second campus between Interstate 280, N Wolfe Rd, E Homestead Rd and along Tantau Ave one mile east of the old campus. The nine properties (50-acre (0.2 km2) south of Pruneridge Avenue were bought in 2006, the property (100-acre (0.4 km2) north of it in 2010 (from Hewlett-Packard).
On June 7, 2011, Steve Jobs gave a presentation to Cupertino City Council, detailing the architectural design of the new building and its environs. The campus is planned to house up to 13,000 employees in one central four-storied circular building surrounded by extensive landscaping, with parking mainly underground and the rest centralized in a parking structure.
Other companies headquartered in Cupertino include Trend Micro, Cloud.com, Lab126, Packeteer, Chordiant, and Seagate Technology. Over 60 high-tech companies have offices there, including IBM, Olivetti and Oracle. Most of these high-tech companies are located on De Anza Boulevard, Cali Mill Plaza, and Bubb Road.
Though Cupertino is home to the headquarters of many high-tech companies, very little manufacturing actually takes place in the city. The city's large office parks are primarily dedicated to management and design functions.
Earlier in its history Cupertino attributed some of its city income from Vallco Fashion Park, at the time one of the only major indoor shopping malls in the South Bay area. People from the greater South Bay area would come to spend money and contribute to the sales tax. Since then, several other shopping malls have sprung up; Valley Fair (now known as Westfield Valley Fair) in Santa Clara caters to the high end boutique stores, while the Great Mall in Milpitas in the 1990s opened to the low-priced and bargain retailers. Vallco Fashion Park was hit hard by these developments, as well as by the loss of one of its anchor stores, Emporium.
In 2002, Cupertino had a labor force of 25,780 with an unemployment rate of 4.5%. The unemployment rate for the Santa Clara County as a whole was 8.4%.
One of the major employers in the area is the aggregate rock quarry and cement plant in the foothills to the west of Cupertino, the Permanente Quarry. Owned and operated by Lehigh Southwest Cement, it was founded by Henry J. Kaiser as the Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant in 1939. It provided the majority of the cement used in the construction of the Shasta Dam. It supplied the 6 million barrels (950,000 m3) of cement over a nine mile (14 km)-long conveyor system. The cement plant is the sole reason for the railroad line that runs through the city.
Lehigh Permanente Cement was honored as the Large Business of the Year by the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce in 2001-2002. On October 5, 2011, the Lehigh Permanente Cement Plant was the site of a shooting in which a disgruntled employee named Shareef Allman shot and killed three people and wounded seven, including one person who was injured during the course of a carjacking by Allman after the shooting. Allman was shot dead after he would not surrender, and displayed a firearm in a threatening manner toward the deputies. On December 19, 2011, the Sierra Club sued Lehigh Southwest Cement Company for discharging selenium and other toxic waste materials into Permanente Creek.
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Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we “really” experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)