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See a Planning Disaster at the 2007 Preserving the American Dream Conference

San Jose is one of the greatest urban planning disasters in the country. As the heart of Silicon Valley, the region’s economy should be booming. Instead, growth was extremely slow in the 1990s–less than 0.7 percent per year–and the 2001 recession caused it to lose 17 percent of its jobs.

San Jose was probably the fastest-growing region in the country in the 1950s and 1960s, gaining 40,000 people per year. But in 1974 a new city council decided to “save” San Jose from becoming like Los Angeles, which they thought was a sprawling, low-density region with too many freeways. So they drew an urban-growth boundary around San Jose, thus “saving” thousands of acres of marginal pasturelands from development. But the results turned out to be a disaster.

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