Word: valleys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Today the double whammy of a lingering U.S. recession and a maturing of high-tech industries has made life in Silicon Valley considerably less buoyant. Employment, profits and housing prices are down, traffic congestion is up, and the occasional layer of smog now looms overhead. "The vision we've had about this place has changed," says Stone. "Economically, we're a region at risk." In what is probably the ultimate indignity, some residents say the area is becoming like Los Angeles. "The Valley," notes Thomas Mandel, a futurist for the consulting firm SRI, "is going through a mid-life crisis...
...month, and most listings attracted multiple offers within 72 hours. Today 8,700 homes (median price: $226,500) languish on the market. "In Santa Clara County, it's a sacred thing: property values go up," says San Jose Realtor John Pinto, a Brooklyn native who came to the Valley believing it was the best place in the U.S. to live. He stops to wave at the lone pedestrian he can see through one of his plate-glass windows facing a main street. Though it is rush hour, the boulevard is eerily quiet. "This is as bad as it's been...
...Valley has gone through slumps before. Recession buffeted the region in 1981-82, but the explosive growth of personal computing brought the ailing industry charging back. In 1985 foreign competition, mostly from Japan, made serious inroads into the semiconductor market. From late 1984 to early 1986, the region lost nearly 33,000 jobs, or 4% of the work force. Just a year later, those jobs and more were reclaimed when a surge of new products and an infusion of venture capital helped rekindle the region's growth. Regis McKenna, Silicon Valley's pre-eminent marketing consultant, says he has seen...
...around Monterey. But Stan Statham, a Republican assemblyman from far-north Redding, wants more radical surgery. He would draw the border above Sacramento for a new 51st state called Northern California. But that would leave most of the state's economic hubs -- including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley -- in the new state to the south. Hey Stan, whose side...
...billowed east as far as San Bernardino. In the inland reaches, near Los Angeles, from Burbank to Riverside, it is not unusual to schedule high school track and football practice at night after the evening cool dispels the pollution. Glendora, a middle-class town in the San Gabriel Valley, at times has visibility of scarcely a quarter-mile and last year experienced 28 Stage-1 smog alerts, when any strenuous exercise is judged unhealthy. That is actually an improvement over the late '80s, owing to a combination of strict emission limits and still mysterious climatic trends, but the Los Angeles...