This community opinion was contributed by the Nik Dholakia. Nik (“Nikhilesh”) Dholakia is Professor Emeritus from the University of Rhode Island. In 2020, he and his wife Ruby made a full-time life-changing transition, moving 3,000 miles to Hollister, California. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent BenitoLink or other affiliated contributors. BenitoLink invites all community members to share their ideas and opinions. By registering as a BenitoLink user in the top right corner of our home page and agreeing to follow our Terms of Use, you can write counter opinions or share your insights on current issues.
Consider this description: Buried under our concrete and asphalt rests some of the planet’s best alluvial soil. And every spring, we are reminded of its bounty in the explosive blossoming of fruit orchards.
In recent past, a few million fruit trees blanketed the county, creating — as a nature writer wrote— “springs that were Milky Ways of blossoms, and summers rich and overripe with fruit.”
It was a time when the highway was a country road and a place where you could pick your own apricots and dry your own prunes … warm summer days and cooler nights allowed the fruit to remain on the tree a bit longer — favoring the development of riper fruit, which burst with flavor and character.
Sounds like a description of Hollister, perhaps just 25 years ago? A hark back to a simpler time before hundreds of new homes started getting built around Fairview Road, Union Road, and the tail end of Airline Highway leading up to Tres Pinos?
Well, let me come clean. The description above has nothing to do with Hollister or San Benito County. It is lifted, adapted a bit, and displayed above, from an article by Lisa M. Krieger in the San Jose Mercury News, published in 2011 and updated in 2016. The opening sentences have just a few playful edits by me.
Lisa’s article is about Santa Clara County. The past – with a reference to eight million fruit trees (in her article) – pertained to the decades from the late 1800s to the early 1940s. The highway in the article – that was once a country road – is not Route-25 Pinnacles National Park (Airline) Highway. It is (gasp) El Camino Real.
We know of course what has happened since then. Sitting in and inspired by Stanford professor Fred Terman’s radio engineering class, Bill Hewlett and David Packard started Hewlett-Packard (HP) in a garage, the pioneering mothership company of Silicon Valley. Fred Terman reportedly even gave the two pioneering inventors the initial $500 for the venture.
The rest is history. HP and the progeny firms, Stanford, the Venture Capitalists of Sand Hill Road; and soon the powerhouse cross-bay talent network of Berkeley coalesced into the tech boom – the die was cast for the unprecedented, unimaginable mega-tech-agglomeration that is the greater Silicon Valley. No orchards any more. (Though, still – even in the tiny postage- stamp backyards of Palo Alto and Menlo Park with black alluvial soil – one can grow fruit trees with enough fruit to feed the family.)
Silicon Valley kept growing and growing. Nothing could stop it – not World War-II, not the Dotcom Crash of 2000, not the Great Recession, not even the COVID Pandemic. It is still growing. And so are the real-estate prices, and the hundreds of unbelievable (but true) stories of software engineers earning over $200,000 and sleeping in motorhomes parked in the lots of their employers or the driveways of their friends.
At the southern edge of Silicon Valley, less than 10 miles from the boundary of Santa Clara County, San Benito County, and especially Hollister, have been experiencing the spillover effects of the mega-growth of Silicon Valley.
In Hollister and San Benito County, we are not living in 1938.
The 2022 San Benito situation, however, has some parallels to the Santa Clara and San Mateo situations of 1930s. In those counties, the tightrope walker tilted badly, lost balance, and fell – into the golden honeypot of tech riches (The Good); and away from the Orchards, Farms and Ranches (The Green). The ‘Good’ – breakneck tech-driven growth leading to hundreds of mega- fortunes and millions of mini-fortunes – pushed The Green under asphalt and concrete.
This need not be the case in San Benito County.
In fact, any good and skilled tightrope walker would be appalled if such lose-the-balance situations happened regularly. Imagine a circus where the tightrope walker regularly tumbles and falls, and always on the same side. Surely some adjustments – shifting the weights and angles of the balance bar – can be made. But balance must be, and can be, maintained.
In San Benito county, a dangerous tilt away from The Green and into The Good could be disastrous. The sweet tech honeypot has stopped at Bernal Road and Highway 101. Beyond that, there are only dark semi-bittersweet molasses pots of distribution centers and piecework shops.
The governing bodies and already-here residents of San Benito County should celebrate the rising tax base and revenues, the escalating home values boosting people’s net worth, and the plans to improve the infrastructure. They should also be mindful, however, of an already- evident dark side: vacant and boarded older stores, shuttered restaurants, ranchers and farmers under pressure to sell their properties to developers, traditional values and culture losing ground, and more. There is enough evidence from the Silicon Valley as to how these processes play out. There could also be potential, new, not-so-evident dark or at least murky gray sides: developers who promise all kinds of green businesses but are essentially profit driven, severe stress on resources such as water and clean air, and ‘growth’ morphing into a feckless, suffocating sprawl.
All the tightrope walkers in the county – those governing it, those supporting it, and those dreaming of a brighter future – need to get seriously into shape, mustering all the efforts and skills needed to maintain balance.
Remember, on the other side of Green, the Good could be murky: there are no golden honeypots to tumble into.