Ana Navarro lives with her husband and two young children in a 450-square-foot apartment. The kids — ages 10 and 3 — share a bedroom that’s more like a glorified closet.
The family pays $1,800 a month to live in its crowded flat across the street from an old landfill in this largely Latino enclave at the southern edge of San Francisco Bay, where the loudest noise can be the squawk of a seagull. Navarro works the night shift as a janitor at Stanford University, earning $15 an hour, while her husband drives a truck, for $20 an hour. Factor in the cost of food, gas, car insurance and other necessities, and making the rent becomes a monthly drama.
“I am stressed every single day — preoccupied,” Navarro said in Spanish, speaking through a translator. “I’m always calling my husband: `Next year we’ll have to pay even more. What do we do?’ ”
They plan to leave Alviso. It’s become too expensive for some — a striking transformation of this historically working-class community.
Long an affordable island of calm amid the Bay Area’s superheated economy, Alviso is becoming one more bedroom community for the steady influx of workers drawn to Silicon Valley. Its close proximity to the tech industry’s global nerve center makes it an attractive prospect for renters and homebuyers, who may not know a thing about its colorful history. But as tech money and gentrification become facts of life, locals — some whose families have lived here for generations — fear their home will lose a portion of the charm that drew them to Alviso in the first place.
Incorporated in 1852, Alviso originally thrived as a shipping port and transportation hub, with steamboats plying the bay to San Francisco, while dance halls and gambling establishments prospered during the 1920s and 1930s. What remains is a community that can seem frozen in time with its 19th-century landmarks, neighborhood groceries, mom-and-pop Mexican restaurants — and its stillness. The shoreline hiking trails in and around Alviso Marina County Park are lightly traversed. The South Bay Yacht Club is a social club without a marina — it closed years ago — but members still sit on the club’s deck, clutching mugs of coffee as they watch the sunset.
“You’re this close to the forefront of technology,” said Mike Hauser, 28, who rents in Alviso and works as a media producer in San Jose. “It’s like you’ve got the future right next to the past.”
Bounded by creeks, sloughs, a river and Highway 237 — next to which sheep could be seen grazing only a few years ago — Alviso officially became part of San Jose in 1968. Though physically and culturally separated from the rest of San Jose and other neighboring cities — Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and Milpitas — Alviso is now feeling the impact of the same economic forces that have transformed Silicon Valley and the region as a whole.
In the past few years, development has crept straight up North First Street to the Alviso border, and then across Highway 237 into town.