WHO OWNS THE MOST SILICON VALLEY ACREAGE?
San Francisco utility holds more acres than local tech titans
The largest landowner — by acreage — in Santa Clara County isn’t one of the many multibillion-dollar technology companies or developers that otherwise dominate Silicon Valley. It’s not even Stanford University, which controls $19.7 billion worth of taxable property — almost three times more than anyone else.
No, the largest land baron in the valley is our neighbor to the north, the city and county of San Francisco. More specifically, it’s the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which is responsible for delivering water to 2.7 million residents and businesses in the Bay Area.
San Francisco’s water utility owns 14,001 acres in Santa Clara County, which translates to 21.9 square miles — that’s just slightly smaller than Mountain View and Cupertino combined. Most of that — 13,187 acres — consists of the Calaveras Reservoir and the Alameda watershed. The remaining 184 acres are in right-of-ways that allow the agency’s pipes and equipment to move the water across the valley and up the Peninsula.
The Santa Clara County holdings are only a portion of the utility’s water portfolio, said Steve Ritchie, as- sistant general manager for water at the commission, and the city and county of San Francisco use just about a third of that total. The rest goes to customers in cities such as San Jose, Milpitas and Sunnyvale. About 94 percent of Palo Alto’s water and 68 percent of Stanford’s water comes from the agency, which also owns large reservoirs in Alameda and San Mateo counties.
San Francisco’s ownership of the Calaveras Reservoir dates back to the 1870s, when the privatelyowned Spring Valley Water Company began buying up ranchland in the Alameda watershed with an eye toward a future dam and reservoir.
“They started looking at this watershed and saying, ‘Good place for a dam and we need to be able to develop this,’ ” Ritchie said. “And they did over time.”
That vision was completed in 1925 but not before an earlier version of the dam collapsed during construction in 1918. In 1930, San Francisco purchased the water company and its reservoir.
The dam, which is technically just over the border in Alameda County, was replaced earlier this year — an eight-year and $823 million project during which workers moved 12 million cubic yards of earth and rock and uncovered more than 1,500 fossils of ancient whales, sharks and more.
The reservoir and water system shouldn’t be thought of in terms of cities and counties, Ritchie said, but rather as a regional service, paid for and managed for everyone who benefits from it.
“It’s a community asset,” he said. “San Francisco was the name on the letterhead, but it’s the Bay Area’s water supply.”
The agency recently purchased the 787-acre Wool Ranch in Alameda County, and Ritchie said it’s keeping an eye on the 51,000acre N3 Cattle Co. ranch near Livermore. By owning watershed land, the agency can protect the water quality in the streams and other runoff that feed its reservoirs.
“Some of it’s in this watershed,” Ritchie said of the N3 ranch. “Are we going to partner with people and maybe buy a piece of that? Maybe.”