[23] Major global tech companies including Cisco Systems, eBay, Adobe Inc., PayPal, Broadcom, and Zoom maintain their headquarters in San Jose.

One of the wealthiest major cities in the world, San Jose has the third-highest GDP per capita (after Zurich and Oslo)[24] and the fifth-most expensive housing market.

[25] It is home to one of the world's largest overseas Vietnamese populations,[26] a Hispanic community that makes up over 40% of the city's residents,[27] and historic ethnic enclaves such as Japantown and Little Portugal.

[29] Following World War II, San Jose experienced an economic boom, with a rapid population growth and aggressive annexation of nearby cities and communities carried out in the 1950s and 1960s.

On June 2, 1969, the city adopted a flag designed by historian Clyde Arbuckle that prominently featured the inscription "SAN JOSÉ, CALIFORNIA".

[45][46][47] San Jose, along with most of the Santa Clara Valley, has been home to the Tamien group (also spelled as Tamyen, Thamien) of the Ohlone people since around 4,000 BC.

That year, King Carlos III of Spain approved an expedition by Juan Bautista de Anza to survey the San Francisco Bay Area, in order to choose the sites for two future settlements and their accompanying mission.

[58] During the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, Captain Thomas Fallon led nineteen volunteers from Santa Cruz to the pueblo of San Jose, which his forces easily captured.

[64] The first capitol no longer exists; the Plaza de César Chávez now lies on the site, which has two historical markers indicating where California's state legislature first met.

The period during World War II was tumultuous; Japanese Americans primarily from Japantown were sent to internment camps, including the future mayor Norman Mineta.

Reynold B. Johnson and his team developed direct access storage for computers,[72] inventing the RAMAC 305 and the hard disk drive; the technological side of San Jose's economy grew.

In 1963, the State of California imposed Local Agency Formation Commissions statewide, but largely to try to maintain order with San Jose's aggressive growth.

Eventually the political forces against growth grew as local neighborhoods bonded together to elect their own candidates, ending Hamann's influence and leading to his resignation.

The city had defined its sphere of influence in all directions, sometimes chaotically leaving unincorporated pockets to be swallowed up by the behemoth, sometimes even at the objection of the residents.

[92] San Jose, like most of the Bay Area, has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen: Csb),[93][94] with warm to hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters.

[109] Runs of up to 1,000 Chinook or King Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) swam up the Guadalupe River each fall in the 1990s, but have all but vanished in the current decade apparently blocked from access to breeding grounds by impassable culverts, weirs and wide, exposed and flat concrete paved channels installed by the Santa Clara Valley Water District.

[111] Conservationist Roger Castillo, who discovered the remains of a mammoth on the banks of the Guadalupe River in 2005, found that a herd of tule elk (Cervus canadensis) had recolonized the hills of south San Jose east of Highway 101 in early 2019.

[112] At the southern edge of San José, Coyote Valley is a corridor for wildlife migration between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range.

The height limit is dictated by local ordinances, driven by the distance from the runway and a slope defined by Federal Aviation Administration regulations.

Blame for this lack of architectural "beauty" can be assigned to the re-development of the downtown area from the 1950s onward, in which whole blocks of historic commercial and residential structures were demolished.

The new City Hall, designed by Richard Meier & Partners, opened in 2005 and is a notable addition to the growing collection of municipal building projects.

In October 1991 protests at Columbus Day and Dia de la Raza celebrations stalled than plan, and the statue was stored in a warehouse in Oakland for more than a decade.

[168] Large models of sharks decorated in clever, colorful, or creative ways by local artists were displayed for months at dozens of locations around the city.

In 2006, Adobe Systems commissioned an art installation titled San Jose Semaphore by Ben Rubin,[169] at the top of its headquarters building.

From 2005 to 2007, the San Jose Grand Prix, an annual street circuit race in the Champ Car World Series, was held in the downtown area.

[182] On October 5, 2015, the United States Supreme Court rejected San Jose's bid on the Athletics, who in 2023 announced they would relocate to Las Vegas.

Western is an evangelical, Christian graduate school that provides theological training for students who hope to serve in a variety of ministry roles including pastors, marriage and family therapists, educators, missionaries and lay leadership.

[211] Observers identified the reasons as a drop of 5,000 students in the preceding years, the difficulties imposed on school finances by Serrano v. Priest in 1968, the reduction of tax monies because of 1978 California Proposition 13, and the local teachers' union contract requiring a raise in pay.

[220] The city set an ambitious goal to shift motorized trips to walking, bicycling, and public transit in 2009 with the adoption of its Envision San Jose 2040 General Plan.

Fewer than one percent of city residents ride bicycles to work[226] as their primary mode of transportation, a statistic unchanged in the past ten years.