Construction workers work on the foundation of a new home in Palo Alto, California.
Silicon Valley is bent on disrupting the world. Its products affect how millions upon millions of people live and work. But when it comes to the physical space that many technologists call home, there are increasing demands to leave things alone.
The heart of Silicon Valley is a 75-mile strip of land anchored by San Francisco at one end and San Jose at the other. In between is a suburbia strewn with corporate campuses and the estates of those who run them. Congested and forbiddingly expensive, it is a region choking on its own success.
“Silicon Valley has been flashing a ‘vacancy’ sign for decades — come here and build a company,” said Larry A. Rosenthal, a specialist in land use and urban policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “Now some people are saying, ‘We’ve hit our limit.’ They may be reaching their threshold tolerance for pain.”
On Tuesday, voters across Silicon Valley will vote on a slew of initiatives intended to rein in that growth. In one community, they can keep houses off the surrounding hills for 20 years; in another, they will have the option to reduce an already low annual cap on housing construction; in a third, there is a measure to restrict sprawl.
Beyond the ballot box, battles have been breaking out over growth in courtrooms and City Council meetings, with skirmishes over rent control and other issues. Beyond cost, there are fears that growth is changing the region’s culture and demographics, pushing minorities even farther out. Cities in the valley are going to war with their neighbors, saying they are not doing enough — and sometimes going to war with themselves.
“We’re going from suburban to urban, with nothing in between,” said Lisa M. Gillmor, the mayor of Santa Clara, a hub for tech companies. “The community is reacting in a hugely negative way. We almost have riots.”
Here in Cupertino, the hometown of Apple, voters will decide the fate of a ghost mall called Vallco, once home to Macy’s, Sears and J.C. Penney. The developers promise a futuristic remake that includes the world’s largest green roof, 800 apartments and two million square feet of office space. The architect Rafael Viñoly said it was the most important project of his career.
All those offices will add up to at least 10,000 jobs, say opponents who wonder where all those people are going to live. Only a few will be able to afford Cupertino, a city of 60,000 where the median home price is $1.6 million. But traveling a long distance to cheaper communities will further stress the area’s jammed roads, and some of those communities do not want to house large numbers of commuters in the first place.
A dozen miles northwest of the Vallco mall is Palo Alto, with a small-town atmosphere that many residents cherish but that also serves as an incubator for many start-ups.
“We have a pretty insatiable demand for whatever office space we construct until there’s 24-hour gridlock and people say, ‘What’s the point?’ ” said Mayor Pat Burt, who is a start-up entrepreneur himself. His instinct is for moderation: “A glass of wine at dinner is good. Chugging a gallon is not.”
In Palo Alto’s recent survey of registered voters, 30 percent said too much growth and development was either a very or an extremely serious problem. Such sentiments are reshaping the political landscape, powering what are called locally “the residentialists.”
Eleven candidates are vying on Tuesday for four slots on Palo Alto’s City Council. Nearly all say they support an annual cap of 50,000 square feet of new office space, a limit enacted last year. Several endorsed an outright moratorium on new construction.
That makes Leonard Ely, a candidate who is a third-generation Palo Altan, something of an anomaly. Mr. Ely is a commercial real estate broker, but his advocacy for growth goes beyond his profession.
“People always want to keep everything the way it is,” he said. “If my grandmother had been a residentialist, a lot of these people wouldn’t be here. There would still be orchards.”
He favors more expansive height limits in the low-slung downtown. But this, he knows, is extremely unlikely. “A lot of people say I’m crazy for running,” he said.
Yet another growth battle is being fought between San Jose and Santa Clara to the west. The winner will be determined not by voters but by a judge.
Santa Clara, population 120,000, has plans for a world-class mall and office complex, called CityPlace, to be built on what was once a waste landfill in San Francisco Bay. It will include 5.7 million square feet of office space and 1.1 million square feet for shopping.
In July, San Jose sued to stop the project, saying it would create 25,000 jobs but provide 1,350 apartments at most. That would shift “the environmental burden and expense to support that economic development onto neighboring cities and counties,” the suit said.
Richard Doyle, the city attorney for San Jose, said: “It’s very unusual for us to be doing this. Public entities don’t like to sue other public entities.”
But he said San Jose had little choice since the objections it made to Santa Clara’s planning commission and City Council “pretty much fell on deaf ears.”
Ms. Gillmor, Santa Clara’s mayor, said San Jose was playing a dangerous game.
“There are a lot of projects happening in San Jose right on its borders with Santa Clara, and they are not getting the sort of scrutiny they should,” she said. “We’re going to start looking, and other cities are going to start looking, even if that takes us down a road we don’t want to go.”
The trial was supposed to begin last month, but Santa Clara petitioned to have it moved from the local courthouse to a more neutral spot. It will now be held in San Mateo, in the northern part of the region.
In Cupertino, anti-growth sentiment has been rising even as Apple finishes a new campus, which will put 12,000 employees in one spot. This year, the City Council voted 4 to 1 to stop an effort to revitalize another mall, the Oaks, that would have included 280,000 square feet of office space. Another project, to replace a tire store with a nine-story hotel, also got knocked down.
If Apple’s giant new spaceship-shaped headquarters is a symbol of Silicon Valley’s ascendance, the Vallco mall just down the street is poised between a bleak present and a contested future. It is largely emptied out, a showcase for nothing. Its developer, Sand Hill Property Co., envisions it becoming “a vibrant new town center for our community.”
Reed Moulds, a managing director for Sand Hill, acknowledged the emotional aspects of the issue. “Retail gets a pass on generating traffic, because people like retail,” he said. “It’s harder for people who are gainfully employed and happy in their lives to find the good in more office buildings.”
A measure to restrict Cupertino development, including Vallco, quickly gathered enough signatures to win a place on Tuesday’s ballot. So did another measure that would let Vallco go forward and legally mandate what benefits Sand Hill would have to provide for the city.
If Cupertino votes down growth, Mr. Moulds said, there will be widespread regrets during the next recession. “How willing are people to plan for the long term, past the priorities in their life today?” he asked.
His opponents say that is exactly what they are doing.
“This is such a huge project, with so much office space so close to the new Apple campus,” said Steven Scharf, one of the residents behind the ballot measure that would curb Sand Hill’s plans for the mall. “What people are upset about is uncontrolled hyper-growth. No one ever wants to look at the long term.”
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