Housing Development, Suburban Sprawl, and Gentrification in San José

Housing Development, Suburban Sprawl, and Gentrification in San José was a collaborative research project conducted with Eli Gordon as part of Remote Sensing III at UC Santa Barbara. Our objective was to explore the rise of gated communities in San José during and following the Dot-Com Boom of the 1990s. Using ENVI for satellite imagery analysis, we examined patterns of suburban sprawl and investigated potential correlations with gentrification across the region.

We focused on several neighborhoods in San José, analyzing housing development trends from 1985 to 2019. Our findings revealed that the most significant growth occurred between 1985 and 1994, coinciding with the early stages of the tech industry’s expansion.

This project sparked a strong personal interest in studying suburban development and its broader socioeconomic impacts. Given the ten-week timeframe, our analysis was necessarily limited, and I hope to revisit this work in the future—expanding the scope with additional data sources and more advanced geospatial tools to deepen the analysis and uncover new insights.