This is the catchy title for the multi-part, multi-newsroom investigative reporting project involving The Mercury News, NBC Bay Area, KQED Radio and others.

This collaborative team spent a year analyzing half a million tax records to determine who really owns Silicon Valley. And it should come as no surprise to College Terrace residents that the top landowner is none other than… Stanford! 

As KQED’s Rachael Myrow points out, the University’s $19.7 billion land portfolio is larger than Google, Apple and Intel combined. 

This investigative crew visited our neighborhood back in August, taking a tour of the neighborhood and joining community members for a discussion on August 21^st.  Our concerns about Stanford’s buy-up of our neighborhood and the ghost-house problem received serious coverage in both the NBC Bay Area broadcast and the Mercury News article. 

In addition to their coverage of Stanford, the team also looked at the broader picture of land ownership and countywide housing issues in a whole series of articles

• NBC Bay Area
  • Who Owns Silicon Valley: Stanford?
  • Who Owns Silicon Valley (general piece about land ownership)
• KQED
  • What Now for Stanford’s Ambitious Plans for Growth?
  • How Stanford Came to Dominate the Landscape in Silicon Valley
  • News Organizations Team Up to Uncover “Who Owns Silicon Valley”
• The Center for Investigative Reporting
  • The Stanford Empire
• San Jose Mercury News
  • Articles are available online to subscribers here. The Stanford piece is Part III.

The full list of news staff who created this amazing multi-part investigation includes NBC Bay Area, The Mercury News, KQED Radio, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, and Telemundo 48 Área de la Bahía.  

Meanwhile, in a surprise move that caught everyone off guard, Stanford withdrew their General Use Permit application last Friday.  While they still have 175,000 square feet of development left on the 2000 GUP, after they’ve used that, they will need to figure out where to go from there.  

Martin Shell, their VP and chief external relations officer says that the university now plans to “pause to assess what the priorities are” and President Marc Tessier-Lavigne says that they “hope to gain deeper mutual understanding of challenges facing our region.” On the other hand, they continue to insist that the majority of the community supports their continued expansion and to blame elected officials in the County and the surrounding communities for the stalemate.

– Pria Graves