San Jose bills itself as the "Heart of Silicon Valley" but the problem is that it's really the cheap housing of Silicon Valley. The tax base does not benefit from very many of those high-tech businesses, but it bears a lot of costs that the smaller communities don't have.

Here is where San Jose is out of balance: It’s housing-heavy.

More housing means more people who draw on city services. And in a post-Proposition 13 era when many property tax bills are more or less frozen in time, that’s a big problem.