The Leland Stanford Junior University is as beautiful as it is big: replete with huge palm trees, Romanesque-inspired sandstone buildings, concert halls, art galleries and a football stadium that seats 50,000 people. But in the midst of a housing crisis some say Stanford helped create, locals are asking if the university is doing enough to house those it employs.
As part of a multi-newsroom investigative project involving Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, The Mercury News, NBC Bay Area, Renaissance Journalism and Telemundo 48 Área de la BahíaTelemundo, we analyzed county assessor office records from 2018 to identify the largest landowners in Santa Clara County.
At the top of the list in terms of property value: Stanford. The value of the university’s holdings is greater than those of Google, Apple and Intel combined.
On campus and off, the value of Stanford’s real estate empire tops $19.7 billion, as of 2018. That’s probably an undercount because Proposition 13, California’s landmark property tax law from the 1970s, has held down the reported value of a lot of Stanford’s properties.
“You can drive for miles and still be on Stanford land. I mean, it’s got a golf course. It’s got a nature preserve. The Stanford Linear Accelerator is operated by the federal government, but it’s on Stanford land,” said Steve Staiger, a historian with the Palo Alto Historical Association.
In recent years, as the region’s housing crisis has metastasized, a growing number of community voices are asking whether Stanford’s size comes attached to a greater responsibility to house its faculty and staff. “Stanford certainly has, in many people’s eyes, a responsibility to do their fair share,” Staiger said. “Now, what they think is their fair share and how that’s being handled? It’s different than others because they have space on their lands for housing.”
How Stanford Came to Be So Big
Stanford has one of the largest campuses in the country and sits on roughly 8,180 acres straddling the border of two counties. UC Davis, for comparison’s sake, is just 5,300 acres.
As every visitor who takes a campus tour learns, the university was founded by a grieving father who dedicated the school to his son.
Amasa Leland Stanford was one of the “Big Four,” a group of California merchants who banded together to build the western portion of America’s first transcontinental railroad, the Central Pacific, with generous support from state and federal governments.
Stanford lived lavishly off the profits of his railroad. He joined an exclusive coterie of ultra-wealthy people and owned both a mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco and a country estate south of the city. He grew grapes and raised horses on a stretch of land that grew to rival the rancheras of the Spanish colonial era.
He might have faded into history if not for a tragedy that struck the family in 1884 when his 15-year-old son, Leland Jr., died of typhoid fever while touring Italy.
With no heir to pass on all their wealth to, the grief-stricken parents decided to launch a university. In 1885, they donated their land to a new school — with the unusual stipulation that it could never be sold.
