In other words, being “wealth-adjacent” doesn’t do anything for city coffers.

With 1 million residents, San Jose is the 10th-largest city in the United State, according to the U.S. Census. But each workday, it drops to the equivalent of the 13th-largest city. That's because residents leave San Jose for jobs elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

That has negative consequences for the city budget. Take sales taxes, for instance. San Jose pulls in some of the lowest revenues per capita in Santa Clara County. Every business lunch bought in Los Gatos, every pair of hiking boots in Campbell, helps to cement a regional imbalance. The smaller cities are pulling in more sales tax income relative to their population base. That applies to hotel, business, utility and parcel taxes, too.

The more taxes a city has coming in, the more money it has to pay for services like police and fire protection. Ideally, a city cultivates a healthy mix of residential, corporate and retail taxes to pay the bills. Here again 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.

So how did San Jose get into this budgetary pickle?

Most locals start by blaming A.P. “Dutch” Hamann, city manager back in the '50s and '60s. He was the guy who started paving over farmland to create a sprawling suburb in the image of Los Angeles. (Before the city tied itself to the Silicon Valley moniker, the area was "The Valley of Heart’s Delight.") This video shows how dramatically the city grew after World War II.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The "Greatest Generation" was raising a bumper crop of baby boomers. Defense firms were hiring locally. And Hamann could count on an ever-growing pot of property taxes because Prop 13 hadn’t passed yet. By the time he left in 1969, San Jose had grown from 17 to 136 square miles, from 95,000 to roughly half a million.

"He was city manager when it was the Divine Right of Kings-era of city managers," says Tom McEnery, mayor through much of the 1980s and the son of "Big John" McEnery, who was good friends with Hamann.

Hamann wasn’t the last housing-happy bureaucrat. Long after San Jose planners should have known better, they kept paving over not just farmland but factories, warehouses and office complexes in favor of housing, McEnery says.

"Thousands of acres that should have been the tax base for cops, youth workers, firefighters, et cetera, was pretty much gobbled up in a mistaken attempt to satisfy a lot of developers that didn’t deserve to be satisfied in that way," he says.

San Jose is now the biggest bedroom community in Silicon Valley, but it didn’t find the right balance to create the tax base it needs today. This tech boom offers San Jose another chance to get that mix right. Or not.