SAN JOSE — The Silicon Valley economy may be booming, but its self-professed capital, the city of San Jose, is hardly paving the streets with gold. The home of eBay, Cisco and Adobe can’t keep libraries open full time, plug most potholes or staff a police force that can investigate many burglaries.

While much of the focus of San Jose’s dreary budget picture has centered on rising pension costs, a deeper problem remains: San Jose pulls in less money in taxes per resident than other big U.S. cities and even its suburban neighbors because it simply doesn’t have enough shops and businesses to support its sprawling population.

It’s a condition that has resisted a cure even as officials atop City Hall have made it among their top priorities over the last decade. That’s left San Jose with a flat budget during the current tech boom, while its neighbors are reaping the benefits of the surging economy by expanding services.

“We’re still broke,” said Mayor Sam Liccardo. “It feels a bit schizophrenic.”

San Jose officials are increasingly dangling financial incentives to lure companies during the boom. But their task is daunting, as the hard numbers show:

“It takes a long time to turn the ship around,” said Kim Walesh, a deputy city manager in charge of economic development.

The root of the issue dates back decades and is the result of what turned out in hindsight to be a series of planning failures by the city’s forefathers.

During San Jose’s exponential growth in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, city leaders went crazy adding housing and annexing suburban, mostly residential neighborhoods that made it four times bigger in land area than San Francisco. Walesh said that made sense at the time, as property tax was a main source of revenue growth for cities.

But once California’s Proposition 13 slammed the brakes on property taxes in 1978, those sprawling residential neighborhoods weren’t the tax boons they used to be.

Yet leaders in San Jose, long the bedroom community of Silicon Valley, compounded the problem by tilting the balance even more in favor of homes. Under Mayors Susan Hammer and Ron Gonzales, the City Council from 1990 to 2006 took about 1,400 acres of land that was supposed to be used for revenue-generating businesses and converted them to budget-draining residential projects. Those actions alone are equivalent to replacing the land to support 140 Target stores with homes to add thousands of new residents.

The progress to reverse course has been slow. Chuck Reed, San Jose’s mayor from 2007 through 2014, led the conversion of about 250 acres of residential land to commercial, and Liccardo wants to continue that effort.

But because so many of those already-approved residential projects are still getting built, — and many developers demand profitable housing to be included with commercial projects — the ratio of homes-to-jobs hasn’t budged in recent years and remains the lowest of any big city in the country. For every 100 employed residents, San Jose has just 87 jobs, while Oakland has 106, Los Angeles has 110, San Diego has 128 and San Francisco has 138.

Reversing that imbalance was among Reed’s top priorities. Some big-league tech players chose San Jose for their expansion, including Samsung and a yet-unnamed “mystery” company set to move into a 2 million-square-foot campus approved for the Bay 101 card room site. But progress was fitful, no doubt hampered by the Great Recession and a shift with tech companies moving toward hipper San Francisco.

“We made some progress on it, but we certainly didn’t cover the gap,” Reed said. And neither will Liccardo, he said: “The scale of it is really enormous. It will take decades to rebalance.”

Still, it is hard for many people to believe the biggest city in a place where new millionaires are minted every day could struggle to pay its bills. At nearly every community meeting, residents show up to proclaim that, surely, there must be enough money here to house the growing homeless population, or crack down on speeding drivers, or fix up the local park.

But California cities really only have two main sources of revenue — property and sales taxes.

While other neighboring suburbs have passed general tax increases, polled residents in San Jose haven’t been thrilled about the idea. Still, city leaders say next year they will talk about placing a tax increase on the November 2016 ballot, hoping residents by then will have come around to the notion.

But it is not without risk. Only one other city in the county — Campbell — has raised its sales tax, and doing so in San Jose could give bargain-hunters one more reason to shop elsewhere at a time when a voter-approved minimum wage hike in the city has already raised prices at some stores.

To lure businesses to San Jose, city leaders are taking action. They’ve lowered development fees and offered to fix up older buildings, for instance.

And there are encouraging signs. Liccardo points to adding 30 tech companies downtown in the last year and a half and the expanding business campuses lining North San Jose as signs of real progress. Adding BART and increasing the urban downtown feel that many tech companies crave will help more, the mayor argues.

Matt Mahood, CEO of the local chamber of commerce, says the city can take advantage of skyrocketing rents and freeway congestion in San Francisco and the Peninsula to lure companies south. But because of the lack of available land, the city will have to build up, not out.

“Moving forward, we need to protect business zones and build more densely in the core,” Mahood said. Many businesses are “tearing down single- or two-story tilt-ups to go multiple stories high.”

And while the economy isn’t leading to a tax windfall for San Jose, it has at least allowed the city to return to pre-recession revenue levels, with property and sales tax proceeds gaining about 20 percent in the last few years to roughly $400 million annually. Business and city leaders are eager to strike now, offering expanded incentives such as multilingual services for small-business owners and reduced parking fees for big companies in an attempt to lure as many as possible to Silicon Valley’s capital.

“The advantage of the boom time is that the pace of change accelerates,” Liccardo said. “This is our opportunity to significantly alter the direction of the ship.”

Contact Mike Rosenberg at 408-920-5705. Follow him at Twitter.com/RosenbergMerc.