Before "Silicon Valley" was a phrase, Stanford had a problem: after World War II it owned plenty of land but had little money. Fred Terman, the university's provost and dean of engineering, proposed leasing part of that land to research-driven companies. That idea became Stanford Industrial Park in 1951. Today it is Stanford Research Park, and it just marked its 75th anniversary.

The park held a two-day celebration on Oct. 21 and 22 at The Hub, its community space, Palo Alto Online reports. Stanford President Jonathan Levin, Palo Alto Mayor Vicki Veenker and Assemblymember Marc Berman were among the guests. "Stanford was a good regional university that was better known for its football team than for its scientific and technical research," Levin said of the postwar years.

An unusual arrangement

Stanford still owns the land and acts as landlord through long-term leases. The park, however, sits inside the city of Palo Alto, and Mayor Veenker called that split of responsibilities "groundbreaking" for its time. It started with roughly 200 acres. It now covers about 700 acres along Page Mill Road and Foothill Expressway, with about 150 companies and roughly 23,000 employees. The park's own figures put it at 10 million square feet of lab and office space.

The tenant list reads like a history of the Valley. Varian Associates, which built its business on the klystron microwave tube, moved in first in 1953. Hewlett-Packard built its headquarters at 1501 Page Mill Road in 1956. Xerox PARC was a tenant from 1970 to 2002 and invented Ethernet there in 1973. Steve Jobs' NeXT developed the NeXTSTEP operating system in the park, and that software became the basis for Mac OS X. Facebook grew there in the early 2010s, Theranos occupied 1701 Page Mill Road from 2014 to 2017, and Tesla, which arrived in 2009, is now the largest tenant.

Stanford says the park generates about $25 million a year in taxes for Palo Alto's general fund and about $30 million a year for Palo Alto Unified.

What's next: homes

The bigger news may be about what's coming. Palo Alto left the park out of its 2023–2031 housing plan, but the plan commits the city to talk with Stanford about multifamily housing there, including a possible neighborhood along Foothill Expressway. Stanford's new General Use Permit application, now under review by Santa Clara County, proposes more than 500 homes for the general public on park land. The park already has one housing development: a 180-unit affordable community approved in 2014 that opened in 2017.