The question is not where the immigrants themselves stayed; it’s where their kids went. Anyway I would bet good money that this is not true.

Madhaus,
Whatever the mix, it definitely does not support RE’s silly argument (and quite off-topic) in at post #31.

Whatever the ratio, it only shows that certain ethnic group is concentrated in certain areas/cities. That does not mean “ethnic X people don’t get it”.

And many Indians renting in Sunnyvale? That has more to do with H1/L1 visa than anything else.

In my immediate neighborhood I see the same thing. Few Chinese on our block and I seriously believe it’s because of the 4 in all the house numbers. There is only one rental on our street and it always goes to Japanese or Israelis.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the Israelis, lots of them at school too.

From your observation, what percentage of people in Cupertino are Indians vs. Asians?

You’ll be disappointed, but I must tell you those folks are recent immigrants just like you.
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RE,
Just read the quote from Renter4 to find what part I am responding to. I was not talking about specific to Cupertino. Cupertino has lots of Indians too. That 44% what Madhaus mentioned – that includes Indians too.

That makes your whole point mute.

Pralay,

If you go to Cupertino, you will be hard pressed to find any Asian whose ancestors came from that heritage. The old immigrants are mostly in San Francisco/China Town; I’ve never heard of Chinese immigrants being rooted in Cupertino as a part of Asian American history.

You’ll be disappointed, but I must tell you those folks are recent immigrants just like you.

Percentage of Asians in Cupertino:

1970: 2.8% (500 of 18,000, of which biggest % was Japanese)
1980: 6.7% (2200 of 34,000, includes Asian Indians, Chinese & Japanese both 2.6%)
1990: 23% (9300 of 40,000. Chinese now 13.2%, next biggest group is Japanese, 4.5%)
2000: 44.6% (22,000 of 50,000) Different groups no longer specified. 3.1% in addition considered themselves of two or more races.

Source: US Census, via Bay Area Census

BTW, I forgot to address the real estate “culture” of these two communities.
Coming from India, I know, like many Asian (East Asian) owning real estate is very important for Indians too. If you don’t own real estate and gold, you would not be considered “successful in life”, no matter how much salary you earn, and how many stocks and other assets you have. Period.

Before globalization and open-door economic policies (pre-1990 period when India was more aligned to Soviet Union), there were not much investment options for middle class people in India. On the top of that there were skyrocketing inflation (it is still 7+% in India, officially). So you have only few options
- own real estate
- own gold
- buying various govt managed provident fund policies.

And I think it is true for not just India, but true for many third world countries – including many “Asian” countries. So, I think you get the idea why owning real estate is such an important thing for Indians. It is not really “cultural” thing, as RealEstater is trying to portray. It’s more of a socio-economic thing.

So whatever Cupertino homes are selling in inflated price – it’s not that Indians are less responsible than Asians. They both have same goal: “Have to own A HOME and it has be in good school district for the sake of kids.”

That’s the dilemma I always face while ticking check-boxes in various govt survey forms. In general many the new forms has two separate categories “South Asian/East Indian” and “Asian”. There I checkbox former one. But if there is only option “Asian”, I checkbox that option.

In general American people refer “Asian” as only East Asian. Some years back I had a colleague from India who had some East Asian appearance. Another colleague was commenting “You are from India? But you look Asian!”

Exactly. East Asians (predominantly from China) has very old root in California. Some of them immigrated here for all the railroads works in late 19th century and early 20th century, including Leland Stanford’s time. That way their California heritage older than many Caucasians/Europeans here (for very same reason it’s unfair to call them “Asian”).

On the other hand, you take out all the South Asian (mainly from Indian subcontinent) who are immigrated between 1995-2008 from bay area, you will hardly see in Indian face here.

Just ask yourself in 1990 how many Indian faces you have seen in Bay area and how many East Asian faces you have seen. Basically we are talking about two immigrant communities – one immigrated mainly in last two decades and another as old as 100 years back.

So it’s no wonder that you will see a huge contrast between the assets they own – including real estates.

I just sort of wanted to gesture at the implication that at some point in the last 20 –30 years someone like RE probably sneered at the parents of these good East Asian house buyers for looking kind of cheap, because they were saving for their kids’ future.

Without snark, this site would be priced out forever.

Indians are not Asians. These 2 groups have different habits in most aspects, except they both like to do tech. Their approaches to real estate are different too. Typically I see Asians make it a goal to become homeowners, while Indians don’t seem to understand real estate, and a lot of them stay as apartment dwellers for long periods of time. If you go to the high end places like Hillsborough and Palo Alto, you see a noticeable number of Asians, but not many Indians. If you go to the cities with high concentration of apartments, such as parts of Fremont and Sunnyvale, you’d see a large population of Indians gather there.

I don’t know about Indians. People in India has much lower average lifespan that Americans. I think it is around 70 (actually in some area it is as low as 60 due to poverty, lack of medical facilities etc). Does their lifespan magically increase after they immigrate here? I am not sure about it.

I think in the end it boils down to income/wealth. People with better income and wealth get regular health checkups (have insurance, or enough money to regular checkups etc). Rich people eat healthy foods. Poor people eat cheeseburger from MacD.

Before I left the BA I was walking around and doing some exercise a park near Palm (the Palm Pilot people) and the clientele of this little neighborhood park seemed to be about 80% non-Caucasian. Listening as I walked or jogged by, I’d notice the Caucasians were all Russians, Germans etc. Not saying regular old Americans never used that park, I just never saw any.

There’s a whole range of choices in the BA of really crappy food to really good food, exercise or not exercise, and it’s interesting to see how different cultural groups make their choices.

Pension, Social Security. If you pull out money for vacation to europe from 401k, it all gets taxed as per the tax bracket in the state you live