Mayor: Build wall around Cupertino, make San Jose pay for it

From “Cupertino mayor jokes about building border wall round Apple’s hometown,” posted Thursday on Cult of Mac.

In his speech, Mayor Steven Scharf showed a PowerPoint slide titled “Securing Our Borders With The Cupertino Wall.” It depicted a map of the city with its border highlighted in black. He then proceeded to joke about constructing a wall and how the surrounding communities of Santa Clara, Saratoga, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, and San Jose would pay it.

“You have heard about the wall along our southern border,” Scharf said. “This is the wall around Cupertino. We have a big problem with all these Teslas coming through our city from Saratoga and other people from other cities, so we came up with this proposal. San Jose will be mainly paying for it, so it’s not coming out of our own taxes. Saratoga will give a little bit too, since they are a big contributor to our traffic issue.”

The comments were made at the end of January. However, they only started whipping up outrage online after they were tweeted this week by venture capitalist and housing advocate Kim-Mai Cutler. The issue is that they tap into long-time concerns that San Francisco is no longer affordable for average people.

My take: The other issue is that Cupertino has turned into one of America’s most boring, over-priced bedroom communities with a median home value of $2.26 million. Who’d want to scale that border wall?