industry explosion and surrounded by tech growth and highly educated white collar workers. However, for part of the 1970s and 1980s, it was a neighborhood in decline that facilitated a lot of undesirable activities. However, residents of Rancho Rinconada had the privilege of a Cupertino mailing address, which by itself lends to higher land values than surrounding cities, and shared the acclaim of the famed Cupertino schools. As the tech industry drew more Asian engineers and managers whose culture emphasizes education, Cupertino became a highly desirable area for them. Though not a part of the City of Cupertino, Rancho gave a low-cost avenue for families to get their children into one of the best school systems. People had the strong desire to put their children in good schools, and these there often extended families living in the same household. Larger houses were needed for such families and Rancho was the place to get larger housing at the cheapest price for the Cupertino schools. By the mid-1990s, the value for the Rancho properties that had the original homes was now almost all in the land alone, as the old Rancho homes held little value due to the nature of their cheap construction. The expense of bringing the old modular construction to modern standards had become cost-prohibitive. Rather than do a major remodel, it was cheaper to tear an old Rancho home down and rebuild from scratch. This gave the builder more flexibility in what to build and resulted in a better-built house to meet modern standards. By the mid-1990s many contractors, particularly some Asian ones, were knocking down the old Rancho buildings and building from scratch. To get as much profit as possible from the property, they built as big as they could. This resulted in many newly built "Pink Mansions" of the two-story 3,000 - 3,500 sq. ft. type on standard lots of 5,500 sq. ft. Near the end of the 1990s, a portion of the neighborhood bordering San Jose along Lawrence Expressway was annexed by the city, and contractors then began construction on large, executive-style homes. Rancho Rinconada became a target for wealthy Silicon Valley executives, as the county's development laws, to which the rest of the neighborhood was subject, allowed remodeling or rebuilding a home up to the size of the largest home in the immediate area. Additionally, the county did not have community input or review of