Steinbeck's books were mostly late-30s, no? Which one are you thinking of? Grapes of Wrath is mostly around Bakersfield, Cannery Row and East of Eden are Monterey/Salinas Valley. I'm not sure of anything set that far north.
I have family photos from back in the 50s showing lots of good orchards in the Bay Area. Certainly no dust bowl stuff. If I remember correctly, my grandparents bought their 5BR tract house in Santa Clara in the mid-1950s for somewhere around $15 or $16k, which was ~40% more expensive than the median California house back then. The Bay Area has always been expensive!!!
Ooph, HN is being HN. The point is that California was not remotely exclusive or expensive in the mid-century, it was a target of emigration from the rest of the country for its relative affordability and low density. The point to citing Steinbeck wasn't to claim he wrote about Silicon Valley in particular, it was to show that this effect was well-known to basically everyone at the time.
I mean, no, "good orchards" aren't desirable homes, by definition. There's at least an order of magnitude delta in real estate price between the two! And sure, your family found a very nice neighborhood in the south bay. That doesn't mean that South SF wasn't a dump or that Fremont wasn't completely uninhabited.
Because my upthread point was, and remains, that you can't look at the history of "desirable homes" over a 75 year scale because by definition desirability changes much more frequently.
I have family photos from back in the 50s showing lots of good orchards in the Bay Area. Certainly no dust bowl stuff. If I remember correctly, my grandparents bought their 5BR tract house in Santa Clara in the mid-1950s for somewhere around $15 or $16k, which was ~40% more expensive than the median California house back then. The Bay Area has always been expensive!!!