I agree with the other comments, as someone who grew up in SF - there is a longstanding tendency to disparage the Central Valley farm towns, and even the centra

I agree with the other comments, as someone who grew up in SF - there is a longstanding tendency to disparage the Central Valley farm towns, and even the central coast, as "places you go to get stabbed". Simultaneously there is total reliance on those farms for the excellent, year-round produce. And there's a political nexus that isn't mentioned in the article, which is the massive post-60's policy shifts that have remained the norms ever since. In the early 60's, there was still a Bracero program. By the mid-70's the farm owners were bussing in illegal immigrants, and the "drug wars" had started, helping to keep those countries destabilized and easy to draw workers from. Agribusiness deals in commodities, so unless there's coordinated top-down enforcement of standards and practices, it quickly converges on exploitation or automation to remain price-competitive. The 70's saw an energy crunch; appetite to attempt further mechanization for fruits and the like would have been limited, if it were even possible. Today's inflationary environment, battery EV and robotics suggests we're due for a rethink of that, which would completely upend longstanding narratives around immigration. The growth of the South Bay is likewise instructive; it used to be a fruit orchard. But post-war, it picked up steam as a military-industrial hub, from which Silicon Valley emerged, again with the 70's marking a certain turning point as computing started to access a mass market, at first with integrated circuit devices and then with microprocessors. That was a better business to be in, after all; a lot of land got sold off and developed, and San Jose eagerly annexed everything around it to become the big city of the area while the Peninsula cities mixed the high-end talent from Stanford with an emerging VC business. Again, a largely unchanged dynamic until very recently. California HSR has the goal of linking the Valley with the coast cities. One hypothesis would be that this would revitalize those cities and bring them into the urban ecosystem of the coast. Another is to look at Japan's Shinkansen experience and say, "all cities are suburbs of Tokyo", i.e. living in Fresno, you'd most likely be a supercommuter who uses the train to get to SF or LA, but is still effectively "off the map" in terms of local vitality.