[jpao79]

Highly recommend watching: Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_uTsrxfYWQ

Basically what the author (Daniel Miessler) is seeing is this suburban sprawl being selectively re-invented. Originally the Peninsula was sprawl for San Francisco in the 1940-70s. Then the housing stock slowly aged and the rich people moved on to Pleasanton, etc.

At some point Oracle, Google and the dot-com bubble and associated traffic jams on 880/101 made it make sense to re-examine and subsequently re-invent/re-invest in infill locations like San Mateo and Mountain View respectively. Usually the leading indicator for re-development is the school district.

Mountain View when I was growing up was were you went for well priced non-Italian/French restaurants. In fact there are some original still there on Castro street still hanging on if you look closely. It was most definitely not high end baked French goods (i.e. Alexander's Patisserie).

I would say with the arrival of Box in Redwood City, it's starting to happen there too.

I'd also add that in places that are not physically constrained (like in Texas or even Southern California), you just have more sprawl. It looks different but it doesn't seem any better (or any worse).