“I wouldn’t say San Jose, a place where single family homes typically cost in excess of $750000, is a depressed enclave “
Not now - but in 1955 when IBM was locating there it was a small town in the middle of prune orchards.
And don’t confuse San Jose city today with the more expensive suburbs that have grown up around the Silicon Valley busineses.
I actually worked at the Cottle Road campus for a number of years and am very familiar with the place. The orchards were still there at the south side of the campus when I started but the have since let them die of neglect.
While San Jose is less expensive than Los Gatos, Cupertino and such, it is still extraordinarily expensive and the cost only goes up as you move up the peninsula through Mountain View, Palo Alto and up toward SF. Not a depressed area by any measure and the IBM( later Hitachi and now Western Digital) plant there was an anchor for the south end of the valley.