From K-QED.

Hey everyone, Olivia Allen Price here, and this is Bay Curious.

We're starting off this week in San Jose.

It's the most populated city in the Bay Area. One million people live

within city limits. That's more than twice the population of Oakland. And yet

for a city at size, it's remarkably spread out.

It doesn't really feel like a big city when you walk around.

That's largely because of when San Jose had its biggest development boom.

It is now possible to have the individual styling

every family wants in its home

and still have all the benefits of mass production.

In the years after World War II, millions of soldiers returned home, got married, and

started looking to buy property.

You know, that whole American dream thing?

Home builders anticipated the needs of newlyweds and young families.

They built new suburbs that appealed to countless first-time homebuyers.

Up until then, about two-thirds of Americans lived in cities. That's where the jobs were.

But with the availability of spacious new homes, at least for white buyers, people left those

cities. And all of this was made possible by another big change, the

Interstate Highway System. These two ideas, suburbs and highways,

went hand in hand, a perfect cocktail for the kind of urban

sprawl we see in cities like San Jose. That kind of sprawl has turned out to

...