Quote:
Originally Posted by tech12
I'd say SF is the dominant anchor city.
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But yeah, it sure isn't as dominant as say, NYC.
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This is more what I meant. You extract NYC from its metro, and you are left with hedge fund-rich Greenwich, Yale, Princeton, and some F500s in North Jersey.
Do the inverse of that exercise for SF. No Silicon Valley, Stanford, Berkeley, Napa/Sonoma wine country, East Bay diversity, wooded areas of San Mateo County, etc. SF in isolation is still fantastic, but it needs the rest of the metro area to really feel more complete. Moreover, the fact that the moniker "Bay Area" is not just readily associated with SF but also often a metonym is telling, especially when SF is a very culturally distinct, neatly defined geopolitical entity locally, nationally, and globally.
I also disagree that SF and Oakland are the same city. City center to city center, they are 7 miles apart as the crow flies. It's not anything like Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. If you mean they, along with Berkeley, constitute an urban core like Boston-Cambridge-Somerville, I'd agree. But again, the Charles River at its widest is only half a mile, and you can actually walk from Back Bay to MIT and Harvard along a single thoroughfare that is pretty urban and pedestrian friendly.
Interestingly, the SF-Oakland dynamic sort of parallels DC-Baltimore, whereby locals insist on Oakland having its own distinct flavor. Warriors moved to SF, just like how the Bullets moved to DC. Baltimore and Oakland lost their respective NFL teams, while their respective MLB teams relocated from elsewhere.