SF is definitely not sunbelt. To me, saying SF is sunbelt is the same thing as saying that Seattle is.

These cities fall into the PacNW category, which is not sunbelt for a variety of reasons not related to their actual climate, but their fabric. SF is a traditionally urban city, nothing like any sunbelt city, including LA.

The Bay Area is very much like LA. 90% of "SF" looks the same as LA, with similar climate, architecture and planning. Cupertino looks like Costa Mesa. The only difference is that SF has a better traditional core. If LA is Sunbelt, so is Bay Area.

It wasnt a serious statement my dude

Exactly, there are more similarities between the two than not.

Yup, parts of the Silicon Valley could be mistaken for parts of the LA area for sure.
It maybe more green up there, but I see many similarties.

The older areas on the Peninsula and around Oakland/Berkeley are very east coast feeling but San Jose and the sprawl beyond the Oakland hills is your stereotypical Western style suburban sprawl.

I put LA and SF in their own categories. They might have been Sunbelt 60 years ago when they were cheap alternatives to the crowded northeast and midwest but that's no longer the case. They are just sunny now that's all.

Sure, there are similarities between New York and Chicago too but nobody lumps them as the same type of city.

Sunbelt cities are generally looked at as attractive alternatives to move to from colder climates due to the warmer climates in Sunbelt cities, cheaper cost of living, ect. San Francisco is really not a magnet for this type of migrant.

Los Angeles definitely has way more of this type of person that the Bay Area has. Also, the Bay Area is a unicorn compared to Sunbelt cities, as it's economy is not based on the service industry or some kind of banking (like Charlotte or ATL.)

Its not based on the service industry or Banking? What is "tech" if not a form of a service. Facebook, Twitter, Google, these are services, technology services but services nonetheless.

And San Francisco is a west Coast Financial hub and has been for a century its where Wells Fargo is HQ'd

^I said it's not based on the banking industry, not that it doesn't have banking industry.

I work in tech and while, yes, it's ''service'' as it serves a client- but it's not service like Hotels, Restaurants, and tourism like Miami, for example. It's also not a big back-office like Atlanta or Dallas or Phoenix or basically any other Sunbelt city.

What I'm saying is San Francisco's economy is based off of innovation. Other than Austin, no other sunbelt city can claim this.

This can be said for any suburb in any metropolitan region in any region of the US. New York sprawls, but nobody's calling it sunbelt. The Bay Area contains nodes of urban development that is mostly absent in sunbelt cities. Please compare Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Phoenix or Las Vegas to the Bay Area and let me know how the two are similar.

I'm not arguing that the Bay Area is an East Coast city, cause it's not, but it's definitely not the same animal as most other Sunbelt cities, which is why I consider it it's own category with Portland and Seattle.

To be fair, Los Angeles is also different than most sunbelt cities but it definitely leans more towards the sunbelt than San Francisco does.

Here's a map of the Sunbelt, so hopefully that settles things.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/42/43...74763c121c.png

?

I don't even consider Silicon Valley to be green; its natural landscape is just like much of SoCal's, when it's only green during late winter and spring because of the rains. When I drove up to SF from LA in June via the 101, as I entered the San Jose city limits, the undeveloped rolling hills were all that wheat-like golden color; in fact, as a kid, I remember reading that California's nickname of "The Golden State" comes from the early American settlers seeing all the golden colored hills and valleys. And I associate the natural landscape of those golden/brown/olive-green colored hills and valleys with California, and it's the kind of landscape you see in the Mediterranean.


Regarding California as being part of the so-called Sun Belt, I never considered it a part of it. When I think of "Sun Belt," I think of Phoenix and everything east of there to the American South, that boomed after WWII. Wasn't the term "Sun Belt" even coined in the early 1970s or something? California boomed a couple of generations before the end of WWII, and continued to grow after that, so I don't see California as being part of that Sun Belt growth. California has been growing in population and with changing industries since the end of the 1800s. Even within California, Los Angeles' population surpassed San Francisco's by the 1920 census. Prior to that, San Francisco was *the* teeming metropolis of the whole west coast, though San Francisco's population was never as big as those more prominent east coast cities during that time (in 1910, San Francisco proper's population was only 416,912). By WWII, California already had an extensive highway network, between the big cities and within the metro areas, all obviously predating the federal Interstate system, unlike most of the Sun Belt.

So I see nothing culturally in common with California and the Sun Belt. I don't even like the term "West Coast" because collectively, California has nothing culturally in common with the Pacific Northwest.

Below is the growth percentage between 1950 and 2010 for the primary cities of 30 of the top 31 metros as of 2010 (Riverside,CA excluded). The average growth rate of these cities combined is 207%. L.A. falls in the top half, so I think it looks very Sun Belt-y city. It looks closer to a Texas city than it does to anywhere in the NE or Midwest. OTOH, San Francisco is identical to New York. It and Seattle were the only western cities in the bottom half, but no western city was in the bottom 1/3rd.

St. Louis -63%
Detroit -61%
Pittsburgh -55%
Cincinnati -41%
Baltimore -37%
Minneapolis -27%
Philadelphia -26%
Chicago -26%
Washington -25%
Boston -23%
Kansas City 1%
New York 4%
San Francisco 4%
Atlanta 27%
Seattle 30%
Denver 44%
Portland 56%
Miami 60%
Los Angeles 92%
Tampa 169%
Dallas 176%
San Antonio 225%
Sacramento 239%
Houston 252%
San Diego 291%
Orlando 446%
Charlotte 446%
Austin 497%
Phoenix 1253%
Las Vegas 2271%

That map is very simplified. It's basing the whole concept of ''Sunbelt'' off of climate.

Who considers New Orleans, Birmingham AL, and Columbia SC sunbelt? I hope nobody. They're warm places but not sunbelt cities.

Actually, it doesn't. That map looks like it skims along warms states and calls it a day. MS and AL aren't exactly sunbelt but Charlotte (which barely makes it) and Nashville (not even included) are. Hawaii is not sunbelt or at least I never seen it classified as such.

This says more about annexation and the relationship between city and metro population growth than anything else.

All those retirees moving to extreme southwestern Kansas!

This map is kind of nonsense

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xUD-tJjreR...omy)121811.jpg

The Bay Area is much more green in general than LA though. LA's landscape is more dry and desert like. The natural landscape of the Bay Area has more trees, especially coastal redwoods, which stop growing south of Big Sur.

Annexation attitudes tend to be more accommodating in places that are growing rapidly.