Quote:
Originally Posted by LA21st
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.
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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.