Why is the Bay Area known for San Francisco when San José is larger?

14 comments

  2. Historical reasons and California law reasons.

    Historical: San Francisco was the first big city in California. It is still to this day the cultural hub for Northern California. San Jose is suburbia. Highly-populated suburbia, but suburbia all the same.

    California law: Cities in California cannot extend beyond their home county. San Francisco was consolidated with its county to form a single “City and County of San Francisco”. It could not expand any farther. San Jose, meanwhile, had room to expand within its county, Santa Clara County. San Jose continued to expand its borders and build more housing until one day it was more populous than San Francisco.

  3. there’s no reason to go to san jose if you don’t live or work there. it’s a suburb. no one travels to dayton ohio.

  4. SF is far more dense. SF has nearly 900k people crammed into less than 50 square miles. SJ has a million at a bit less than 200 square miles.

  6. San Jose is laid out like a big suburb, San Francisco is a city with a more rich and interesting culture and history.

  7. San Jose wasn’t as big as SF until the early 90s. Then it eclipsed SF. Plus, the bay is named San Francisco.

  10. I’ve been living in San Jose for over 10 years now, and am active in my actual community as well as on r/SanJose.

    Some things have already been addressed on this thread, but it’s worth mentioning a few others.

    — SF was a major port during the gold rush as people worked their way towards the Sierras, which led to much more rapid development and access to money, early on. San Jose developed much more slowly, and later. When SF was already a major bustling metro area, SJ was mainly just rural and agricultural.

    — SF area is geographically bounded on three sides by ocean, which encouraged high-density development to support the growing population. SJ is in a broad valley at the south tip of the bay, and didn’t have such stark restrictions for development or creep of suburban development patterns.

    — Speaking of suburban development, SJ is a suburban strip mall nightmare. A lot of this can be traced back to mayoral choices and local leadership policy that was implemented during the 1960s. One of our mayors in the 1960s saw how Los Angeles was being developed as a car-centric city, and he basically said, “I definitely want this for San Jose.” So we’re still dealing with those development and infrastructure choices to this day.

    — Depending on how you want to define the geographic and cultural area of “Silicon Valley,” which can be a bit contentious, San Jose area has long been a convenient bedroom community for commuters going to many of the major tech companies in that region. That’s because of the geographic factors I mentioned already, in part, and families can (historically) afford a larger single-family home in San Jose than they might have been able to along the Peninsula or in SF. But today, that is not necessarily true. Property prices in SJ now rival those in SF.

    — The SJC airport is unusually close to the downtown core, more so than most other major cities with major airports. This limits the maximum height of buildings in downtown San Jose, and limits the population density downtown.

  11. It wasn’t really till the tech boom in that the population in SJ exploded but was only slightly less populous than SF in the 60s. SF hasn’t grown much since while SJ has nearly doubled

  12. what is San Francisco known for? golden gate bridge, the bay, the trolleys, gays, hills, etc

    what is San Jose known for? tech ig, but that’s the entirety of the silicon valley

    it’s the same reason why Miami is more well known than Jacksonville, despite Jacksonville being much bigger

  14. San Francisco is older, and a major port which put it front and center in the minds of most Americans during the westward expansion period.

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