demography is geography is destiny
I was searching for something in the archives here, in the course of which I came across a thread from January wherein auslanders boxley and Nother expressed themselves mystified that we in the Bay Area should style ourselves “Northern California” when about a third of the state’s acreage lies north of us. It’s helpful, I think, to regard the division in terms of population cluster polarities rather than of raw geography. The nucleus of “Southern California” can be thought of as a triangle the vertices of which extend from San Diego north to metropolitan LA and east past Riverside. Santa Barbara can be considered near its northern boundary. Draw a line from Santa Barbara toward Las Vegas, and these are subsets of SoCal, named with various flavors of desert. Death Valley is a kind of hybrid of the desert and the mountains that form California’s eastern spine, the Sierra Nevada (always “the Sierra” and not “the Sierras,” if you please). Bakersfield to approximately Sacramento is the “Central Valley.”
“Northern California” refers to the other major population cluster, this one with its vertices extending roughly from San Jose/Silicon Valley, north to Santa Rosa (at one time within living memory thought to be preposterously beyond the commute radius to San Francisco, whereas young couples today are prepared to pledge their firstborns to Moloch should their bid on a property there find favor with the Housing Gods), east to Sacramento. The principal subset here is the “Bay Area,” which comprises San Francisco, “the Peninsula,” the “East Bay” (which we Berkeleyites and Oaklanders further divide into us and the “Least Bay” the other side of the Oakland Hills, temperatures there lacking the cool and humid charm of our foggy precincts) and Marin County, north of the Golden Gate. The “Wine Country” comprises Napa and Sonoma Counties—Solano County, adjacent to Sonoma, is the poor stepsister: Oakland to Sonoma’s San Francisco; St. Paul to Sonoma’s Minneapolis—and, between the Bay and Sacramento lies “the Delta” (tweakers have sort of been economically cleansed in this direction). Sacramento itself, which cartoonist Dan O’Neill described as “the political pigsty of the western world” back when Reagan was governor, has experienced a surge of growth fueled by refugees fleeing the Bay Area’s exorbitant housing prices. Pretty much everything north of Sacramento is still considered “Northern California,” and although there are some serious per capita political, economic and cultural differences between, say Alameda and Modoc counties, my own neighborhood of perhaps twenty square blocks is within a thousand residents of the total population of Modoc, which went overwhelmingly for the short-fingered vulgarian in 2016, so fuck ’em.
Santa Cruz, where I passed my time as an undergraduate, is sometimes considered part of Northern California, but here the more nearly geographical designation is appropriate: most of us regard the city as being near the northern boundary of the “Central Coast,” a designation beginning approximately at San Luis Obispo, a charming town, and which takes in Big Sur.
I venture to hope that this has cleared things up.
cordially,
[Edited for a semblance of clarity]
“Northern California” refers to the other major population cluster, this one with its vertices extending roughly from San Jose/Silicon Valley, north to Santa Rosa (at one time within living memory thought to be preposterously beyond the commute radius to San Francisco, whereas young couples today are prepared to pledge their firstborns to Moloch should their bid on a property there find favor with the Housing Gods), east to Sacramento. The principal subset here is the “Bay Area,” which comprises San Francisco, “the Peninsula,” the “East Bay” (which we Berkeleyites and Oaklanders further divide into us and the “Least Bay” the other side of the Oakland Hills, temperatures there lacking the cool and humid charm of our foggy precincts) and Marin County, north of the Golden Gate. The “Wine Country” comprises Napa and Sonoma Counties—Solano County, adjacent to Sonoma, is the poor stepsister: Oakland to Sonoma’s San Francisco; St. Paul to Sonoma’s Minneapolis—and, between the Bay and Sacramento lies “the Delta” (tweakers have sort of been economically cleansed in this direction). Sacramento itself, which cartoonist Dan O’Neill described as “the political pigsty of the western world” back when Reagan was governor, has experienced a surge of growth fueled by refugees fleeing the Bay Area’s exorbitant housing prices. Pretty much everything north of Sacramento is still considered “Northern California,” and although there are some serious per capita political, economic and cultural differences between, say Alameda and Modoc counties, my own neighborhood of perhaps twenty square blocks is within a thousand residents of the total population of Modoc, which went overwhelmingly for the short-fingered vulgarian in 2016, so fuck ’em.
Santa Cruz, where I passed my time as an undergraduate, is sometimes considered part of Northern California, but here the more nearly geographical designation is appropriate: most of us regard the city as being near the northern boundary of the “Central Coast,” a designation beginning approximately at San Luis Obispo, a charming town, and which takes in Big Sur.
I venture to hope that this has cleared things up.
cordially,
[Edited for a semblance of clarity]
