44 Facts About San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California.

In 1769, the Bay Area was inhabited by the Ohlone people when a Spanish exploration party led by Gaspar de Portola entered the Bay – the first documented European visit to the Bay Area.

In 1945, the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco, establishing the United Nations, and in 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco re-established peaceful relations between Japan and the Allied Powers.

Since then, the Bay Area has experienced numerous political, cultural and artistic movements, developing unique local genres in music and art and establishing itself as a hotbed of progressive politics.

Economically, the post-war Bay Area saw huge growth in the financial and technology industries, creating an economy with a gross domestic product of over $700 billion, and home to the third-highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the United States .

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The Bay Area is host to six professional sports teams and is a cultural center for music, theater, and the arts.

Home to 101 municipalities and nine counties, governance in the Bay Area involves numerous local and regional jurisdictions, often with broad and overlapping responsibilities.

Borders of the San Francisco Bay Area are not officially delineated, and the unique development patterns influenced by the region's topography, as well as unusual commute patterns caused by the presence of three central cities and employment centers located in various suburban locales, has led to considerable disagreement between local and federal definitions of the area.

The "North San Francisco Bay Area" includes Marin, Sonoma, Napa, and Solano counties, and is the largest and least populated subregion.

In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain and the Bay Area became part of the Mexican province of Alta California, a period characterized by ranch life and visiting American trappers.

Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco were seen as centers of activity, with the hit American pop song San Francisco further enticing like-minded individuals to join the movement in the Bay Area and leading to the Summer of Love.

San Francisco Bay Area's students, including David Packard and William Hewlett, would later help usher in the region's high-tech revolution.

The Bay Area was the center of contentious protests concerning racial and economic inequality.

San Francisco Bay Area's name was symbolically tied to the Occupy Oakland protests two years later that sought to fight against social and economic inequality.

Bay Area is located in the warm-summer Mediterranean climate zone that is a characteristic of California's coast, featuring mild to cool winters with occasional rainfall, and warm to hot, dry summers.

In 1989, the southern breeding range of the osprey in the Bay Area was Kent Lake, although osprey were noted to be extending their range further south in the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada.

Bay Area is well known for the complexity of its landforms that are the result of the forces of plate tectonics acting over of millions of years, since the region is located in the middle of a meeting point between two plates.

In total, the Bay Area is traversed by seven major fault systems with hundreds of related faults, all of which are stressed by the relative motion between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate or by compressive stresses between these plates.

Three principal cities of the Bay Area represent different employment clusters and are dominated by different, but commingled, industries.

San Francisco is home to the region's financial industry, tourism, and is host to numerous conventions.

The East Bay, centered around Oakland, is home to heavy industry, metalworking, oil, and shipping, while San Jose is the heart of Silicon Valley where a major pole of economic activity around the technology industry resides.

Furthermore, the North San Francisco Bay Area is a major player in the country's agriculture and wine industry.

The smaller nine-county Bay Area had a GDP of $995 billion in the same year, which nonetheless would rank it fifth among U S states and 17th among countries.

Contrary to historical patterns of low incomes within the inner city, poverty rates in the Bay Area are shifting such that they are increasing more rapidly in suburban areas than in urban areas.

Bay Area is the most expensive place to live in the United States.

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Additionally, San Francisco was revealed to have the most unsheltered homeless people in the country.

Bay Area is home to a large number of colleges and universities.

City of San Francisco is host to two additional University of California schools, neither of which confer undergraduate degrees.

The University of California, San Francisco is entirely dedicated to graduate education in health and biomedical sciences.

Additional campuses of the California State University system in the Bay Area are Cal State East Bay in Hayward and Cal Maritime in Vallejo.

Public primary and secondary education in the Bay Area is provided through school districts organized through three structures and are governed by an elected board.

The mechanism for charter schools in the Bay Area is governed by the California Charter Schools Act of 1992.

Transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area is reliant on a complex multimodal infrastructure consisting of roads, bridges, highways, rail, tunnels, airports, ferries, and bike and pedestrian paths.

The greater Bay Area contains the three principal north–south highways in California: Interstate 5, U S Route 101, and California State Route 1.

Politics in the Bay Area is widely regarded as one of the most liberal in California and in the United States.

Since the late 1960s, the Bay Area has cemented its role as the most liberal region in California politics, giving greater support for the center-left Democratic Party's candidates than any other region of the state, even as California trended towards the Democratic Party over time.

In U S Presidential elections since 1960, the nine-county Bay Area voted for Republican candidates only two times, in both cases voting for a Californian: in 1972 for Richard Nixon and again in 1980 for Ronald Reagan.

Currently, both of California's U S Senators are Democrats, and all twelve U S congressional districts located wholly or partially in the Bay Area are represented by a Democratic representative.

Additionally, every Bay Area member of the California State Senate and the California State Assembly is a registered Democrat.

Bay Area was a hub of the Abstract Expressionism movement of painting.

The post-grunge era in the 1990s featured prominent Bay Area bands Third Eye Blind of San Francisco, Counting Crows of Berkeley, and Smash Mouth of San Jose, and later pop punk rock bands like Green Day.

Today, much of the rap coming out of Oakland and the East San Francisco Bay Area is "conscious rap", which concerns itself with social issues and awareness.

All three football-playing schools in the Bay Area are in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of NCAA college football.

Bay Area has an ideal climate for outdoor recreation, such that activities like hiking, cycling and jogging are popular among locals.