Schools In-San Francisco, Napa, Solano & Sonoma Counties

List of colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area

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Although geographically located on the tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, the city of San Francisco is not considered part of the "Peninsula" subregion, but as a separate entity. As one of the larger subregions, the East Bay includes a variety of enclaves, including the suburban Tri-Valley area and the highly urban western part of the subregion that runs alongside the bay.

Its eastern half, which runs alongside the Bay, is highly populated while its less populated western coast traces the coastline of the Pacific Ocean and is known for its open space and hiking trails. The western counties of Marin and Sonoma are encased by the Pacific Ocean on the west and the bay on the east, and are characterized by its mountainous and woody terrain.

Sonoma and Napa counties are known internationally for their grape vineyards and wineries , and Solano county to the east, centered around Vallejo , is the fastest growing region in the Bay Area. Although the settlement of the Americas occurred some 20, years ago, when the first Asians crossed the Bering Strait into Alaska , [25] the earliest archaeological evidence of human habitation of the Bay Area dates to around 3, B.

In , James W. The Bay Area's population quickly emptied out as laborers, clerks, waiters, and servants joined the rush to find gold, and California's first newspaper, The Californian , was forced to announce a temporary freeze in new issues due to labor shortages. As a result, numerous vigilante groups formed to provide order, but many tasked themselves with forcibly moving or killing local Native Americans , and by the end of the Gold Rush, two thirds of the indigenous population had been killed.

During this same time, a constitutional convention was called to determine California's application for statehood into the United States. After statehood was granted, the capital city moved between three cities in the Bay Area: San Jose — , Vallejo — , and Benicia — before permanently settling in Sacramento in Construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad from the Oakland Long Wharf attracted so many laborers from China that by , eight percent of San Francisco's population was of Asian origin. In the early morning of April 18, , a large earthquake with an epicenter near the city of San Francisco hit the region.

Army 's relief operations were deaths in San Francisco, 64 deaths in Santa Rosa , and in or near San Jose, for a total of about More recent studies estimate the total death count to be over 3,, with over 28, buildings destroyed. Amadeo Peter Giannini , owner of the Bank of Italy now known as the Bank of America , had managed to retrieve the money from his bank's vaults before fires broke out through the city and was the only bank with liquid funds readily available and was instrumental in loaning out funds for rebuilding efforts.

By , the city had been sufficiently rebuilt and advertised itself to the world during the Panama Pacific Exposition that year, although the effects of the quake hastened the loss of the region's dominant status in California to the Los Angeles metropolitan area. During the stock market crash and subsequent economic depression , not a single San Francisco-based bank failed, [41] while the region attempted to spur job growth by simultaneously undertaking two large infrastructure projects: Between and , San Francisco welcomed over , new residents, inland suburbs in the East Bay saw their populations double, Daly City 's population quadrupled, and Santa Clara 's population quintupled.

By the early s, the Bay Area and the rest of Northern California became the center of the counterculture movement. His students, including David Packard and William Hewlett , would later help usher in the region's high-tech revolution. In , in the middle of the World Series match between two Bay Area baseball teams, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck and caused widespread infrastructural damage, including the failure of the Bay Bridge , a major link between San Francisco and Oakland.

This bubble began collapsing in the early s and the industry continued contracting for the next few years, nearly wiping out the market. Even as the growth of the technology sector transformed the region's economy, progressive politics continued to guide the region's political environment. By the turn of the millennium, Non-Hispanic whites , the largest ethnic group in the United States, were only half of the population in the Bay Area as immigration among minority groups accelerated. In , an African American man named Oscar Grant was fatally shot by Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers , precipitating widespread protests across the region and even riots in Oakland, [57] and whose name was symbolically tied to the Occupy Oakland protests two years later that sought to fight against social and economic inequality.

The Bay Area was a hub of the Abstract Expressionism movement of painting. It is associated with the works of Clyfford Still , who began teaching at the California School of Fine Arts now the San Francisco Art Institute in , leaving a lasting impact on the artistic styles of Bay Area painters up to the present day. Later, the Bay Area art movement would be heavily influenced by the counterculture movement in the s , and art produced during this time reflected the political environment. Pixar, based in Emeryville , produced the first fully computer animated feature film , Toy Story , with software it designed in-house and whose computer animation films have since garnered 26 Academy Awards and critical acclaim.

Throughout its recent history, the Bay Area has been home to several musical movements that left lasting influences on the genres they affected. San Francisco, in particular, was the center of the counterculture movement in the s , which directly led to the rise of several notable musical acts: The Grateful Dead , which formed in , and Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin ; all three would be closely associated with the Summer of Love. During the s and early s, the Bay Area became home to one of the largest and most influential thrash metal scenes in the world, with contributions from 3 of the "Big Four" of thrash metal, namely Metallica , Slayer , and Megadeth , and the emergence of the avant-garde metal with bands such as Giant Squid , Grayceon , and Ludicra.

According to the regional theater service organization Theatre Bay Area , the San Francisco Bay Area is the third largest center of activity for theater companies and actors in the United States, after the New York City and Chicago metropolitan areas , with companies spread throughout the region. The Bay Area also has an active youth theater scene.

Bloomberg West , a show that focuses on topics pertaining to technology and business, was launched in from a studio in and continues to broadcast from San Francisco. Public broadcasting outlets include both a television station and a radio station , both broadcasting under the call letters KQED from a facility near the Potrero Hill neighborhood.

The San Francisco Examiner , once the cornerstone of William Randolph Hearst 's media empire and the home of Ambrose Bierce , declined in circulation over the years and now takes the form of a free daily tabloid, under new ownership. The national newsmagazine Mother Jones is also based in San Francisco. The Bay Area is home to seven professional major league sports franchises: Outside of major league sports, the Bay Area is home to eight minor league teams.

The Bay Area has an ideal climate for outdoor recreation, such that activities like hiking and cycling are popular among locals. Extensive public tennis facilities are available in Golden Gate Park and Dolores Park , as well as at smaller neighborhood courts throughout the city. San Francisco residents have often ranked among the fittest in the U. Based on geographic location, non-Hispanic whites make up the majority in Marin , Napa , and Sonoma counties. San Francisco and Marin County both have substantial Jewish communities.

The African American population of the Bay Area used to be significant in San Francisco, where one out of seven residents were black in , which had a thriving jazz scene and was known as "Harlem of the West". Since the economy of the Bay Area heavily relies on innovation and high-tech skills, a greater, educated population exists in the region. However, discretionary income is very comparable with the rest of the country, primarily because the higher cost of living offsets the increased income.

By , the Bay Area's wealth gap was considerable: Thirteen lived in San Francisco proper, placing it seventh among cities in the world. Statistics regarding crime rates in the Bay Area generally fall into two categories: Vallejo came in second, at 8. In , 45 Bay Area cities counted zero homicides, the largest of which was Daly City. In , Oakland also saw the highest rates of property crime in the Bay Area, at Five members of the Joe Boys gang were arrested and convicted of the crime. The 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 and business industry, tourism, and is host to numerous conventions. The East Bay, centered around Oakland, is home to heavy industry, metalworking, oil, and shipping, while Silicon Valley is a major pole of economic activity around the technology industry.

Furthermore, the North Bay is a major player in the country's agriculture and wine industry. Several major corporations are headquartered in the Bay Area.

A Warm Welcome

Among the Fortune companies located in the region include technology companies Google , Apple Inc. The Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, [] has resulted in an extreme housing shortage. For example, from to , the San Francisco metropolitan area added , new jobs, but only 60, new housing units. With high costs of living, many Bay Area residents allocate large amounts of their income towards housing.

This combined total of housing and transportation signifies 59 percent of the Bay Area's median household income, conveying the extreme costs of living.

San Francisco Bay Area

Because of the high cost of housing, many workers in the Bay Area live far from their place of employment, contributing to one of the highest percentages of extreme commuters in the United States, or commutes that take over ninety minutes in one direction. For example, about 50, people commute from neighboring San Joaquin county into the nine-county Bay Area daily, [] and more extremely, some workers commute daily by flying.

The Bay Area is home to a large number of colleges and universities. The first institution of higher education in the Bay Area, Santa Clara University , was founded by Jesuits in , [] who also founded the University of San Francisco in Rankings compiled by U.

The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone

Stanford University is the highest ranked university in the Bay Area, and fifth overall in the United States. The University of California, Berkeley is ranked twentieth overall, but for the past nineteen years has been highest-ranked public university in the country. The 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.

Many scholars have pointed out the overlap of education and the economy within the Bay Area. According to multiple reports, research universities such as Stanford University, University of California - Santa Cruz and University of California - Berkeley, are essential to the culture and economy in the area. These opportunities not only provide educational services to the community, but also generates significant amounts of revenue.

Public primary and secondary education in the Bay Area is provided through school districts organized through three structures: In addition, many Bay Area counties and the city of San Francisco operate "special service schools" that are geared towards providing education to students with handicaps or special needs.

According to rankings compiled by U. In the South Bay and further inland, while the wet season is cool and mild, the summer dry season is characterized by warm sunny days, [] while in San Francisco and areas closer to the Golden Gate strait, the dry season is periodically affected by fog. Due to the Bay Area's diverse topography, the result of the clashing tectonic plates , the region is home to numerous microclimates that lead to pronounced differences in climate and temperature over short distances. Along the Golden Gate Strait , oceanic wind and fog from the Pacific Ocean are able to penetrate the mountain barriers inland into the Bay Area.

Along the San Francisco peninsula, gaps in the Santa Cruz Mountains , one south of San Bruno Mountain and another in Crystal Springs, allow oceanic weather into the interior and causing a cooling effect for cities along the Peninsula and even as far south as San Jose. This weather pattern is also the source for delays at San Francisco International Airport.

In Marin county north of the Golden Gate strait, two gaps north of Muir Woods bring cold air across the Marin Headlands , with the cooling affect reaching as far north as Santa Rosa. Here, the resulting breeze is so strong that it is home to one of the world's largest array of wind turbines. Further north, the Carquinez Strait funnels the ocean weather into the San Joaquin River Delta , causing a cooling effect in Stockton and Sacramento , so that these cities are also cooler than their Central Valley counterparts in the south. The Bay Area is home to a diverse array of wildlife and, along with the connected San Joaquin River Delta represents one of California's most important ecological habitats.

There is also a significant diversity of salmonids present in the bay. Steelhead populations in California have dramatically declined due to human and natural causes; in the Bay Area, all naturally spawned anadromous steelhead populations below natural and manmade impassable barriers in California streams from the Russian River to Aptos Creek , and the drainages of San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bays are listed as threatened under the Federal Endangered Species Act.

Aquatic mammals are also present in the bay.

Before , Spanish, French, English, Russians and Americans were drawn to the Bay Area to harvest prodigious quantities of beaver , river otter , marten, fisher, mink, fox, weasel, harbor and fur seals and sea otter. This early fur trade, known as the California Fur Rush , was more than any other single factor, responsible for opening up the West and the San Francisco Bay Area, in particular, to world trade. Other mammals include the internationally famous sea lions who began inhabiting San Francisco's Pier 39 after the Loma Prieta earthquake [] and the locally famous Humphrey the Whale , a humpback whale who entered San Francisco Bay twice on errant migrations in the late s and early s.

Historically, this was the northern extent of their warm-water species range. In addition to the many species of marine birds that can be seen in the Bay Area, many other species of birds make the Bay Area their home, making the region a popular destination for birdwatching. Western burrowing owls were originally listed as a species of special concern by the California Department of Fish and Game in Bald eagles disappeared from the Bay Area in , and only began returning in recent years. In , zoologist Joseph Grinnell wrote that osprey were only rare visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area, although he noted records of one or two used nests in the broken tops of redwood trees along the Russian River.

The Bay Area is well known for the complexity of its landforms that are the result of millions of years by the forces of plate tectonics , since the region is located in the middle of a meeting point between two plates. As a consequence, many types of rock and soil are found in the region. The oldest rocks are metamorphic rocks that are associated with granite in the Salinian Block west of the San Andreas fault.

These were formed from sedimentary rocks of sandstone , limestone , and shale in uplifted seabeds. The region has considerable vertical relief in its landscapes that are not in the alluvial plains leading to the bay or in inland valleys. The topography, and geologic history, of the Bay Area can largely be attributed to the compressive forces between the Pacific Plate and the North American plate. 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.

These "hidden" faults, which are not as well known, pose a significant earthquake hazard. The Bay Area is home to a complex network of watersheds, marshes, rivers, creeks, reservoirs, and bays that predominantly drain into the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean. Prior to the introduction of European agricultural methods, the shores of San Francisco Bay consisted mostly of tidal marshes. Government in the San Francisco Bay Area consists of multiple actors, including city and nine county governments, a dozen regional agencies, and a large number of single-purpose special districts such as municipal utility districts and transit districts.

Politics in the Bay Area is widely regarded as one of the most liberal in California and in the United States. According to the California Secretary of State , the Democratic Party holds a voter registration advantage in every congressional district , State Senate district , State Assembly district , State Board of Equalization district , all nine counties, and all but three of the incorporated municipalities in the Bay Area. On the other hand, the center-right Republican Party holds a voter registration advantage in only one State Assembly sub-district the portion of the 4th in Solano County and three cities: Atherton , Hillsborough , and Danville.

Presidential elections since , the nine-county Bay Area voted for Republican candidates only three times, in all three cases voting for a Californian: The last county to vote for a Republican Presidential candidate was Napa county in for George H. Since then, all nine Bay Area counties have voted consistently for the Democratic candidate.

Senators are Democrats, and all twelve U.

The association between the Bay Area and progressive politics has led the term "San Francisco values" being used by conservative commentators in a pejorative sense to describe the secular progressive culture in the area. 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 development, maintenance, and operation of these different modes of transportation are overseen by various agencies, including the California Department of Transportation Caltrans , San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency , and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. The Bay Area hosts an extensive freeway and highway system that is particularly prone to traffic congestion , with one study by Inrix concluding that the Bay Area's traffic was the fourth worst in the world.

Interstate 5 , U. Route , and California State Route 1. Additional local highways connect the various subregions of the Bay Area together. There are over two dozen public transit agencies in the Bay Area with overlapping service areas that utilize different modes , with designated connection points between the various operators. These rail systems are supplemented by numerous bus agencies and transbay ferries such as Golden Gate Ferry and the San Francisco Bay Ferry.

Most of these agencies accept the Clipper Card , a reloadable contactless smart card , as a universal electronic payment system. So how can smaller Seattle make so much more housing happen than San Francisco? Developers active in both cities and officials who have worked in both point to structural differences that outweigh the demographic similarities. In San Francisco, development issues are routinely subject to consideration by neighborhood bodies, approval by the city planning commission and often ratification by its board of supervisors, with opportunities for decisions to be appealed.

It does not approve or reject projects. The city council weighs in on projects only in rare cases. San Francisco's metropolitan area added , net new jobs in the last five years—but issued permits for only 58, units of new housing. The lack of new construction has exacerbated housing costs in the Bay Area, making the San Francisco metro among the cruelest markets in the U. Over the same period, Houston added , jobs and permitted , new dwellings, five times as many units per new job as San Francisco. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For other uses, see Bay Area disambiguation. Conurbation in California, United States. Timeline of the San Francisco Bay Area. Art in the San Francisco Bay Area. List of bands from the San Francisco Bay Area. Media in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sports in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Maps of racial distribution according to U. Each dot is 25 people: White , African , Asian , Hispanic , or Other yellow. List of colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area. List of high schools in California. During the winter and spring, hills surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area are lush and green. The same location during the summer months. Because rain is rare in the San Francisco Bay Area during this time, the surrounding hills quickly become dry and golden-hued in grassy areas.

Ecology of the San Francisco Estuary. List of species endemic to the San Francisco Bay Area. Hydrography of the San Francisco Bay Area. Politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Explore The Culinary Institute of America in California

Transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco Bay Area portal. California States Association of Counties. Retrieved September 21, Overwhelmed pumps led to Alviso flooding; residents say it's a 'wake-up call ' ". San Jose Mercury News. Retrieved March 22, Retrieved November 17, Retrieved September 10, Retrieved September 18, San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority. Association of Bay Area Governments.

United States Office of Management and Budget. Retrieved April 17, Retrieved February 9, Siberia Tie to California Tribes Cited". Archived from the original on November 28, Retrieved September 22, San Francisco Historical Information". City and County of San Francisco. Archived from the original on March 1, Retrieved June 10, Early History of the California Coast.

Northern California History Weekends. Retrieved December 26, Archived from the original on October 22, Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration. San Francisco Unified School District. List of school districts in Sonoma County, California. Retrieved from " https: School districts in California California education-related lists Lists of school districts in the United States by state Lists of California school districts by county California geography-related lists.

Lists of coordinates Geographic coordinate lists Articles with Geo. Views Read Edit View history. Languages Suomi Edit links. This page was last edited on 4 September , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Map this section's coordinates using:

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