AHC: LA-sized Bay Area

Just like it says on the tin. How do we reach this goal? What are the effects of this change? Does San Francisco annex neighboring municipalities like LA? Do the sizes of other cities change as a result? What is the effect of this on California state politics?
 
The Bay Area's geography is what keeps this from happening, in addition to the 1906 Earthquake. The later is a big reason LA even grew into metropolis, as a secondary port with the destruction of Frisco.
 
And whatever one thinks of geological PODs, San Francisco is in earthquake country. There's going to be one there sooner or later if 1906 doesn't happen.
 
Keep Los Angeles from being the terminus of the southern Transcontinental Railroad, maybe give it to San Diego instead. Getting the movie industry to go somewhere else would be good too.
 
Just like it says on the tin. How do we reach this goal? What are the effects of this change? Does San Francisco annex neighboring municipalities like LA? Do the sizes of other cities change as a result? What is the effect of this on California state politics?

Geography unfortunately is against you on that. The main areas that would likely see urban annexation; Oakland, Marin, and the Peninsula, are all either separated by water (in the case of Oakland and Marin) and the Peninsula up until the last sixty years or so was largely farmland up until you hit San Jose. Unlike Chicago or LA where you had several towns and cities in close proximity much of the urban areas of the Bay, up until the 1930s, were divided by geography and divergent interests. Los Angeles, by contrast, sits in the middle of a huge, easily traversed valley with lots of room to grow. This meant economic, social, and political interests had much more benefit from unification of services, government, and the like than they did from division. It helps that up until they scrapped the streetcar system it was much faster and easier to get from one side of LA to the other than it was to get from San Francisco to Oakland, Marin, or San Jose.
 
Not sure different fates for LA or southern California makes San Francisco absorbing areas around it more practical.
 
I'd think the easiest way to reduce LA would be to take more of Mexico so it isn't effectively a border city. Particularly if Baja, Sonora and Chihuahua are American I suspect that a lot of the development that went into LA is going to be a lot more dispersed.
 
I'd think the easiest way to reduce LA would be to take more of Mexico so it isn't effectively a border city. Particularly if Baja, Sonora and Chihuahua are American I suspect that a lot of the development that went into LA is going to be a lot more dispersed.

LA is a hundred plus miles from Tijauna. I'm not sure hot that makes it "effectively a border city" or why being even further from the border would disperse development - or increase San Francisco.
 
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