Could the long Orange County nightmare be coming to an end?

[krudmonk]

wordbarf

So now that you're here, how much faster do you think the Sharks will be without hem stripes? Also, are the Sharks the greatest sports team of all time, or merely the greatest hockey team of all time?

I'm not sure of the root of your bitterness, but I'm just relieved those 2007 monstrosities are gone.

And thanks for conceding all my brilliant points.

I don't think I made my point very clearly - after all, Oakland had "civic identity and supporting fanbase to warrant such a brand" as well.

I think the Sharks chose their city name because it meant they could carve out their own marketing niche in a sprawling, crowded region. Especially in the context of the NHL.

So they are renegades in shunning the perceived center of everything? If anything, the San Jose Earthquakes blazed that trail 17 years earlier.

[bosrs1]

Maybe not stand alone, but it is practically a Twin Cities style setup at present and thats just going to continue to grow. I mean half the TV and radio stations are now based in the South Bay (and some have even begun using San Jose-SF-Oakland when referring to their coverage areas). And the A's and Niners will both be calling the region home before long in addition to the Sharks and Earthquakes (with 3 of them using the SJ name for marketing purposes).

That is where SF/SJ is not really analogous to LA/OC. With the Bay Area, there is a very distinct separation between SF and SJ geographically. Where it is far less distinct in SoCal. And even more importantly there is no real "center" to OC that comes anywhere close to the size or importance of LA itself. Santa Ana, Anaheim, Fullerton? They're all relatively small cities with no appreciable financial, media, demographic, social or population edge over LA. In the Bay Area though San Jose is the largest single city, bigger than SF, is more ethnically diverse, has a distinct center, isn't all a "bedroom community" despite what some east coasters may think, has a controlling stake in part of the media market, has its own social scene that while smaller than SF's is there and growing... And on top of everything else said here, when out of town people from the South Bay say they're from San Jose or the Bay Area and are almost universally understood. They don't say they're from San Francisco.

SJ just isn't a great example of the point people are trying to make.

Having spent over a decade living in each I'd say it's pretty damn analagous. The one big difference is what you stated that OC has no defined center but that really doesn't matter all that much in the general scheme of things. Like many other metro areas and like OC the only reason SJ grew in significance is the fact that the original metro center (SF) had already been maxed out in terms of available land and SJ was right down the road with a ton of land waiting to be built upon. Granted there was some city like infrastructure already there because it was an ag town that had more in common with it's neighbors to the south like Gilroy than it did with SFO & OAK.

Guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. To me saying San Jose is a sprawling suburb of San Francisco is akin to saying San Diego is a sprawling suburb of Los Angeles. Neither is true.

[bosrs1]

wordbarf

So now that you're here, how much faster do you think the Sharks will be without hem stripes? Also, are the Sharks the greatest sports team of all time, or merely the greatest hockey team of all time?

I'm not sure of the root of your bitterness, but I'm just relieved those 2007 monstrosities are gone.

And thanks for conceding all my brilliant points.

I don't think I made my point very clearly - after all, Oakland had "civic identity and supporting fanbase to warrant such a brand" as well.

I think the Sharks chose their city name because it meant they could carve out their own marketing niche in a sprawling, crowded region. Especially in the context of the NHL.

So they are renegades in shunning the perceived center of everything? If anything, the San Jose Earthquakes blazed that trail 17 years earlier.

This. And not only that, but San Joseans in my experience are just as resistant, if not more so, of being told they're residents of the "San Francisco Area" than folks from Oakland. And they have more legitimate reasons to do so by far than Oaklanders in the present day. And that dovetails into what I think San Jose's biggest issue... that people's perceptions have been glacially slow at catching up to the reality that Oakland is nothing more than a suburb of SF looking back on better days before the port, military presence and indeed city started shrinking both in population and in overall importance while San Jose has been accendant in all measureable categories to the point where it's eclipsed even San Francisco in may respects. People who live in the Bay Area realize this, and residents of California to a lesser extent have clued in, but the farther you get from the Bay Area, the less people seem to have caught up with the current reality. There's a reason the Earthquakes and later Sharks chose San Jose over San Francisco and why the Niners and now A's are or are trying to move south too. San Jose and its suburbs are a largely separate and growing market that is still largely untapped.

[Funky Bunky]

Isn't it kind of presumptuous to say that everyone in a suburb despises the anchor city? Perhaps people identify with the larger city because they, in fact, like it.

Of course. I do think there's a racial component in many cases, though. The cities as a whole tend to be browner, the suburbs more pale. That was certainly the case in Orange County when I was in LA, as well as Milwaukee's suburbs (especially the outer ones like Waukesha and what they call "Lake Country" nowadays), Westchester County, Chicago's northern suburbs and pretty much every suburban place I've lived or spent much time.

It's not just Orange County, but parts of LA county too. People from Manhattan Beach make sure other people know they're from Manhattan Beach. Same thing with people from the San Franando Valley, Santa Monica, etc.

Also, Orange County isn't entirely Caucasian, but there are A LOT of Asians and Hispanics, too. There are a lot of Hispanics in Santa Ana, Anaheim, Stanton, etc, and there are a lot of Asians in Huntington Beach, Westminster, Irvine...

[FiddySicks]

Let me just point out that no one here has said "everyone in the suburbs is racist". Only that there can be a racial component to people in those suburbs wanting to create a clear division between their towns and the larger cities they orbit.

This is absolutely true. There are many suburbanites living in their McMansions who don't want anyone to think that they live in the city with the poor black folk. It's a horrible attitude, and admittedly, one that I grew up with, which is one of the reasons now that I'm proud to have purchased a home in an urban area of my city, despite working all the way out in the "San Jose" of the Philadelphia region (an area with enormous office parks and the biggest mall in terms of leasable space in the country and a very high population.)

Please tell me my geography is wrong and you didn't just compare King of Prussia, PA to San Jose.

[Gothamite]

Also, Orange County isn't entirely Caucasian,

Which is in no small part, I feel, why the Orange Curtain isn't as pronounced as it was just a few decades ago. The divide doesn't feel as significant to me as it once did, and I credit that a lot to changing demographics.

[tBBP]

Yes, yes, white flight was/is real. Yes, there's a racial component to why some people choose to live in suburbs. And yeah, some people live in suburbs because they don't like the nearby city, and race may factor into that.

As you yourself said though, not everyone who lives in a suburb is a racist. I'd add, however, that there are reasons for why one might choose to live in a suburb that have nothing to do with race.

Hey, I just want to clarify something - I didn't say (or at least never intended to say) that racism has much to do with why people would chose to live in a suburb. Historically there's been a strong correlation, but that doesn't necessarily hold today.

My point was that it's somewhat easier to see dark motives at work when people identify solely with their suburb at the expense of the larger city supporting it. When they want nothing to do with "that other place", resisting even being placed in the same general area. I knew many people in Waukesha and other outer suburbs who would have bristled at being labeled as being from "the Milwaukee area", no matter how accurate the description was.

I hope I've made that distinction.

I understand the distinction, thank you

But here's what I find funny, and sad, about all of this. You bring up valid reasons why race factors into why some suburban residents actively try to resist being identified with the nearby city. And generally I agree with that, as well as agreeing that trying to claim a suburb is a unique entity onto itself is silly for a variety of reasons.

Yet we also have illwauk and Buc complaining that suburbanites dare to identify with the city their communities orbit. As you said Goth, someone from Waukesha being recognized as being from Milwaukee is sensible. Yet illwauk's going on about how this is supposedly some sort of travesty.

So I ask all of you, what exactly is someone supposed to do when it comes to civic identity if they live in the suburbs? If you take the attitudes on display in this thread it seems like those people can't win. Damned as racists if they try to say their communities are distinct entities unto themselves, damned as outsiders who are probably racist and who probably look down on the anchor city if they do identify with the anchor city. It's a no-win scenario when these are two prevalent streams of discussion on the topic.

Frankly I find the whole thing ridiculous. A suburb, any suburb, owes its existence in one way or another to the anchor city. So if you're from the suburbs you're from the "Insert City Name area," and just identifying with the city itself is fine too. You only really need to get into what suburb you're from if you're talking to someone else familiar with the area.

There doesn't have to be any hidden, latent racism or any other similarly dark agenda. Simply saying "I'm from the city" when you're from the suburbs is fine.

Yeah, there are racists in suburbs. There are racists everywhere though.

Two things about this:

1.) Granted, my ignore list is quite long these days, so I have no idea how race even got into this particular discussion, nor do I feel like backtracking to try to find out, as that really ain't have nothing to do with (at least my) original point, either. Can't speak for illwauk, but I don't think he meant to slide off on that tangent, either. And second...

2.) Nowhere in any of my posts on this subject, and I'm pretty sure it's the same with illwauk, did I say all suburbanites everywhere hold that type of viewpoint/mindset--let's get that cleared up now. I can't speak for many other metros around the midwest (again, watch the specificities here), just the ones I've lived in/spent a significant amount of time in. And of the ones I've lived in/spent significant time in, Indy is the only one I've lived in in which a good many of the suburb folk only claim the anchor city when they see some kind of recognition or benefit from it, while in the very next breath--and at the same time probably ever-presently in the back of their minds--renouncing damn near everything about it outside of the sports teams. It's as illwauk said about [some of] the 'burbanites of the Milwaukee area..they (the subset that we're referring to, not all--again, watch the generalities) tend to take an "elitist" view of their own suburb while looking off the end of their noses at anyone who [in the case of Indy, anyway] lives inside the beltway. In over two years of living over there, I observed more of that than I ever wanted or needed to. If any of you doubt this, peruse over to the city-data.com forums, and start reading through the threads under Indiana > Indianapolis; you may see some of what I saw and heard personally while I was living there.

Oh, and just for the record: granted, Hamilton County ain't exactly the most ethnically diverse place in the country (but then, neither is Indy), but I've noticed that kind of "snootiness" out of the folk I'm talking about out there regardless of ethnicity.

[IceCap]

1.) Granted, my ignore list is quite long these days, so I have no idea how race even got into this particular discussion, nor do I feel like backtracking to try to find out, as that really ain't have nothing to do with (at least my) original point, either. Can't speak for illwauk, but I don't think he meant to slide off on that tangent, either. And second...

illwauk may not have started the talk about race, but he certainly drummed up that talking point...

I'm not eager to re-read seven pages of this myself, but I think it all started with the assumption that the OC/Anaheim mentality of being "separate" from LA was fuelled, at least in part, by latent racism. Which then got extrapolated into every suburb/anchor city relationship. Because...you know....the suburbs are evil...or something.

On a side note (not directed at you Buc) I have read Suburban Nation, and yes it was very well written and interesting, and yes I agree with most of the author's conclusions. Even taken as it is, though, I don't feel that painting suburbanites with broad strokes is justified. Yeah, there are racist/xenophobic reasons to live in the suburbs. There are also perfectly harmless and reasonable reasons to as well.

2.) Nowhere in any of my posts on this subject, and I'm pretty sure it's the same with illwauk, did I say all suburbanites everywhere hold that type of viewpoint/mindset--let's get that cleared up now. I can't speak for many other metros around the midwest (again, watch the specificities here), just the ones I've lived in/spent a significant amount of time in. And of the ones I've lived in/spent significant time in, Indy is the only one I've lived in in which a good many of the suburb folk only claim the anchor city when they see some kind of recognition or benefit from it, while in the very next breath--and at the same time probably ever-presently in the back of their minds--renouncing damn near everything about it outside of the sports teams. It's as illwauk said about [some of] the 'burbanites of the Milwaukee area..they (the subset that we're referring to, not all--again, watch the generalities) tend to take an "elitist" view of their own suburb while looking off the end of their noses at anyone who [in the case of Indy, anyway] lives inside the beltway. In over two years of living over there, I observed more of that than I ever wanted or needed to. If any of you doubt this, peruse over to the city-data.com forums, and start reading through the threads under Indiana > Indianapolis; you may see some of what I saw and heard personally while I was living there.

Oh, and just for the record: granted, Hamilton County ain't exactly the most ethnically diverse place in the country (but then, neither is Indy), but I've noticed that kind of "snootiness" out of the folk I'm talking about out there regardless of ethnicity.

My larger point here is that, as far as this discussion goes, suburbanites cannot seem to win when it comes to the topic of civic identity. The suburbanite tendency to see their community as "separate" is criticized, but so is the act of willingly identifying with the anchor city.

I'm not going to doubt your own first-hand accounts Buc, but I will say that in some cases it swings both ways.

Also, to piggyback off what Buc said (BTW... well said, sir)... call me crazy, but I feel like in order to claim to be from somewhere, you should have actually been part of the community there at some point. If all you've done in a city is the touristy things, and you live 20 miles away in another county, that's probably not the case.

Now this seems kind of snooty, don't you think? As if there's some sort of pre-requisite for who can and cannot identify with a city. Who says what qualifies as "being part of the community" to the point where you can claim to be "from" a city? Is there some Grand Council of Civic Pride to ensure those elitist suburbanites don't get to identify with the city without first being "part of the community" for so long? Are we all going to have to start grilling each person we meet when they say "I'm from wherever"? It reeks of reverse elitism in a way, if we're going to assume that "elitism" in the realm of this discussion refers to the attitudes associated with suburbanites re: their anchor city. Like "you don't get to be part of our glorious metropolis if you wanna live out in the suburbs!"

As I said, I find the whole thing ridiculous. If you live in a city's suburb you fall within that city's media umbrella. Which means you read their newspapers, and you watch their tv stations. Your livelihood is either directly or indirectly tied to the anchor city, and you more then likely root for that city's sports teams. Yeah, there's a bit of a cultural disconnect, but let's not pretend that major cities are culturally homogeneous entities. Each neighbourhood has its own distinct character, its own distinct twist on the local culture. The differences you see in the suburbs can often just be seen as an extension of this. Just more variety added to the already varied nature of the anchor city itself. So if you live in the suburbs, sure. Say you're from the city, and clarify if asked. It's that simple, and it doesn't need to be any more contentious then that. Yeah, trying to claim a suburb is separate, and above, an anchor city is snooty and elitist, but so is the claim that unless you "pay your dues" you don't "get" to identify with a city. It's all equally ridiculous and needlessly divisive.

[Still MIGHTY]

So the Anaheim City Council voted 4-1 to drop the "of Anaheim" provision and enter lease negotiations. (Interestingly, I guess, the Mayor was the one vote against.)

So, whatever.

[krudmonk]

Weak, now I have to respect the Ducks for something.

[jstraper]

Why is this a big deal? The Rams played there for 15 years.

[CS85]

ChicagoShawn, living 2 hours and change south of a city I could never live in, reporting for duty.

[Gothamite]

As I said, I find the whole thing ridiculous. If you live in a city's suburb you fall within that city's media umbrella. Which means you read their newspapers, and you watch their tv stations. Your livelihood is either directly or indirectly tied to the anchor city, and you more then likely root for that city's sports teams.

Exactly. Orange County will get by just fine with the Los Angeles Angels.

[The_Admiral]

On a side note (not directed at you Buc) I have read Suburban Nation, and yes it was very well written and interesting, and yes I agree with most of the author's conclusions. Even taken as it is, though, I don't feel that painting suburbanites with broad strokes is justified. Yeah, there are racist/xenophobic reasons to live in the suburbs. There are also perfectly harmless and reasonable reasons to as well.

The biggest problem I had with Suburban Nation is that New Urbanism as envisioned by Andres Duany ends up being even more restrictive and bourgeois than regular suburbs. Take, for instance, Seaside, Florida, which was Duany's big masterpiece. The early part of the book makes a lot of terrific points about how subdivisions are prone to awful design because city ordinances call for the roads to be too wide for fire trucks no one needs, and developers draw up too many cul-de-sacs and too few access roads, and it makes a big mess. All true. But then when you get your crack at a master-planned community, you find yourself telling people which color their shutters have to be because it's all part of The Vision. And for all the bluff and bluster about creating mixed-income communities, which is admirable, it has a funny way of not really happening. Seaside is basically a resort town for rich people. The end result is that Fake Real ends up being worse than Real Fake. Is it any wonder that Seaside is where they filmed The Truman Show?

[bosrs1]

As I said, I find the whole thing ridiculous. If you live in a city's suburb you fall within that city's media umbrella. Which means you read their newspapers, and you watch their tv stations. Your livelihood is either directly or indirectly tied to the anchor city, and you more then likely root for that city's sports teams.

Exactly. Orange County will get by just fine with the Los Angeles Angels.

It's not like they didn't get by just fine with the Calfiornia Angels for a couple of decades.

[bosrs1]

Now that I've thought about it, OC was going to lose the name one way or the other. Either it was going to happen this way but they get to keep the team and get yet another update to Angel Stadium, or they were actually going to lose the team to LA proper. Either way the LA name was coming back alone.

[guest23]

wordbarf

So now that you're here, how much faster do you think the Sharks will be without hem stripes? Also, are the Sharks the greatest sports team of all time, or merely the greatest hockey team of all time?

I'm not sure of the root of your bitterness, but I'm just relieved those 2007 monstrosities are gone.

And thanks for conceding all my brilliant points.

I don't think I made my point very clearly - after all, Oakland had "civic identity and supporting fanbase to warrant such a brand" as well.

I think the Sharks chose their city name because it meant they could carve out their own marketing niche in a sprawling, crowded region. Especially in the context of the NHL.

So they are renegades in shunning the perceived center of everything? If anything, the San Jose Earthquakes blazed that trail 17 years earlier.

This. And not only that, but San Joseans in my experience are just as resistant, if not more so, of being told they're residents of the "San Francisco Area" than folks from Oakland. And they have more legitimate reasons to do so by far than Oaklanders in the present day. And that dovetails into what I think San Jose's biggest issue... that people's perceptions have been glacially slow at catching up to the reality that Oakland is nothing more than a suburb of SF looking back on better days before the port, military presence and indeed city started shrinking both in population and in overall importance while San Jose has been accendant in all measureable categories to the point where it's eclipsed even San Francisco in may respects. People who live in the Bay Area realize this, and residents of California to a lesser extent have clued in, but the farther you get from the Bay Area, the less people seem to have caught up with the current reality. There's a reason the Earthquakes and later Sharks chose San Jose over San Francisco and why the Niners and now A's are or are trying to move south too. San Jose and its suburbs are a largely separate and growing market that is still largely untapped.

Couple of things: I wouldn't consider OAK a suburb at all as much as it's the west coast version of Detriot on a smaller scale. Oakland has/had an significant industrial base and a more urban landscape than SJ but has effectively turned into a bedroom community due to the absolute lack of decent jobs in the city limits.

In terms of SJ's ascension as the new center of the Bay Area is the fact that it really is a bedroom community within the city limits as I think the only major company to actually have a HQ within city limits is Adobe. So in reality what has really ascended to national/global prominence is Santa Clara county as a whole not just SJ proper. If we really want to be specific the real economic core of the SF Bay Area is geographically bounded by SJC at the south, SFO at the north, 101 on the East and 280 to the West.

[bosrs1]

Actually many large companies have HQ in San Jose proper including Cisco, Sanminia, and eBay on the Fortune 500, not to mention a number on the Fortune 1000 list such as Adobe, Knight-Ridder, Atmel, and Brocade. Plus while San Jose might be a bedroom community in parts, those people typically just commute to other parts of San Jose or its neighboring suburban cities like Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Milpitas or Sunnyvale. In fact there was a study done by the San Jose Mercury News a few years back that highlighted the fact that more people commute out of SF for work than in and vice versa for San Jose.

[monkeypower]

My 0.02$.

The Angels play in Anaheim so they should be called Anaheim because Anaheim is a big enough city and it is a well known city. (It's not an Orchard Park-Buffalo Bills type deal)

To my knowledge Anaheim isn't an actual suburb of LA, it may be a "spiritual" suburb however.

If they played in LA (or Burbank or Pasadena or wherever in LA County) then call them Los Angeles.

Using Anaheim as a geographical identifer doesn't bother the Ducks.

[tigerslionspistonshabs]

My 0.02$.

The Angels play in Anaheim so they should be called Anaheim because Anaheim is a big enough city and it is a well known city. (It's not an Orchard Park-Buffalo Bills type deal)

To my knowledge Anaheim isn't an actual suburb of LA, it may be a "spiritual" suburb however.

If they played in LA (or Burbank or Pasadena or wherever in LA County) then call them Los Angeles.

Using Anaheim as a geographical identifer doesn't bother the Ducks.

Well said. My thoughts exactly.