You touch on many things I have thought about for years :) I think the Mountain View / Palo Alto / Sunnyvale area mirrors the San Gabriel valley structure pre

You touch on many things I have thought about for years :) I think the Mountain View / Palo Alto / Sunnyvale area mirrors the San Gabriel valley structure pretty closely (with Palo Alto ~= Pasadena, Menlo Park+Atherton ~= San Marino, Sunnyvale+Mountain View ~= Glendale+Burbank). So in that sense they are similar in one particular region. On the other hand, LA downtown is surrounded by confederate townships. San Francisco is in some sense a city on a hill. Similarly, there is nothing like the Venice / Santa Monica / Malibu cluster providing "coastal" political influence to the city. There is no way that, e.g., Pacifica or Half Moon Bay would ever be able to be first class citizens in local politics the way that Venice/Santa Monica/Malibu are in LA politics. Continuing the contrast, the LA area doesn't really have anything like the East Bay. I could go on and on, but I will leave it at that for now. I do think that anyone who thinks they have an opinion on LA, but hasn't lived there, should take a moment and think that maybe it really is different from their expectations or previous experience of large cities. Edit: one could, I suppose, say that Long Beach is, in some sense, analogous to the East Bay. They are parallel in an economic and social class sense, but I still think the East Bay is much more of a cultural component of SFBA than Long Beach is of LA Metro.