Economy
In 2011 the San Francisco Bay Area had a GDP of $518.1 billion, which would rank 20th among countries.
The Silicon Valley is located within the southern reaches of the Bay Area. The leading high technology region in the world, Silicon Valley covers San Jose and several cities of South Bay. The Valley is home to many of the industry leaders in technology such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Cisco, Apple, Oracle, Marvell, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard. Major corporations in San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and the surrounding cities help make the region second in the nation in concentration of Fortune 500 companies, after New York. The region's northern counties encompass California's famous Wine Country, home to hundreds of vineyards and wineries. The Bay Area is a leader in sustainable agriculture, organic farming, and sustainable energy and for being a leading producer of high quality food, wine, and innovation in the culinary arts. California Cuisine was developed primarily in the Bay Area, as was the San Francisco burrito. The area is renowned for its natural beauty. It is also known as being one of the most expensive regions to live in the country.
Oakland, on the east side of the bay, has the fifth largest container shipping port in the United States. The city is also a major rail terminus.
Changes in house prices for the Bay Area are publicly tracked on a regular basis using the Case–Shiller index; the statistic is published by Standard & Poor's and is also a component of S&P's 10-city composite index of the value of the U.S. residential real estate market.
Read more about this topic: San Francisco Bay Area
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)