San Francisco

• 1. Introduction

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  San Francisco sits at the tip of a narrow peninsula jutting into one of the world's great natural harbors, and for nearly three centuries it has pulled people toward it with a force that defies easy explanation. On the 29th of June, 1776, Spanish settlers planted two outposts here: the Presidio at the Golden Gate and a mission a few miles south, both named for Francis of Assisi. Less than a century later, gold transformed a sleepy settlement of 459 souls into the largest city on the West Coast. By 2025, 826,079 people call San Francisco home, and the city ranks first among American cities of comparable size in per capita income.

  The questions worth asking about San Francisco are not simply what it is today, but how it got there, and at what cost. Why did a city destroyed by earthquake and fire in 1906 come back stronger? Why did it become the birthplace of the counterculture, the gay rights movement, and the internet economy, all in the same square miles? And what do you make of a place that simultaneously leads the world in per capita income while counting more than 8,000 people sleeping on its streets?

• 2. From Ohlone to Gold Rush

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  Archaeological evidence of human habitation in the San Francisco area reaches back to 3000 BCE. The Yelamu group of the Ramaytush Ohlone people called the place Ahwaste, meaning "place at the bay," and lived in small villages along the shore when the Portola expedition arrived on the 2nd of November, 1769 as the first documented Europeans to see San Francisco Bay.

  The Spanish moved quickly after that initial contact. Juan Bautista de Anza selected sites for a mission and presidio in 1774, and on the 5th of August, 1775, the ship San Carlos under Juan Manuel de Ayala became the first vessel to anchor in the bay. What followed for the Ramaytush people was the gradual destruction of their language and culture as the mission system absorbed and reorganized indigenous life.

  For decades, San Francisco remained a small outpost. The pueblo of Yerba Buena was founded in 1834 on a cove already favored by trading vessels; an 1842 census counted just 21 residents born in the United States or Europe. American forces under John B. Montgomery captured the settlement on the 9th of July, 1846, and on the 30th of January, 1847, Mayor Washington Allon Bartlett formally renamed it San Francisco, partly to prevent confusion with a rival settlement General Vallejo was planning to call Francisca.

  The California gold rush of 1849 erased every prior notion of the city's scale. Population leapt from roughly 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. Arriving ships were abandoned mid-harbor as crews deserted for the gold fields, leaving what witnesses described as a forest of masts. Around 500 of those ships were repurposed as storehouses, saloons, and hotels. Some were sunk to establish legal title to underwater lots. Buried hulls still surface today when construction crews dig new foundations.

• 3. Boom, Vice, and William Ralston

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  The discovery of the Comstock Lode silver deposits in Nevada in 1859 poured another wave of wealth into San Francisco, and one man became the avatar of that era's ambitions: William Chapman Ralston. A banker and investor, Ralston gained control over a significant portion of the Comstock's gold and silver mines, founded the Bank of California (described as the first bank in the Western United States), and built the Palace Hotel, said at the time to be the largest hotel in the country.

  The same gold rush that made fortunes also made the Barbary Coast district synonymous with prostitution, bootlegging, and gambling. Lawlessness was so pervasive that missionaries like William Taylor began preaching in the streets, using an upturned barrel as a pulpit. The surge of wealth drew Chinese immigrants by the tens of thousands, drawn to what they called "Old Gold Mountain," and their presence transformed San Francisco into a polyglot city. By 1880, Chinese residents made up 9.3% of the population.

  Ralston's empire collapsed in 1875 during the Panic of 1873. The unemployment that followed fed rising anti-Chinese resentment, and in 1877 a mob descended on Chinatown, killing four people and causing $100,000 in property damage. Out of that violence rose the Workingmen's Party of California, led by Denis Kearney, whose slogan was "The Chinese must go!" The party won enough delegates to rewrite the state constitution, stripping Chinese Americans of voting rights in California and laying the groundwork for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the United States for more than 60 years.

  Yet the city kept growing. The first cable cars carried passengers up Clay Street in 1873. By 1890, San Francisco's population approached 300,000, making it the eighth-largest city in the United States.

• 4. Earthquake and Rebirth

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  At 5:12 in the morning of the 18th of April, 1906, the San Andreas Fault ruptured beneath the city. Buildings collapsed, gas lines ruptured, and fires spread across the city for several days. The Presidio Artillery Corps dynamited entire city blocks trying to create firebreaks. When the smoke cleared, more than three-quarters of San Francisco lay in ruins, and contemporary accounts listed 498 dead, though modern estimates place the true toll in the several thousands. More than half the city's population of 400,000 was left homeless, sheltering in tent villages in Golden Gate Park and on the beaches.

  Jack London wrote what became the earthquake's most quoted epitaph: "Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone."

  San Francisco was not gone. Reconstruction began almost immediately, driven by a deliberate choice to rebuild on the existing street grid rather than redesign the city from scratch. Amadeo Giannini's Bank of Italy, which would later become Bank of America, extended loans to many whose livelihoods had been wiped out. The city's wealthy moved west to Pacific Heights, while the destroyed mansions of Nob Hill became grand hotels. Civil engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy, hired by Mayor James Rolph in September 1912, supervised construction of the Twin Peaks Tunnel, the San Francisco Municipal Railway, a new reservoir system, and eventually the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, which gave the city a reliable water supply for the century ahead.

  By 1915, San Francisco was celebrating its rebuilt self at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Not long after, at the height of the Great Depression, the city simultaneously built the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, completing them in 1936 and 1937. In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, not a single San Francisco-based bank had failed.

• 5. Counterculture and Civil Rights

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  World War II brought Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and Fort Mason to the center of the Pacific war effort, drawing tens of thousands of workers, especially African Americans from the South, to the city. Many who came to work or shipped out through San Francisco's docks decided to stay when the war ended.

  The United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco in 1945. Six years later, the Treaty of San Francisco re-established peaceful relations between Japan and the Allied Powers. But the city's most lasting postwar transformation happened in its streets and neighborhoods rather than in its meeting halls.

  Beat Generation writers gathered in North Beach in the 1950s, anchoring what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. By the mid-1960s, hippies were moving into Haight-Ashbury, and in the summer of 1967 the neighborhood became the symbolic center of an American counterculture. Meanwhile, the Castro district evolved from a working-class Scandinavian and Irish neighborhood into what is recognized as North America's first gay village. San Francisco was already home to the Daughters of Bilitis, the country's first lesbian-rights organization, and to Jose Sarria, the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States.

  The election of Harvey Milk to the Board of Supervisors marked a turning point in American political history: Milk became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. His assassination, along with that of Mayor George Moscone, in 1978 cut short the movement's most visible early leadership, but the city's character was already fixed. By the 1970s, Democrats and to a lesser extent the Green Party had come to dominate city politics so thoroughly that San Francisco has not cast more than 20% of its votes for a Republican presidential or senatorial candidate since 1988.

  The first openly lesbian judge appointed in the United States, Mary C. Morgan, came from San Francisco, as did Theresa Sparks, the city's first transgender police commissioner.

• 6. The Technology Economy

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  Technology jobs accounted for just 1% of San Francisco's economy in 1990. By the end of 2013 the figure had reached an estimated 8%, and the trajectory had reshaped almost every aspect of the city's social geography.

  The dot-com boom of the late 1990s arrived like a second gold rush. Between 1999 and 2000, job growth ran at 4.9%, adding more than 50,000 positions in technology firms and internet companies. When the bubble burst in 2001, many of those companies disappeared, but the next wave was already forming. The social media boom of the mid-2000s brought Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook offices to the city. In 2013 alone, San Francisco attracted 423 venture capital financings worth $4.58 billion.

  The companies that define the current economy read like a roster of household names: Salesforce, Uber, Airbnb, Levi's, Gap, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Dropbox, and Lyft all have their addresses here. Salesforce is now the city's largest private-sector employer, with close to 12,000 employees. The city government itself employs more than 35,000 people, making it the single largest employer overall.

  In 2024, San Francisco's GDP was $268 billion, with a per capita figure of $324,000. The broader nine-county Bay Area reached a GDP of $1.332 trillion that year, exceeding the total output of all but 17 countries. Median home values in San Francisco County reached $1,297,030 in a recent survey, ranking third in the country behind Nantucket, Massachusetts and neighboring San Mateo County.

  The pandemic years brought a visible contraction: office vacancies climbed as remote work emptied downtown towers, and retail businesses followed workers to the suburbs. Whether this represents a permanent retreat or a temporary dislocation is still being argued, but the city's underlying assets have not moved: its universities, its concentration of venture capital, and the density of technical talent that makes San Francisco a place where companies continue to form.

• 7. Homelessness and Civic Strain

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  San Francisco's 2019 point-in-time count found 8,035 people experiencing homelessness, an increase of more than 17% over the count two years earlier. Of those, 5,180 were living unsheltered on the streets and in parks. In 2024, the count stood at approximately 8,323 individuals, with more than 20,000 people actively seeking homeless services.

  The city has spent heavily trying to address this. The budget for homelessness services jumped from $34 million in one year to $275 million the following year, reaching $305 million in 2017-18 and $368 million in 2019-20. A proposed budget for 2020-21 set aside $850 million. In January 2018, a United Nations special rapporteur on homelessness, Leilani Farha, visited the city and said she was "completely shocked" by what she found, comparing the conditions of encampments she saw on San Francisco's streets to those she had witnessed in Mumbai.

  26% of respondents in the 2019 count identified job loss as the primary cause of their homelessness; 18% cited alcohol or drug use; and 13% cited eviction. The Tenderloin district concentrates a disproportionate share of the city's troubles: it accounts for roughly 70% of violent crimes and about one-fourth of murders, and sees high rates of drug use, gang activity, and prostitution.

  The crime picture is more complicated than headlines suggest. In the first half of 2024, overall crime in San Francisco fell 32% compared to the prior year. Personal property theft dropped 41%, and violent crimes including gun incidents fell 30%. In May 2026, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced that the city's latest point-in-time count showed unsheltered homelessness at its lowest level in 15 years. How durable that progress proves will depend on whether the city can sustain the spending and policy focus that appears to have driven it.