ABOUT SAN FRANCISCO

San Francisco, California is the fourth-most populous city in the state of California and 17th-most populous in the United States. It is a commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California with a population of 827,526 residents. The larger San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland combined statistical area, the fifth-largest urban region in the United States, had a 2023 estimated population of over 9 million.

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San Francisco holds a secure place in the United States' romantic dream of itself—a cool, elegant, handsome, worldly seaport whose steep streets offer breathtaking views of one of the world’s greatest bays. According to the dream, San Franciscans are sophisticates whose lives hold full measures of such civilized pleasures as music, art, and good food. Their children are to be pitied, for, as the wife of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday once said, “They will probably grow up thinking all cities are so wonderful.” To San Franciscans their city is a magical place, almost an island, saved by its location and history, one of America’s most attractive, colorful, and distinctive places to live.

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Hilly and roughly square, San Francisco occupies the northern tip of a peninsula. To its south are the bedroom suburbs of San Mateo County, to the east and northeast is the bay, and to the west and northwest lies the Pacific Ocean. The most prominent of San Francisco’s hills are Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, and Mount Sutro, all of which exceed 900 feet in elevation.