San Francisco,city and port, coextensive with San Francisco county, northernCalifornia, U.S., located on apeninsula between thePacific Ocean andSan Francisco Bay. It is a cultural and financial centre of the westernUnited States and one of the country’s mostcosmopolitan cities. Area 46 square miles (120 square km). Pop. (2010) 805,235; San Francisco–San Mateo–Redwood City Metro Division, 1,776,095; San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont Metro Area, 4,335,391; (2020) 873,965; San Francisco–San Mateo–Redwood City Metro Division, 1,638,407; San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley Metro Area, 4,749,008.

Character of the city

San Francisco holds a secure place in theUnited 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 magnateNelson Doubleday once said, “They will probably grow up thinking all cities are so wonderful.” To San Franciscans their city is a magical place, almost anisland, saved by its location and history from the sprawl and monotony that afflicts so much of urbanCalifornia.

SinceWorld War II, however, San Francisco has had to face thestark realities of urban life: congestion, air andwater pollution, violence and vandalism, and the general decay of the inner city. San Francisco’smakeup has been changing as families, mainly white and middle-class, have moved to its suburbs, leaving the city to a population that, viewed statistically, tends to be older and to have fewer married people. Now more than one of every two San Franciscans is “nonwhite”—in this case African American, East Asian, Filipino, Samoan, Vietnamese, Latin American, orNative American. Their dreams increasingly demand a realization that has little to do with the romantic dream of San Francisco. But both the dreams and the realities are important, for they are interwoven in the fabric of the city that might be called Paradox-by-the-Bay.

Although San Franciscans complain of the congestion, homelessness, and highcost of living that plague the city and talk endlessly of the good old days, the majority still think of San Francisco the way poet George Sterling did, as “the cool grey city of love,” one of America’s most attractive, colourful, and distinctive places to live.