San Francisco, CA is a city and county of roughly 800,000 residents occupying the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula, and the cultural and financial anchor of the nine-county Bay Area.
The settlement was founded as Yerba Buena in 1835 and renamed San Francisco in 1847, then grew from a village of a few hundred to a city of tens of thousands within two years of the 1848 California Gold Rush. The 1906 earthquake and the fire that followed destroyed roughly three-quarters of it; reconstruction was substantially complete by 1915, when the city hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition as a public declaration of recovery.
Its 47 square miles are laid out as a street grid draped over more than forty hills, producing the abrupt gradients and view corridors the city is known for. That compressed footprint, combined with sustained constraints on new construction, has made San Francisco one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States.
The city has functioned repeatedly as a staging ground for American subcultures — the Beat writers of North Beach in the 1950s, the psychedelic counterculture centered on 📝Haight Street in the 1960s, and the gay liberation movement organized in the Castro through the 1970s. Since the 1990s it has been the urban pole of a technology industry whose center of gravity sits down the peninsula in 📝Silicon Valley, a role that drives both its concentration of wealth and its housing pressure.