Geography

Geography

When many people think of this city by the bay, they recall the lyrics "If you're going to San Francisco/Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair," from the famous folk song by Scott McKenzie. However, beyond its place in popular culture, San Francisco has a fascinating history dating back to the late 1800s.

For such a famous city, San Francisco's landmass is surprisingly small. It is located on a peninsula, between the Pacific Ocean, and San Francisco Bay, two bodies of water linked by the Golden Gate Strait. The strait is spanned by the famous Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge, with its distinctive "international orange" paint scheme, was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1937. Today, the Golden Gate Bridge is the seventh-longest suspension span.

Primarily, San Francisco is a city of hills. Think of a famous movie scene featuring a hill in an urban area, and chances are it was shot in San Francisco.

There are 725,000 people living within the confines of the city of San Francisco. However, together with its surrounding cities, collectively known as the Bay Area, the San Francisco metropolitan area is one of the largest in the country.

The city's population is diverse, and split almost evenly between men and women, young and old, with an average age of 36. Approximately 50 percent of San Francisco's population is white, and Asians (of mostly Chinese and Filipino descent) make up the largest minority, accounting for nearly 30 percent of the population. Hispanics and African Americans are the next-largest minority groups, together making up more than 20 percent of the city's population.

With the increasing population of the nine-county Bay Area, it was inevitable that San Francisco's share of the regional population and employment would decline over time. After all, San Francisco covers less than 50 square miles, or less than i percent of the 7,041-square-mile Bay Area. Even with San Francisco's continuing high residential population density--15,600 people per square mile in 1990, second among major U.S. cities, after New York City--the historic core of regional settlement was bound to shrink in relative importance as the Bay Area urbanized. This trend intensified between 1970 and 1994 (Table I). Although San Francisco's population increased to 752,000 during this period, its regional share dropped from 15.5 percent to 11.8 percent. Meanwhile, the booming South Bay counties of San Mateo and Santa Clara experienced a continued demographic surge, growing to a population of 2.2 million, or 35.5 percent of the 6.4 million Bay Area residents, by 1994 (Planning Department 1995, 110).

San Jose, the sprawling metropolis of Santa Clara County, surpassed San Francisco in population by 1990, when the South Bay city reached 782,248 inhabitants to rank third in the state, after Los Angeles and San Diego (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1993, 24). Another blow to San Francisco's civic pride and regional self-image came as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed sixty people, caused some $60 billion in property damage, and ...