Bay Area Facts

Overview

CITIES

San Francisco Bay Area

San Francisco

Many Cannot Afford to Go Home to Their ‘City by the Bay’

San Francisco has long occupied a mythic place in the American imagination, from the California Gold Rush, which established the city as a rich mercantile center, to the flowering of a counter-culture in the 1960s. A relatively young city, San Francisco was developed largely in the 1920s and 1930s, following a devastating earthquake in 1906 that razed much of the city.

Overall, the Bay Area is economically healthy; its median household income increased significantly during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. It also boasts a large crop of young, upwardly mobile residents, with people in their late 20s and early 30s constituting Oakland’s biggest age group. (This runs counter to the national trend, which saw an overall decrease in population between 25 and 34 between 1990 and 2000.) Overall Oakland acquired 27,000 new residents over the 1990s, its Latino population going from 14 to 22 percent.

But rising incomes and a growing population have combined with San Francisco’s small size (under 50 square miles) and hilly landscape to drive housing prices sky-high. Rents have been notoriously high since 1990, and affordable housing scarce. As downtown San Francisco remains wholly unaffordable for a growing number of families—particularly recently arrived immigrants—the Bay Area has a whole has experienced increasing decentralization, with rapid expansion in such suburban counties as Alameda and Contra Costa. An increasing number of Bay Area residents have a suburb-to-suburb commute.