page_title: San Francisco
section_title: Cityscape
hierarchical_section_title: San Francisco / Geography / Cityscape
caption_attribution_description: English: Aerial view of San Francisco
context_page_description: San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco and colloquially known as The City, SF, or Frisco and San Fran, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the 16th most populous city in the United States, and the fourth most populous in California, with 881,549 residents as of 2019. It covers an area of about 46.89 square miles, mostly at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city, and the fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. San Francisco is the 12th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States by population, with 4.7 million people, and the fourth-largest by economic output, with GDP of $549 billion in 2018. With San Jose, it forms the fifth most populous combined statistical area in the United States, the San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area.
  As of 2020, San Francisco has the highest salaries, disposable income, and median home prices in the world at $1.7 million, as well as the highest median rents.
caption: Aerial view from the west in April 2018. San Francisco is seen in the foreground, with Oakland in the background.
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