Talk:San Francisco: Difference between revisions

Line 195: Line 195:

|}

|}

:: Thanks for bringing this up. I appreciate you coming to the talk page on this and bringing up some very thoughtful and well-researched points. First, no one is saying that San Jose exceeds San Francisco as a cultural, financial, and economic center of the region. I don’t think even the San Jose article claims that. Silicon Valley as a whole, however, exceeds San Francisco’s GDP, payroll, annual receipts, aggregate income, retail sales, municipal expenditures, population, and nighttime residents. There is a clear separate economic, commercial, and financial center that is very distinct from San Francisco and yes, rivals it for primacy in those metrics. That fits with SF being ”a” financial, cultural, and commercial center and not ”the” financial, cultural, and economic center of Northern California.

:: Thanks for bringing this up. I appreciate you coming to the talk page on this and bringing up some very thoughtful and well-researched points. First, no one is saying that San Jose exceeds San Francisco as a cultural, financial, and economic center of the region. I don’t think even the San Jose article claims that. Silicon Valley as a whole, however, exceeds San Francisco’s GDP, payroll, annual receipts, aggregate income, retail sales, municipal expenditures, population, and nighttime residents. There is a clear separate economic, commercial, and financial center that is very distinct from San Francisco and . That fits with SF being ”a” financial, cultural, and commercial center and not ”the” financial, cultural, and economic center of Northern California.

:: Also, you can’t seriously compare Silicon Valley to Middlesex County, MA or Nigeria. Silicon Valley has a cultural and economic cache that dwarfs both those areas and would be considered its own distinct region (like the Research Triangle in North Carolina, but on a much larger scale) if it wasn’t only 50 miles from San Francisco and Oakland. That’s very different from other rich counties such as Prince George, Loudoun, Fairfax, or Orange; none of which house the density of Fortune 500 companies, jobs, two major league sports teams (not including the 49ers who play in Santa Clara), hospital networks, cultural institutions, and universities that Silicon Valley has. Miami is also the largest city proper in its metropolitan region, and Miami-Dade County is the locus of all the economic metrics you mentioned above. San Francisco is not. The only primary metric that points in SF’s favor is the airport, but by that logic, Queens should be the center of the New York region, and not Manhattan.

:: Also, you can’t seriously compare Silicon Valley to Middlesex County, MA or Nigeria. Silicon Valley has a cultural and economic cache that dwarfs both those areas and would be considered its own distinct region (like the Research Triangle in North Carolina, but on a much larger scale) if it wasn’t only 50 miles from San Francisco and Oakland. That’s very different from other rich counties such as Prince George, Loudoun, Fairfax, or Orange; none of which house the density of Fortune 500 companies, jobs, two major league sports teams (not including the 49ers who play in Santa Clara), hospital networks, cultural institutions, and universities that Silicon Valley has. Miami is also the largest city proper in its metropolitan region, and Miami-Dade County is the locus of all the economic metrics you mentioned above. San Francisco is not. The only primary metric that points in SF’s favor is the airport, but by that logic, Queens should be the center of the New York region, and not Manhattan.

:: Like the consensus did 6 years ago, I also take issue with “Northern California” being in that lede. Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, and Merced (especially Sacramento) are entirely different metropolitan regions and CSAs that have their own economic, cultural, political, and commercial gravity that are not tied to the Bay Area. Sacramento is indisputably the center of political power in the state and the Northern California megaregion, over San Francisco, which only houses the state’s judicial branch. It has its own major league sports teams, performing arts venues, museums, broadcast TV market, and transit network that have no overlap with the Bay Area. Saying that San Francisco is these cities’ center is even more questionable than claiming San Francisco is the center of the Bay Area.

:: Like the consensus did 6 years ago, I also take issue with “Northern California” being in that lede. Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, and Merced (especially Sacramento) are entirely different metropolitan regions and CSAs that have their own economic, cultural, political, and commercial gravity that are not tied to the Bay Area. Sacramento is indisputably the center of political power in the state and the Northern California megaregion, over San Francisco, which only houses the state’s judicial branch. It has its own major league sports teams, performing arts venues, museums, broadcast TV market, and transit network that have no overlap with the Bay Area. Saying that San Francisco is these cities’ center is even more questionable than claiming San Francisco is the center of the Bay Area.

:: Lastly, you mention that San Francisco’s metropolitan statistical area has more people than San Jose’s. That’s true, but SF also shares its MSA with Oakland, which is very culturally significant in different ways from SF. Oakland is the center of the Bay Area’s African American community and houses the second largest port in the West Coast. It is the headquarters of the UC system and the operational center of the BART network. Don’t think that they would consider SF their “center” either.

:: Lastly, you mention that San Francisco’s metropolitan statistical area has more people than San Jose’s. That’s true, but SF also shares its MSA with Oakland, which is very culturally significant in different ways from SF. Oakland is the center of the Bay Area’s African American community and houses the second largest port in the West Coast. It is the headquarters of the UC system and the operational center of the BART network. Don’t think that they would consider SF their “center” either.

	San Francisco is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.
	This article appeared on Wikipedia’s Main Page as Today’s featured article on November 17, 2006.
Article milestones Date Process Result April 4, 2006 Good article nominee Listed August 3, 2006 Featured article candidate Not promoted September 6, 2006 Peer review Reviewed September 10, 2006 Featured article candidate Promoted June 30, 2008 Featured article review Kept December 24, 2021 Featured article review Demoted Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia’s Main Page in the “On this day…“ column on January 30, 2011, January 30, 2014, and January 30, 2017. Current status: Former featured article

Why is this article now noting San Francisco is the “5th densest county” instead of the 2nd densest major city? Calling it the 5th densest county is misleading, since the other four denser counties are all in New York City, a place that very few people are even aware is made up of multiple counties since cities (with incredibly rare exception) exist within counties and are not made up of them.

Unless someone has a good reason to oppose the change, I’m going to switch this back to using the same approach that is used in the New York City article, which says “With an estimated population in 2024 of 8,478,072 distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), the city is the most densely populated major city in the United States.”
—Cowboywizard (talk) 23:15, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What is a “major city”? Lightandtruth (talk) 17:44, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The SF Bay Area is the equivalent of NYC. The boroughs were counties? Compare SF to Manhattan.

Piñanana (talk) 19:51, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

https://archives.nd.edu/observer/v12/1977-10-19_v12_037.pdf

with 49 mile drive map

now historical data

Piñanana (talk) 01:23, 24 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

merchant corridor segments, such as:

san bruno ave, clement st, fillmore st, union st, chestnut st, …

2601:646:203:E7B0:0:0:0:A222 (talk) 02:05, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

“restaurant” is mentioned but not local food.

Farmers markets in San Francisco can be cited for the relevant articles, such as streets and districts.

<ref name=”sf-enviro/farmers-markets”>{{cite web |title=Farmers markets in San Francisco |url=https://www.sfenvironment.org/farmers-markets-in-sf |website=San Francisco Environment Department |publisher=[[City and County of San Francisco]] |access-date=19 October 2025 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20251002010603/https://www.sfenvironment.org/farmers-markets-in-sf |archive-date=2025-10-02 |language=en |date=21 March 2025}}</ref>

More than six organizations manage these events.

Piñanana (talk) 20:00, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This constant rewording re San Francisco’s metropolitan area is quite baffling and has now reached absurd levels: a range of 4.6 to 9.1 million residents, without further comment. This is a disservice to readers, who are looking for what they find in every other U.S. city article: U.S. Census Bureau statistics that summarize the infobox numbers. I’ve restored the standard, encyclopedic wording, with the Bureau’s latest population estimates (2024) for MSA and CSA, and the national rankings. Mason.Jones (talk) 17:29, 9 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, just out of curiosity, why is this an improvement? The vast majority of readers have no idea what an MSA or CSA is, nor should they. And I linked to the section in the Bay Area article discussing defining the regions boundaries (including MSA and CSA stuff). Lightandtruth (talk) 01:24, 12 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(And as you said, that stuff is already in the infobox) Lightandtruth (talk) 01:25, 12 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

All articles about American cities in Wikipedia reference official U.S. Census statistics in the lead: the population of the city intra muros and the metropolitan area (metropolitan statistical area, or MSA). No other WP articles have ever stated, as this one did, that “the metropolitan area can range from 4.6 million to 9.2 million”, and leave it there. Every other encyclopedia (Britannica, Collier’s) or general reference book (World Almanac) follows the same yardstick described in my first sentence. Why shouldn’t Wikipedia be just as clear? Why oppose common practices and consistency because “some readers have no idea”? Mason.Jones (talk) 17:17, 20 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 2 September 2025 and 12 December 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): KimDLC (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by KimDLC (talk) 23:38, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The redirect San Francisc has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 January 16 § San Francisc until a consensus is reached. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 23:01, 16 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Filmssssssssssss: I appreciate that you are working to improve the history section. I saw some improvement with
this edit. However, I don’t agree with some of the changes:

• This should not have been deleted: “Buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings.”

• Was there a reason to delete this image?

[[File:San Francisco in July 1849 Painting by George Henry Burgess.jpg|thumb|gold rush]]]]

• Was there a reason to remove this sourced material?

The first North American plague epidemic was the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904.^[1]

I didn’t revert the entire edit, because of improvement, but I would appreciate if these the above three items be restored and consensus found for those changes.

In the future it would be helpful if you broke the changes up into individual edits so that it would be easier to selectively revert the changes and understand what is being changed.

—David Tornheim (talk) 17:19, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I appreciate you letting me know and I will restore these edits. In the future, I will definitely break up edits

Thanks Filmssssssssssss (talk) 18:41, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

—David Tornheim (talk) 17:19, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:San_Francisco/Archive_8#SF_Being_*the*_Political,_Cultural,_and_Economic_Center_of_NorCal

I am re-opening this discussion to bring additional arguments and evidence. The notion that the municipality of San Jose is more central to the economy of the Bay Area and Northern California than the city and county of San Francisco is absurd. It is perfectly reasonable to call San Francisco THE commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California.

The city of San Francisco has 1.7x more firms than the city of San Jose^[1], which have 1.8x as many establishment, 1.9x in annual receipts, 3x in annual payroll, and 2.4x employees^[1]; SF has >10% more households as San Jose^[2], SF residents have at least 16% more aggregate income than San Jose residents^[2], SF has 33% more aggregate retail sales than San Jose^[2], 60% more employer firms than San Jose^[2], 4.5x the municipal expenditures of San Jose ^[3][4], 4.7x the municipal assets of San Jose ^[3][4], the San Francisco international airport has 4.3x as much passenger traffic as the San Jose airport, the aggregate property roll value in San Francisco is 22% higher than in San Jose ^[3][5], and SF has >8x as many high-rises as San Jose^[6]. What’s more, the San Francisco Urban Area has >1.9x as many residents as the San Jose Urban Area. And the San Francisco-Oakland MSA has 2.3x as many residents and a GDP >1.8x higher as the San Jose-Sunnyvale MSA. Yes, Silicon Valley is a central component of the Bay Area and Northern California economies, but the majority of Silicon Valley lies OUTSIDE the city of San Jose. In particular, the city of San Jose contains just 44% of Santa Clara County’s firms, which have just 42% of its their establishments, 37% of their annual receipts, 27% of their annual payroll, and 37% of their employees^[1]. Re: culture, it will be almost impossible to find any source claiming San Jose has more cultural influence than San Francisco ^[7][8][9].

Yes, San Jose has 20% more nighttime residents ^[10], but very few would argue that Nigeria is more central to the world economy than Japan just because it has a higher population, and the population delta there is much larger ^[11][12]. Very few would argue that India is the center of the world economy just because it has the highest population. Yes, San Francisco proper has a small share of the region’s nighttime population relative to other regions. But the city of Miami contains an even smaller share of its metro’s population, <10%, and very few would argue that Miami is not central to the metro. Yes, Santa Clara COUNTY has a higher aggregate GDP than San Francisco county ^[13]. But again, that economic activity is disproportionately located OUTSIDE the city of San Jose^[1], and even including all of Santa Clara County, the per capita GDP of San Francisco county is $324,000 vs. $228,000 in Santa Clara county^[13]. Further, very few would argue that Middlesex County, MA is the center of the Boston metro just because it has a higher aggregate GDP than Suffolk County^[13]. The mere fact that the Combined Statistical Area is labeled “San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland” is a bureaucratic oddity, not an indication that San Jose is more central to the region than San Francisco. Lightandtruth (talk) 22:26, 8 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for bringing this up. I appreciate you coming to the talk page on this and bringing up some very thoughtful and well-researched points. First, no one is saying that San Jose exceeds San Francisco as a cultural, financial, and economic center of the region. I don’t think even the San Jose article claims that. Silicon Valley as a whole, however, exceeds San Francisco’s GDP, payroll, annual receipts, aggregate income, retail sales, municipal expenditures, population, and nighttime residents. San Francisco has 9 Fortune 500 company HQs; Silicon Valley has over 30. There is a clear separate economic, commercial, and financial center that is very distinct from San Francisco and matches/surpasses SF’s scale. That all fits with SF being a financial, cultural, and commercial center and not the financial, cultural, and economic center of Northern California.

Also, you can’t seriously compare Silicon Valley to Middlesex County, MA or Nigeria. Silicon Valley has a cultural and economic cache that dwarfs both those areas and would be considered its own distinct region (like the Research Triangle in North Carolina, but on a much larger scale) if it wasn’t only 50 miles from San Francisco and Oakland. That’s very different from other rich counties such as Prince George, Loudoun, Fairfax, or Orange; none of which house the density of Fortune 500 companies, jobs, two major league sports teams (not including the 49ers who play in Santa Clara), hospital networks, cultural institutions, and universities that Silicon Valley has. Miami is also the largest city proper in its metropolitan region, and Miami-Dade County is the locus of all the economic metrics you mentioned above. San Francisco is not. The only primary metric that points in SF’s favor is the airport, but by that logic, Queens should be the center of the New York region, and not Manhattan.

Like the consensus did 6 years ago, I also take issue with “Northern California” being in that lede. Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, and Merced (especially Sacramento) are entirely different metropolitan regions and CSAs that have their own economic, cultural, political, and commercial gravity that are not tied to the Bay Area, whether it is San Francisco or Silicon Valley. Sacramento is indisputably the center of political power in the state and the Northern California megaregion, over San Francisco, which only houses the state’s judicial branch. It has its own major league sports teams, performing arts venues, museums, broadcast TV market, and transit network that have no overlap with the Bay Area. Saying that San Francisco is these cities’ center is even more questionable than claiming San Francisco is the center of the Bay Area.

Lastly, you mention that San Francisco’s metropolitan statistical area has more people than San Jose’s. That’s true, but SF also shares its MSA with Oakland, which is very culturally significant in different ways from SF. Oakland is the center of the Bay Area’s African American community and houses the second largest port in the West Coast. It is the headquarters of the UC system and the operational center of the BART network. Don’t think that they would consider SF their “center” either.

To sum up, Northern California is a very unique, polycentric region with many different centers, including those outside the Bay Area. It’s unique even from twin city metros such as Minneapolis-St. Paul and Dallas-Ft. Worth. Unique enough that its polycentrism merited its own section in the Bay Area page and has been studied by academics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Geography). San Francisco is a very important center for this region. But it’s a center, not the center. EndlessCoffee54 (talk) 00:49, 9 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]