Located at the north end of the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. As the 15th-most populous city in the United State, the city welcomes tens of millions of visitors each and every year. San Francisco has very eclectic mix of architecture in both the commercial and residential sections of the city. Some of the more prominent styles include the signature Victorian. A popular tourist destination, San Francisco is known for its cool summers, fog, steep rolling hills, eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, the former Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, Fisherman's Wharf, and its Chinatown district.  

According to the 2010 United States Census: 

• Population: 805,235 (883,305 as of July 1, 2018) 
• Average family size: 3.11  
• 41% lived in owner-occupied housing units; 56% lived in rental housing units 
• Median age of the city population: 38 years  

San Francisco is one of the country’s tech hotbeds with the headquarters of such notable global companies as Salesforce, Airbnb, Twitter, Uber and Craigslist. In addition to technology, San Francisco is a financial powerhouse with five major banking institutions calling San Francisco home. The city, and the surrounding Bay Area, is a global center of the sciences and arts and is home to a number of educational and cultural institutions, such as the University of San Francisco (USF), University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco State University (SFSU), the De Young Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the SFJAZZ Center, and the California Academy of Sciences. As of 2019, San Francisco is the highest rated American city on world livability rankings. 

The University of California, San Francisco is the sole campus of the University of California system entirely dedicated to graduate education in health and biomedical sciences. It is ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States and operates the UCSF Medical Center, which ranks as the number one hospital in California and the number 5 in the country. Public schools are run by the San Francisco Unified School District as well as the State Board of Education for some charter schools. Just under 30% of the city's school-age population attends one of San Francisco's more than 100 private or parochial schools, compared to a 10% rate nationwide. Nearly 40 of those schools are Catholic schools managed by the Archdiocese of San Francisco.