Starting point: Gold rush; great harbor and bay

Organizing strategy: Commercial/financial hub; natural beauty

Tools: Real estate at premium; money; bridges to peninsula; topography

Outcomes: One of the world’s most beautiful and successful cities

Resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

Urban planning projects in the 1950s and 1960s involved widespread destruction and redevelopment of west-side neighborhoods and the construction of new freeways, of which only a series of short segments were built before being halted by citizen-led opposition.^[57] The onset of containerization made San Francisco’s small piers obsolete, and cargo activity moved to the larger Port of Oakland.^[58] The city began to lose industrial jobs and turned to tourism as the most important segment of its economy.^[59] The suburbs experienced rapid growth, and San Francisco underwent significant demographic change, as large segments of the white population left the city, supplanted by an increasing wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America.^[60][61] From 1950 to 1980, the city lost over 10 percent of its population.

Over this period, San Francisco became a magnet for America’s counterculture. Beat Generation writers fueled the San Francisco Renaissance and centered on the North Beach neighborhood in the 1950s.^[62] Hippies flocked to Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, reaching a peak with the 1967 Summer of Love.^[63] In 1974, the Zebra murders left at least 16 people dead.^[64] In the 1970s, the city became a center of the gay rights movement, with the emergence of The Castro as an urban gay village, the election of Harvey Milk to the Board of Supervisors, and his assassination, along with that of Mayor George Moscone, in 1978.^[65]

Bank of America completed 555 California Street in 1969 and the Transamerica Pyramid was completed in 1972,^[66] igniting a wave of “Manhattanization” that lasted until the late 1980s, a period of extensive high-rise development downtown.^[67] The 1980s also saw a dramatic increase in the number of homeless people in the city, an issue that remains today, despite many attempts to address it.^[68] The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused destruction and loss of life throughout the Bay Area. In San Francisco, the quake severely damaged structures in the Marina and South of Market districts and precipitated the demolition of the damaged Embarcadero Freeway and much of the damaged Central Freeway, allowing the city to reclaim The Embarcadero as its historic downtown waterfront and revitalizing the Hayes Valley neighborhood.

The last 20 years have seen two booms driven by the internet industry. First was the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, startup companies invigorated the San Francisco economy. Large numbers of entrepreneurs and computer application developers moved into the city, followed by marketing, design, and sales professionals, changing the social landscape as once-poorer neighborhoods became increasingly gentrified.^[69] Demand for new housing and office space ignited a second wave of high-rise development, this time in the South of Market district.^[70] By 2000, the city’s population reached new highs, surpassing the previous record set in 1950. When the bubble burst in 2001, many of these companies folded and their employees were laid off. Yet high technology and entrepreneurship remain mainstays of the San Francisco economy. By the mid 2000s (decade), the social media boom had begun, with San Francisco becoming a popular location for tech offices and a popular place to live for people employed in Silicon Valley companies such as Apple and Google.^[71]