San Francisco: what to see and whether to move there

What the city runs on and who it suits

San Francisco is small: around eight hundred thousand people on roughly a hundred and twenty square kilometres. It is also, in 2026, probably the most concentrated pool of capital on the planet. After the 2020-2023 slump, when rents fell and offices emptied, the AI boom pulled the city back out. Office vacancy has fallen from about a third to roughly twenty-eight per cent, more space was leased in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2024, and residential rents are climbing faster than in any other US city, on the order of twenty per cent year on year.

The economy is narrow, and that makes it fragile: technology, venture capital, the finance that orbits them, biotech in Mission Bay, plus UCSF and its medical system. If you work outside those fields the city will feel absurdly expensive relative to your salary, because prices are set by people holding equity.

The texture is nothing like New York. People here sleep early, talk about work constantly, and organise social life around professional circles and weekend trips into nature. The arrivals are engineers, founders, investors and researchers for whom being physically inside the network delivers something remote work does not. For anyone seeking a cultural capital or a career outside tech, San Francisco is almost always overrated.

Neighbourhoods

The Mission is sunny, dense, has the best food and bars, and changes character block by block. Noe Valley and Cole Valley are quiet and family-oriented. Hayes Valley has become the centre of the AI scene, expensive and busy. The Marina and Cow Hollow draw young professionals and bay views.

The Richmond and the Sunset on the west side are the most sensible value in the city, with houses instead of towers and excellent Asian food, subject to one caveat: fog. Summers there run several degrees colder and noticeably greyer than in the Mission, and it genuinely affects how you feel. Potrero Hill and Dogpatch are sunny and convenient for anyone commuting south towards the Peninsula campuses. Pacific Heights is expensive, classic and view-heavy.

Where not to live: the Tenderloin and the adjoining stretch of SoMa around Sixth Street, where the open drug scene remains grim even after a midnight-to-five business curfew cut incidents by roughly thirteen per cent. Be more careful in Bayview at night. The broader numbers, though, improved dramatically: homicides and violent crime fell around a third against 2024, and car break-ins dropped to their lowest level in decades. The city is measurably safer, but street poverty has not gone anywhere, and it is the first thing a newcomer sees.

Cost of living

San Francisco has caught New York on rent again. The citywide median passed three and a half thousand dollars, and the driver is obvious: thousands of well-paid new AI hires competing for a housing stock that barely grows.

The median purchase price hovers around one and a half million dollars, before mortgage rates enter the picture. Taxes: federal plus a California rate reaching 13.3 per cent at the top, with sales tax around 8.6 per cent. Overall living costs run roughly two thirds above the national average, almost entirely because of housing. A realistic threshold for one person living without roommates and without counting every purchase starts around 130,000-150,000 dollars a year.

Getting around, weather and everyday logistics

The climate fools everyone. Summer in San Francisco is cold and foggy, especially on the western side, where fifteen degrees and wind in July is routine. Real summer arrives in September and October, the best months of the year. Winter is mild and wet at ten to fifteen degrees. Microclimates operate block by block: the Mission can be in full sun while the Sunset, four kilometres away, sits behind a wall of fog.

Transport: you can live here without a car, and plenty do. Muni buses and light rail cover the core, BART links the East Bay and the airport, and an electrified Caltrain runs south faster than it used to. Waymo robotaxis are now an ordinary part of getting around. Parking is expensive and painful, and car break-ins, though sharply down, have trained everyone to leave nothing visible inside.

Airports: SFO, Oakland and San Jose. English is the language, with Spanish and Chinese widely spoken. Internet is excellent. Banking follows the standard US pattern of SSN or ITIN plus credit history for a lease, and in a tight market landlords choose between several applicants, so assemble your documents before you start looking.

Moving and legal status

San Francisco is a city where visa strategy comes up over dinner. For salaried engineers the default is still H-1B through the lottery, but the fee of around a hundred thousand dollars introduced in 2025 on new petitions hit startups hardest: large companies can absorb it, small ones frequently cannot. Litigation continues, and as of autumn 2026 the matter is unresolved.

Founders more often go through O-1, built on a record of funding rounds, publications and recognition, then onward to EB-1A. Researchers and engineers with publications use EB-2 NIW, which needs no employer. International companies use L-1, and entrepreneurs from treaty countries use E-2, which is closed to Russian citizens but open to nationals of Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Turkey among others. The investment routes are EB-5 from 800,000 dollars and the Gold Card at around a million, introduced in late 2025.

A tax note: California taxes a resident's worldwide income at one of the highest rates in the country, and equity compensation adds real complexity. Plan the structure and the timing of your move before you sign the offer, not after.

More detail: United States, the O-1 visa, EB-2 NIW, the investor green card, residence permits, nomad visas, taxes and residency.

Is San Francisco worth considering as a base

If you work in AI, data infrastructure, biotech or venture capital, the answer is easy: there is no second place like it right now. The density of people, capital and conversation is high enough that the move pays for itself in contacts faster than in salary. The city is compact, the ocean and the mountains are close, the food is excellent, and industry pay covers a lot of sins.

Now the honest part. Rents are back at New York levels in a much smaller city with a far narrower job market. If your income is not tied to tech, you are paying a premium for somebody else's boom. Summer is cold and foggy, which disappoints more people than expected. Street poverty and the Tenderloin drug scene remain hard to look at even as the crime numbers fall. Public schools are uneven, and families regularly decamp to the Peninsula or the East Bay. And the biggest risk is the cycle itself: this city has swung from overheating to slump twice within living memory, and a lease signed at the peak survives the boom worse than you do.

The sensible strategy for a newcomer: rent rather than buy for the first couple of years, choose your neighbourhood by sunlight and commute rather than prestige, and keep a plan for a less generous phase of the cycle.