It is also part of the greater 12-county San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area, whose population is over 8.75 million, making it the fifth-largest in the United States as of July 1, 2016.

[9] The principal Hispanic groups in the city were those of Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, and Puerto Rican ancestry.

[10] In 2010, residents of Chinese ethnicity constituted the largest single ethnic minority group in San Francisco at 21.4% of the population; the other Asian groups are Filipinos (4.5%), Vietnamese (1.6%), Japanese (1.3%), Asian Indians (1.2%), Koreans (1.2%), Thais (0.3%), Burmese (0.2%), Cambodians (0.2%), and Indonesians, Laotians, and Mongolians make up less than 0.1% of the city's population.

The remainder of Hispanics self-identify as Other Race (49.1%), Multiracial (10.7%), American Indian and Alaskan Native (0.8%), Black (1.6%), Asian (2.2%), and Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (0.2%).

[19] If treated as a category separate from race, Hispanics are the third largest minority group in San Francisco County.

[21] During the Spanish mission period, from the late 1700s to 1830, the indigenous people of the East Bay were enslaved, relocated and decimated by disease, leading to their disappearance.

[27] The neighborhoods with the lowest percentage of non-Hispanic white residents are Visitacion Valley (5.5%) and Silver Terrace (7.0%).

This is increasingly the case in higher levels of education, with only 8.9% of the public high school population being white.

[29] Neighborhoods with significant black populations include Fillmore District, Hunters Point, and Visitacion Valley.

[30][31] The Japanese population of the South Bay is diverse, and many have mixed-race backgrounds due to the growing trend of inter-racial marriages.

[32] Of all major cities in the United States, San Francisco has the second-highest percentage of residents with a college degree, behind only Seattle.

According to the 2005 American Community Survey, San Francisco has the highest percentage of gay and lesbian individuals of any of the 50 largest U.S. cities, at 15.4%.

[11] Median family income is $81,136,[11] and the San Francisco Bay Area ranks 8th in the number of billionaires known in the region.

[45] The unemployment rate stands at 4.8% in the greater San Francisco Bay Area as of January 2015[update].

[46] Homelessness has been a chronic and controversial problem for San Francisco since the early 1970s when many mentally ill patients were deinstitutionalized, due to changes which began during the 1960s with the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid.

[49][50] Rates of reported violent and property crimes for 2009 (736 and 4,262 incidents per 100,000 residents, respectively)[51] are slightly lower than for similarly sized U.S.

In total, 45.42% (342,693) of San Francisco's population aged five and older spoke a language at home other than English.