San Francisco has a Chinatown and Japantown; both are among the largest and oldest in the US. It also boasts a budding Vietnamese community, a large homeless population in the Tenderloin neighborhood, Filipinos in Crocker-Amazon and South of Market, an Italian community in North Beach, a French Quarter, and Irish, Chinese, and Russian communities in the Richmond District.

The rapidly gentrifying Mission District is the oldest neighborhood in the city, and is the site of Mission Dolores, established in 1776. Russian Hill is a residential neighborhood most famous for Lombard Street "the crookedest street in the world". However, Vermont Street in Potrero Hill is more crooked. Haight-Ashbury gained prominence during the "Summer of Love" 1960s for its counter-culture and concentration of hippies. The Castro neighborhood has the world's highest concentration of homosexuals. In addition to the predominantly gay Castro, there are significant concentrations of gays in Noe Valley, Diamond Heights, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, Haight-Ashbury, Hayes Valley, and SOMA. (See The Castro for more gay demographics.)

The larger homes in the city are located in the area known as Pacific Heights as well as Victorians in the Haight-Ashbury and the "painted ladies" of Alamo Square and the Castro. San Francisco is also famous for its cable cars, designed to carry residents up the steep hills. It is still possible to take a cable car ride up and down Nob and Russian Hills. Along with New Orleans' streetcars, San Francisco's cable cars are one of only two mobile United States National Monuments. Coit Tower, a notable landmark dedicated to San Francisco's firefighters, is located at the top of Telegraph Hill.

Current demographic and land use expansion is concentrated in the east and south. The South of Market neighborhood was the center of the dot-com boom in San Francisco during the late 1990s. A new neighborhood, Mission Bay, is being redeveloped from an industrial area at the far eastern end of South of Market. The cornerstones of this development are the AT&T Park baseball stadium and an extension of the University of California, San Francisco, housing major biomedical research facilities.

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