Over the past decade, San Francisco’s population grew by 8.5%, or nearly 70,000 residents. Yet despite this increase, the city’s population remains tiny compared with giants such as New York and Los Angeles, which have nearly 9 million and 4 million people, respectively. With roughly 900,000 residents, San Francisco is only the 17th most populous city in America.
It’s a different story when you take geographical size into account. In addition to its modest population, San Francisco is also physically small. So when you look at residents per square mile, it’s the second-most densely populated major city in the country after New York.
That’s according to a Chronicle analysis of 2020 decennial census data on cities with at least 300,000 residents. We looked at which are the most crowded and which have gotten more or less so since 2010, when the previous census was conducted.
When it comes to density, New York is in a league of its own, with nearly 30,000 residents per square mile. That’s more than 50% higher than the density of No. 2-ranked San Francisco, which comes in at just under 19,000 per square mile.
Two other California cities make it into the top 10 — Santa Ana and Long Beach — with densities per square mile around 11,300 and 9,200, respectively. Los Angeles ranks No. 12 nationwide because, even though its headcount is huge, it also encompasses an enormous 500 square miles, roughly 10 times the area of San Francisco.
Most major cities grew in population over the last decade and, as a result, became more crowded. Of the top 12 most densely populated cities, Seattle and Washington, D.C., saw the biggest increases in density — 21% and 14%, respectively. San Francisco’s density rose by about 8%.
Aside from the city’s overall density, some parts pack in substantially more people than others. To understand how population varies across neighborhoods, we analyzed the data by census tracts — geographic areas with anywhere from 1,200 to 8,000 residents. Several San Francisco tracts have few residents, like the one that includes Golden Gate Park, so we excluded any with fewer than 1,000 residents from our analysis.
In general, the most crowded sections are located near downtown, in the Tenderloin, Chinatown and Financial District/South Beach neighborhoods. The tract with the highest density is a three-block area of the Tenderloin, north of Market Street and between Leavenworth and Jones streets. It has roughly 2,300 residents in a 0.01-square-mile area, equivalent to about 224,000 people per square mile. That’s nearly 12 times more crowded than the city average.
The second-most-crowded tract is just a block away — the three blocks bounded by Ellis Street, Leavenworth, Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde Street. It’s slightly larger — 0.02 square miles — but has about 1,500 more residents, equivalent to a density per square mile of about 217,000.
By contrast, neighborhoods such as Bayview-Hunters Point, Lakeshore and the Sunset tend to be the least crowded. The lowest density tract is a 1.4-square-mile area in Bayview-Hunters Point, adjacent to Potrero Hill and Dogpatch. Roughly 1,250 people live there, which comes out to roughly 900 residents per square mile — about 20 times less crowded than the city average and 250 times less dense than the most crowded part of the Tenderloin.
Even so, this area has more than tripled in population in the last decade; back in 2010, it had only 350 residents. Yet it still remains the least crowded part of the city by quite a bit: the next least dense is about 1.5 times more crowded.
On a national scale, the Tenderloin ranks up with the giants. The two most-crowded tracts there are the sixth and seventh most densely populated in the country, exceeded only by four tracts in New York and one in Chicago. All of them are in roughly the same size range: The five outside San Francisco average 250,000 people per square mile, versus 220,000 for the two Tenderloin tracts.
But aside from those and a few others, San Francisco is relatively uncrowded compared to the Big Apple. Of the 100 most densely populated tracts in the U.S., just five are in the City by the Bay, one is in Chicago and another in Miami — and the other 93 in New York City.
Urban populations in the U.S. are likely to continue last decade’s growth trend in the years ahead. But while some major cities can grow outward by expanding their boundaries, that’s impossible in San Francisco, since it’s bounded on three sides by water. To accommodate more people, the population density will likely have to be more equally distributed across the city.
Earlier this month, the San Francisco Planning Commission approved a plan to allow the construction of fourplexes on more than 110,000 parcels currently zoned for single-family homes or two-unit buildings. According to Commissioner Frank Fung, a plan like this that spreads medium density throughout the city is quite rare — many proposals are for tall buildings near downtowns. But an approach that parcels out population more evenly could lead to faster and cheaper construction, said Fung, not to mention more gradual and manageable growth.
Nami Sumida is a San Francisco Chronicle data visualization developer. Email: nami.sumida@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @namisumida
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San Francisco may be small, but it's among America's most crowded cities - San Francisco Chronicle
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