San Francisco has always been uninhabitable.
San Francisco . The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth , making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time . San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856 . San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. , Gap Inc. , Salesforce.com , Dropbox , Reddit , Square , Inc. , Dolby , Airbnb , Weebly , Pacific Gas and Electric Company , Yelp , Pinterest , Twitter , Uber , Lyft , Mozilla , Wikimedia Foundation , Craigslist and Weather Underground .