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SAN FRANCISCO — For some time, people have been saying that San Francisco is transforming into another, different kind of big city.

First, San Francisco was the new Hollywood — given that people like Mark Zuckerberg are now household names and they are sort of in the entertainment business, too.

Then it was the new Paris of the 1920s, because of all the creation taking place here. A moveable feast of coding instead of writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald have become two guys with a Mac building a messaging app. Or something like that.

Then San Francisco was turning into Washington, because somehow tech power equates political power.

Now, San Francisco is apparently just like New York.

Last week, a publication based in New York that is called “New York,” asked the question, “Is San Francisco New York?” A publication based in San Francisco answered, quite resolutely, “No.”

The theory that San Francisco is becoming the Big Apple goes as follows: bankers, Harvard graduates and affluent party-goers (you know, the important people) are heading west in search of new digital gold.

While it’s true that the area is drawing in these kinds of people, is that enough evidence to believe that San Francisco is on its way to being the next Big Apple?

Sure, San Francisco has, for better or worse, some New York-like attributes. Real estate is outrageously expensive here. There’s an abundance of wealth that in some ways rivals New York City. And there’s a constant merry-go-round of moguls, celebrities and politicians passing through as they visit start-ups in a new age pilgrimage. (The power brokers visit New York media outlets in a similar hajj.)

But there are aspects of San Francisco that couldn’t be further from the recipe that makes New York so New York.

For one thing, today’s San Francisco is much more of a company town. Go into any bar in San Francisco and you will hear people talking about their start-up, or a battle they recently had with a line of code. Stop by a coffee shop in some neighborhoods here and you will be surrounded by venture capitalists being pitched a new idea for a new app. All of these people rarely, if ever, interact with people outside the tech world.

Unfair? Sure, but we are talking about glossy magazine stereotypes here.

In New York, if you meet someone who works in tech you feel like you’ve met a long-lost relative. Bars, coffee shops and restaurants are a mishmash of people from vastly different industries.

The lack of diversity between social groups in San Francisco isn’t going to change anytime soon, as the number of tech employees in the Bay Area is only going to continue to rise. Ted Egan, chief economist for San Francisco’s Controller’s Office, recently said that in the early-90s, tech workers made up less than 1 percent of city workers in San Francisco. In 2000, tech employees had risen to 3 percent of the workforce. By 2013, that number had passed 6 percent.

San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee said publicly last year that toward the end of 2013 there were 1,892 tech companies in San Francisco, up 3.6 percent from 2012. Expect that number to keep rising, too.

Unlike New York, which arguably has more economic, social, and employment diversity than anywhere else on earth, San Francisco’s tech-on-tech layering has created a not-so-little echo chamber. As I wrote last year, people seem to build products here that would make the rest of the country scratch their heads.

San Francisco also lacks a number of other New York-like attributes. New York boasts eight million residents. San Francisco barely passes 825,000. In New York, you see people dressed to impress. In San Francisco, people take pride in wearing a hoodie and jeans to five-star restaurants (despite glossy magazine reports to the contrary).

And in New York people are ostentatious and flashy with their money.

In San Francisco? Sure, Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive and America’s Cup champion, is more than happy to show off his wealth. But most wealthy people here tend to hide it, afraid that it won’t jibe with the we’re-here-to-make-the-world-a-better-place image of Silicon Valley. (I know of one successful founder who owns an old beat-up 1985 Honda that he drives to his secret private jet.)

So what exactly is San Francisco?

There is a passage in the book, “The Barbary Coast,” referring to the 1849 gold rush that may have the answer to that question.

“Despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in early San Francisco was supremely confident that he would soon be able to return home with an incalculable amount of gold,” the author writes, describing the city more than a century and a half ago. “Everything was conceived on a vast scale, and there was always plenty of cash available for any scheme that might be proposed, no matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed.”

Well, would you look at that? It seems that San Francisco is the new San Francisco.