San Francisco ranks high on "American Cities of the Future" list

New York City The Big Apple has topped this list three straight times now. New York City The Big Apple has topped this list three straight times now. Photo: Todd Heisler Photo: Todd Heisler Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close San Francisco ranks high on "American Cities of the Future" list 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

Investors believe in the future of San Francisco, according to fDi Intelligence's American Cities of the Future list. The biennial list, put out by a magazine owned by the Financial Times, highlights the top destinations for foreign direct investment. New York City topped the rankings for the third consecutive time. San Francisco followed the Big Apple in second place.

fDi Intelligence looked at 421 different locations for the study, analyzing hundreds of "data points" under five main categories: Economic Potential, Business Friendliness, Human Capital and Lifestyle, Cost Effectiveness and Connectivity. Those data points included a wide-range of topics including unemployment rate, brain drain, minimum wage, number of airports, and corporation tax rate. The main rankings are of "major American cities" but they further divide into categories based on size, including "large," "medium," "small," and "micro."

San Francisco in particular received a lot of attention from the study. Unsurprisingly, the core strength for the area was technology development; a majority of the work studied by the report came from the software and technology sector. Indeed, the three top companies for foreign investment in SF were Salesforce, Twitter, and Airbnb.

Cédric Ravalec, chief executive of Francebased Android app company Genymobile, which established an office in the city in 2014, says: "San Francisco is definitely the core of mobile development. The biggest players in the mobile industry are in the [area], as well as our main corporate users."

SF wasn't the only Bay Area city to land on the top 10 list, though; Sunnyvale, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, came in at fifth on the American city list, a nice feat for a city much smaller than the other cities on the list. Still, that rich technology field is boosting Sunnyvale, "boasting a GDP per capita of nearly $92,000*, inflation of only 1.98% and a low unemployment rate of 4.6%."

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Check all top 10 of the overall cities - and how San Francisco and Sunnyvale finish compared to the others - in the gallery above.