Prima facie this strikes me as an apples-to-oranges comparison. New York and Los Angeles are large cities with millions of residents and dominate their geograph

Prima facie this strikes me as an apples-to-oranges comparison. New York and Los Angeles are large cities with millions of residents and dominate their geographical areas (LA perhaps less than New York, but still). San Francisco has something like 884,000 residents, which makes it the second largest city in the Bay Area (after San Jose, with 1,035,000 or so), which has something like 8.7 million residents if you go by Combined Statistical Area (CSA) definition, which makes intuitive sense to me having lived here. By comparison New York has 8.6 million out of 24 million for its CSA; LA has 4 million out of 18.7 million for its CSA. So really, a more meaningful comparison (if one is resigned to handwaving about tax bases, without delving into details of city finances) for SF would be Boston, with 865,000 people out of 8.2 million for its CSA.