San Francisco--Not an obvious favored quarter?
Since a lot of this thread is more dedicated to metro areas than just central city limits, I think when talking about San Francisco you can really look at the Bay Area as a whole and in that sense yes, there isn't an obvious favored quarter because there really are three distinct bubbles of affluence with around 2 million residents shared between them. It initially seems like the main San Francisco metro counties (SF, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Marin) and Santa Clara (At this point San Jose's really not a unique metro, imo) are one interconnected chain of wealth, all being some of the wealthiest counties nationwide and with median incomes of over $100,000 stand out despite containing large cities. Here, this income does not go as far, however, so the bar is a bit higher when considering "favored quarters" and these six counties can be split into areas of wealth with Central and Northern SF combining with Marin to form one bubble, Western Santa Clara and Southern and Central San Mateo combining to form another bubble, while the third area is Southern and Central Contra Costa and the Eastern portion of Alameda.
The SF/Marin bubble is probably the whitest out of the three, and is distinct due to its mixture of old and new money with finance billionaires and tech billionaires dominating Pac Heights and North SF in city while old school doctors, lawyers, and business professionals live in Marin and the suburban hilly parts of central SF. This area basically takes in the whitest parts of the city and adds them to even whiter Marin to stand out as probably the only place that matches the stereotypical idea of suburbia, but is somewhat analogous to New York and Westchester (despite those two counties not connecting). Politically, you see a LOT of NIMBY culture that is shrouded in liberalism and this is what you imagine when you think of stereotypical hypocritical liberals who are all in on BLM but don't particularly like the homeless. Easily the most liberal out of the three regions.
The Silicon Valley bubble of Santa Clara and San Mateo is probably the most asian out of the three, and is distinct due to its clear dominance of tech culture in a line from Hillsborough (arguably closer in culture to the SF bubble, but geographically absorbed into SV) down to Los Gatos with parts of San Jose included. I'm most familiar with this part of the Bay Area and would say you have the billionaire class generally in the hilly portions of this region, with a large number of Asian professionals living side by side their white counterparts. Politically, again there's a LOT of NIMBY culture but one that is definitely more openly anti-homeless and not as concerned about a liberal facade, with this region more moderate than the previous one and closer to the tech-bro stereotype (although libertarians are fairly rare, that part's not true whatsoever imo), but for the Bay Area moderate is closer to 75-25 D compared to the 85-15 of the last group.
The last bubble is the closest to generic suburbia without its own real culture and is an amalgamation of quickly growing cheaper exurbs and suburbs far flung from SF as well as Oakland's Eastern hills and its "suburbs" (think sun belt suburbs for the most part combined with a detached and somewhat more conservative part of the first bubble). In my experience a lot of people live in the second bubble for the nationally ranked schools and when their kids get to college they sell and get a house twice the size in this area, but this area is up-and-coming in its own right. You have Asian dominance in Fremont, San Ramon, and Pleasanton, while there's a far larger white population in Lamorinda, Alamo, Danville, and in Eastern Oakland and Berkeley's hills. Politically, you don't have a lot of NIMBY culture when you're in the Southern half of this area since new homes are being built almost daily, but when you get to Berkeley and Oakland's hills it almost matches SF, although overall this area is the most conservative of the three, but again in the Bay Area that's closer to 70-30 D.
