South San Francisco's biotech story grew from an industrial city

South San Francisco has one of California’s clearest old-industry-to-new-industry stories. The hillside sign still says “The Industrial City,” but the city is also known as the birthplace of biotechnology.

That shift reaches back to Genentech’s founding in 1976 by Herb Boyer and Robert Swanson in a small industrial warehouse in South San Francisco. The city now describes itself as home to one of the largest biotech clusters in the world, with over 250 biotech companies and about 12 million square feet of biotech space.

The geography helps make sense of it. South San Francisco sits near SFO, San Francisco, Stanford, UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, Caltrain, ferries, and Highway 101. Older industrial land east of the freeway could turn into labs, offices, and life-science campuses. The same city that once leaned into factories and warehouses became a place where medicine, research, and biotech real estate shaped the local economy.

For residents, that story shows up in traffic, jobs, buildings, shuttle routes, public investment, and the city’s identity. South San Francisco did not erase its industrial past. It layered a science economy on top of it.