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Expect accommodation to cost upwards of $200/night in a reasonable hotel or motel, and less out of high season, although keep in mind that rates can fluctuate wildly at any time based on demand. San Francisco residents complain frequently about skyrocketing rents, and it’s no different for visitors. This is a city in a constant state of evolution, quickly gentrifying itself into one of the most high-end towns on earth – thanks, in part, to the disposable incomes pumped into its coffers from its sizeable singles and gay contingents. Since the 1990s, San Francisco has been the scene of the dot-com revolution’s meteoric rise, fall and recovery the resultant wealth has pushed housing prices sky-high. By World War II, San Francisco had been eclipsed by Los Angeles as the West Coast’s most populous, but it achieved a new cultural eminence with the emergence of the Beats in the 1950s, hippies in the 1960s and a newly liberated gay population all throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Rebuilding began immediately and in the decades that followed, many of its landmarks were built, including both local bridges (the Golden Gate and the Bay). In the midst of the San Francisco’s golden age, however, a massive earthquake, followed by three days of fire, wiped out three-quarters of the city in 1906. By the time the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy boomtown of bordellos and drinking dens, something the moneyed elite – who hit it big on the much more dependable silver Comstock Lode in Nevada – worked hard to mend by constructing wide boulevards, parks, a cable-car system and elaborate Victorian redwood mansions by century’s end. Within a year, fifty thousand pioneers had come from the Midwest and East Coast (or from China), turning San Francisco from a muddy village and wasteland of sand dunes into a thriving supply centre and transit town. Two years after the Americans replaced the Mexicans in 1846, the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills precipitated the rip-roaring Gold Rush. The original inhabitants of this area, the Ohlone Indians, were all but wiped out within a few years of the establishment in 1776 of the Mission Dolores, the sixth in the chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran the length of California.