With 89 neighborhoods in San Francisco to choose from, how do you determine which one's the best for you? Today I'm going to tell you where I would live and where I wouldn't. If you're thinking about making a move to San Francisco, this video is for you. Let's be clear, the best and the worst neighborhood can be defined differently by everybody. You're going to want to think about things like budget, commute time, where you work, maybe even where your kids go to school. This is an overview and I've done separate videos that go into each of these neighborhoods in depth regarding schools, costs, specific restaurants, all of that. So take some notes on the neighborhoods that interest you most and you can check out our vlogs, which will be in the description below. I've lived in the Bay Area for over 20 years and though I haven't lived in all of these neighborhoods, I've spent a lot of time in each of them because I've sold over a thousand homes and I've also gotten to hear the perspective from both buyers and sellers. This list is based on my experience and though I can't possibly fit 89 neighborhoods into five tiers, I'm going to do my best but I'm sure I'm going to be getting a lot of flack in the comments section so I'm sorry in advance. So starting with the worst at number five, I only have two neighborhoods on that list and if you open up any headlines about San Francisco, you're going to see a lot of stories about crime, homelessness, dirtiness, all of that. A lot of those headlines are honestly concentrated around two neighborhoods, the Civic Center and the Tenderloin. And to be honest, most residents, given the choice, are not stepping foot in those neighborhoods. Now let's move on to tier number four. For tier number four, I have the Inter Mission and SoMa. So Inter Mission actually has a lot going for it. If you look at what makes a neighborhood valuable in San Francisco, sun and walkability are top on the list and this neighborhood actually has both of those things. Inter Mission has some fantastic restaurants in it. Flower and Water is one of my favorite but there's honestly too many to mention. So actually I think there's a lot of long term potential in the neighborhood, but it has also been hit by some crime and some homelessness and is a little bit dirty right now. Soma is similar but different. It actually does have some crimes and homelessness, some dirtiness mixed in. There's actually a very different kind of architecture there. It's a lot of high rise architecture there. And I would say the restaurant scene is actually not as happening there. But if you live in these high rises, it can be really convenient living. You can have gyms, everything that you need, concierge service, 24-hour security right in your building and you don't really have to leave. Of course with those benefits, they do often come with high HOA dues and we actually have done separate videos on the top 10 things to avoid when buying a condo in San Francisco. Both neighborhoods have pockets that are quite nice. So if you're willing to hang in there for a little while and wait for the neighborhood to get cleaned up, you can really get your dollar to stretch a long way in those neighborhoods right now. I'm Ruth Krishnan and I'm founder of the Krishnan Team. My team and I have been selling real estate in San Francisco for over a decade. And if you have any questions during this video, feel free to text this number right here. We'd be happy to help out and we'd love to be your real estate team of choice for anything to do with real estate in San Francisco. So for my third tier, I'm going to add in some neighborhoods that are great for me, but they're lacking a few things. So one of them is Clarendon Heights. Clarendon Heights is a beautiful neighborhood that actually sits on top of a hill, has massive views of the bay, downtown. One of the things that it's lacking is it's on a hill so the topography is such that there's really no backyards there. Also, it's not very walkable. Clarendon Heights is made up primarily of single-family homes and they can be usually purchased between about three million and about six million dollars, but there's definitely some outliers out there. Next up, the Outer Richmond. The Outer Richmond has become quite the hotspot for homes under one point seven million dollars. It's located near the ocean, so if you love the ocean, if you love to surf, please bear in mind it is cold and it is wild. It is not for the faint of heart, but you also have Lands End Trail located there, which is bar none some of the best hiking trail in the city. It's absolutely gorgeous. There's a ton of new restaurants popping up there, mom and shop places, really cool places to walk, and a really really cool vibe out there. Keep in mind on the downside, it's cold. It's also located kind of in a corner of the city, so getting downtown or to the South Bay is quite the commute. Though you can score a home near the median price point, there's actually quite a few homes sprinkled in there between like the two and the three million dollar price point. Next, we have Bernal Heights, and Bernal Heights is a great neighborhood. I like it a lot. It was the first neighborhood that my husband and I ever lived in an apartment together. And to be honest, at the time, I didn't even know that there were neighborhoods south of Cesar Chavez. Fast forward 20 years and Bernal Heights has been written up numerous times as one of the hottest neighborhoods in San Francisco. It's got a very bohemian feel to it with a very community-centric vibe. The reason why it's on my third tier list and not my second is because I actually think Bernal should be broken up into four different neighborhoods. Some parts of the neighborhood are super walkable, some are not. Some have really really great sun and really great weather, and some are windy. Some have freeway views, which most people don't like. Also, some parts of it have streets that are so tight that I literally have to cross both my fingers and toes to avoid getting hit by a car. So although there's some really great desirable homes in the neighborhood, many of them have been broken up and changed without permits over time and just are kind of weird and undesirable in some ways. Still, Bernal is on my list because I really love the community vibe there, and you can actually get a really great home there for a reasonable price, really anywhere between about $1.5 and about $3 million dollars, with most homes selling about $2.6, $2.7 million, which is a pretty reasonable price for San Francisco. Alright, admittedly, as I'm working my way up this list, there's more and more neighborhoods being added to my tier. So next up for my tier two neighborhood, I'm going to add Glen Park, Inner Sunset, and Inner Richmond. So starting with Glen Park, I think it's really underrated. It's walkable. It has a small walkable street on Diamond Street and Chenery, and it has pretty much everything that you need. There's a really nice community grocery store there, a couple of restaurants. Also, the housing stock is pretty nice, solid and consistent. You can score a home there usually for about $1.6 to $2.8 million dollars, with some homes on Laidley Street being in the five to six million, sometimes as high as ten, and there's been some even higher than that sold. But those homes on those streets have massive, massive views. So that's going to be more of the Fairmount Heights area. It's also one of the only neighborhoods in this section of town that has a BART, which is awesome. You can easily get to other neighborhoods via BART. Also, the freeway is really close by. So if you need to make it down to work in the South Bay, that's really easy to do. Next up, the Inner Sunset. I'm adding both the Inner Sunset and the Inner Richmond to my list because they're both located on Golden Gate Park, which I love the quality of life living on Golden Gate Park, especially if you have young children, which I do is really, really high. Being able to go to JFK, which they close off on Sunday, with your kids to ride bikes, listen to music, play soccer, it's it's phenomenal. Also, the Inner Sunset has a really great strip of restaurants on Irving and ninth that's really popping happening. There's a ton of really great things there. There's also a muni line there. So it's a great neighborhood. Both neighborhoods are a bit foggy. So if you're sensitive to weather, that may not be a good location for you. The Inner Richmond actually has all of that. Aside from the muni line, they do have some express lines that run up and down Geary. But what they do have that's different is they have, I would say, a more consistent housing stock. So if you're looking for a house that has three bedrooms, two baths on one level, the first floor being an entertainment level, like really classic style homes, really large backyards. The Inner Richmond has all of that. It's also located by the park. It also has Clement Street, which has a ton of restaurants. And I would say it has like the most diverse food scene in the city where you can get certainly California cuisine, but also just a lot of different kinds of cuisines. And I find that street really interesting for restaurants. My very first apartment over 22 years ago was located in the Inner Richmond and I loved living there. A couple times a week, I would go over to the park, run down to the beach. I just I thought it was phenomenal living right off the park. A house like I described in the Inner Richmond is usually going to run you between three and four million dollars. And if I picked up that same home and moved it over to Noe Valley, it would probably be five or six million dollars. So you get a little bit more for your money than some areas of the city that have better weather. Based on what I do for a living, people constantly ask me if I could live anywhere in the city, where would I live? And honestly, it's a really hard question to answer because of course it has so much to do with what is the budget? Where do my kids go to school? Where am I commuting? But if I took all that and threw it out the window, then I do have some choices for you. So if I could choose any neighborhood, it would probably be Pac Heights, but it's not an easy choice. When I met my husband, he was living in what he liked to call Pac Heights, but it was actually really Japantown, which is a nice neighborhood, but not quite the same as Pac Heights. But we did spend a lot of time in Pac Heights, and I have some really fond memories of that. Fillmore Street is amazing. The restaurant scene there is really, really great. Also, there's some really great shopping. So in terms of walkability, it's probably one of the best streets in the city. Some of the streets in Pac Heights that have the best views actually don't have the best walkability. And we are suckers for views, so I would probably choose those streets, probably somewhere close to the Lyon Street steps where I could still walk to Fillmore and Union Street. And I don't mind, I love walking, so I don't mind walking. And I would not personally trade walkability for views, but lots of our buyers do. Maybe someday we'll actually get a place there. In Pac Heights, a single-family home is going to start around $5 million, and usually that's not a very nice home, and they go up from there considerably to $10, $20, in some cases even $40 million. The sky is the limit. There's a section in Pac Heights called Billionaire's Row. That's where you would find me with money not being an option. And those houses usually trade between the $20 and $40 million price point and have amazing views. My very, very, very close second neighborhood would actually be Sea Cliff. I love Sea Cliff. It's a little further out, so you do have to give up really the walkability, but the streets there are super wide. The housing stock is really consistent and gorgeous. I actually was there today with a buyer on Seaview Terrace, and it is like everything I would ever want. You have Golden Gate Bridge views from every level, just amazing level of finishes, and honestly checks every box that most buyers are looking for. So the homes in Sea Cliff, they tend to all be very grand. The scale of them is very large. The lot sizes are a little bit large, and the neighborhood, just to walk around that neighborhood, even though there's not restaurants, it's gorgeous. You also have Lands End, which I mentioned earlier, really close by, so having that hiking trail really close by, but you are going to probably get in the car, and it is going to be a longer commute to downtown or out to the South Bay if that's where you're going. One of the nice things about this section of town or the north side of town in general is that if you happen to have a home in Tahoe or in Napa, Sonoma, and you want to go there on the weekends, then actually getting out of town is actually going to be much faster for you than many parts of the city. So a good budget for Seacliff is probably the $6 to $10 million price point, but there are some homes that trade for considerably higher on the seawall. There's not many of them. In fact, one traded last year over $40 million. But if money is the factor, and let's face it, for most of us, it is, then you can score a similar style of home, and the neighborhood actually feels very similar in a neighborhood called St. Francis Wood. And that neighborhood is also a planned development community. It's really, really beautiful, and homes there usually trade between about three and about $6 million. Also, the lots are very wide, the streets are very wide, it just feels super, super beautiful. It's also not super walkable, but it is a little bit more walkable than Sea Cliff. You have West Portal that's located close by. Now the West Portal Strip, it doesn't have a lot on it. It's similar to Glen Park in that there's some things, but not a lot of things. It does have a muni line. So I wouldn't be a neighborhood that I would consider walkable, but that is an option to walk over to West Portal and get a few of the things that you need there. If you took one of these homes out of St. Francis Wood and moved it to a place like Pac Heights, you could plan on adding three, four million, maybe even more to the price tag for a very similar kind of home with a much larger lot. The neighborhood also feels really different than most neighborhoods in San Francisco. It feels a little like SoCal without the weather. Next up, Noe Valley. Noe Valley would be an obvious choice for me. I love the neighborhood. My kids are in school close by and most people who are diehard Noe people, they actually want to be on the flats near 24th. Where I would be is a little section actually outside of Noe called Liberty Hill and it is less walkable but has massive views, which I love. It also has proximity to both the Castro, the Mission and 24th Street, which is the main drag in Noe Valley. So to me, I find that a lot more interesting because you have the option to walk, though you have to walk up hills, to all three neighborhoods, all which have a lot of things to offer. Noe Valley is popular among families who want to have access to the parks, great walkability, and also access to the freeway. You can score a good-sized home in Noe Valley anywhere between about 2.7 all the way up to about six million dollars. There are a handful of homes every year that sell for 10, 9, sometimes in some cases even 15 million dollars in Noe and those are going to be on your most prime streets like Jersey, Elizabeth. They also in some cases have views, in some cases have walkability, usually not both, but usually really, really nice level of finishes and what people consider a perfect floor plan. The last neighborhood in my top tier is Cole Valley and I really like Cole Valley because again it's located near the park, which I love, but it's also really central in San Francisco and a lot of times the really urban areas of San Francisco actually have a lot of housing mixture, meaning condos, single families. Cole Valley is mostly single family homes, most of them pretty large, around 3,000 square feet. So what you find is you find families that like go there to stay there, they're buying their kind of end home in a lot of cases and so the community is really rooted there. There's a lot of long-term residents. Also the style of the houses are very beautiful, a lot of Victorians, classic architecture. You also have Cole Street that has a lot of really, really great restaurants. You also have a train there and because it's centrally located, it's really easy to get in and out of that neighborhood as well. A lot of times people say that Cole Valley feels somewhat similar to Noe Valley and the prices are similar, but the starting point is a little bit higher because they don't have the smaller homes mixed in. So a good budget for Cole Valley is anywhere between about four and a half and five and a half million dollars, sometimes six, and then if you get up along Belvedere Street there are some larger, fancier homes with bigger views as well. You may find yourself with more questions than ever. I'm going to link our neighborhood vlog section below so you can really take a deep dive into all of these neighborhoods and more, but we'd love to help you explore the right neighborhood, so feel free to reach out to us. We'd be happy to help you. Also smash that subscribe button so you don't miss another video.
