San Franciscans are obsessed with success, obsessed with food, and obsessed with technology
This is the oldest press mention on this page, and rereading it is a useful exercise. In December 2011 I told the Examiner we were having another tech renaissance. That turned out to be correct, and also a considerable understatement.
What I would add now is that the thing I described as demand was also the beginning of a displacement that reshaped the neighborhood. The census figures in that article were already showing it: the Inner Mission had lost more than a fifth of its Latino residents over the previous ten years while the total population held roughly steady. That trend did not stop. Anyone selling the Mission purely as a success story is leaving out the part that matters most to the people who lived there first.
Both things are true at once, and I think you have to hold them together to understand the neighborhood. The Mission is one of the best places to live in San Francisco, for exactly the reasons I gave in 2011. It is also a neighborhood where a great many long-term residents could not afford to buy the home they were renting.
For buyers looking at the Mission today, the practical picture has changed less than you might expect. Inventory is still tight, condominiums still move fastest, and the blocks vary enormously street by street in a way that no online estimate captures. Fifteen years on, my advice has not changed either: walk it at different times of day before you decide what a block is worth to you.
