Ingleside Heights

Located on the southernmost tip of San Francisco, Ingleside Heights is one of the steepest neighborhoods in the city. It is considered part of the greater Ingleside area, with brightly colored buildings tightly squeezed together. The area is home to a flock of lower-middle class families with a subset of diverse ethnicities.

For those looking to own homes, the neighborhood is not immune to the housing market substantial decline in recent years. With many of the houses constructed with the same layout as their neighbors, prices do not seem to vary.

Shopping is a bit run-of-the-mill in this neighborhood. The district only offers a few small shops and seedy neighborhood corner stores with bars on the windows. Consequently, crime is a little bit of a factor in this area, with car thefts and burglaries having the most cause for concern among locals. These factors make it easy for visitors to avoid this somewhat disreputable neighborhood.

Ingleside Heights is home to many college students because San Francisco State University lies just a short bus ride away. The district provides reasonable prices on temporary housing for students. For younger educational institutions, the area offers Jose Ortega Elementary. However, the school does not seem to have a great reputation.

For commuters, public transit consists of Balboa Park Station and Interstate 280, which both connect the neighborhood to the Financial District and the greater San Francisco area.

Ingleside Heights is one of those neither here-nor-there neighborhoods that takes its cues from what lies around it: the sprawling suburban anonymity of Daly City to the south; the somewhat tired look of the blocks to the east and north; and the clean and modern (though somewhat sterile) Parkmerced to the west. Though it lies within the city limits, it has the look of numerous other communities that stretch up and down the Peninsula. Many first-time visitors to the area get here by taking a wrong turn off I-280, and it’s not uncommon for them to stop a local and ask “How do you get back to San Francisco?”

But this subdistrict of the area known overall as Ingleside (or, depending on where you live, Oceanview) is not without features that distinguish it from its neighboring districts. For one, it’s a bit safer in terms of crime. For another, it’s somewhat cleaner, with homes of a more recent vintage (and thus, more rectilinear in design, with less detailing to paint). Considering that it’s for the most part situated on a hill, there’s a more open feel to this neighborhood as well, sloping down as it does toward Brotherhood Way from Shields Street and Brooks Park, each house with its own postage-stamp front yard and individual landscaping (bushes and shrubs, generally—trees tend to be scarce here). Homes near Shields Street can even claim partial views of the Pacific.

The area was once rolling vegetable and dairy farms, then the nexus of a rail line that cut through the hills en route from the San Francisco waterfront to San Jose. Irish, German, and other immigrants from Europe moved here, encouraged by the easy access to jobs in the city. During the early part of the 20th century, however, the railroad abandoned the area for a more direct route via the Bayshore cut, and this once thriving place declined. Fueled by the World War II boom of the 1940s and ’50s, however, it began to be filled in with economical homes (of the style typical in the Sunset). Because there were no racial restrictions, African Americans and other minorities barred from home-ownership elsewhere in San Francisco could move here. The neighborhood quickly became one of the most diverse in the city.

Today, that diversity is still evident. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the neighborhood’s roughly 10,000 residents are about 45 percent Asian, 30 percent African American, 20 percent white, and the remaining 5 percent of mixed or two races; about 8 percent of all groups identify themselves as Latino. This is a lower middle-class area, with a median annual household income of about $55,000. About 75 percent of all residents own their homes. The proximity of San Francisco State University explains a large short-term population here, as many students are attracted to the area’s reasonable rents and the rooms and granny-unit accommodations that many homes offer.

Ingleside Heights can easily be divided into two distinct sections, with Brotherhood Way serving as the demarcation line; neighborhoods north and south have two different characters.

North of Brotherhood Way (a gently curving parkway carved in the 1960s from Stanley Drive), houses look minimally well-maintained, with a few sad cases of neglect and oddities thrown in. In the 100 block of Arch Street, for instance, visitors can easily spot a bizarre trio of homes on the east side of the street: one cheesy moderne, the next ersatz Yosemite, the final one Stone Age primitive. It is an amazing display of bad taste, and yet it fits in somehow with this street and its other crazy-colored adobe homes, from lime-meringue green to mustard yellow.

Many have criticized these tightly packed streets for being too car-centric, the homeowners (or renters) too obsessed with their cars and not enough with the upkeep of their dwellings. But there is nothing to suggest urban decay or blight, and most houses, while perhaps not imaginatively painted and decorated, are at least neat and clean. The presence of bars across most first-floor windows and entryways, however, suggests a frequency, or at least fear, of burglary, but the mostly graffiti-free neighborhood also attests to a certain pride of ownership as well.

On the south side of Brotherhood Way, the area takes on a different, less oppressive feel, with newly constructed apartment buildings (in particular, OceanView Village, a huge complex of renovated, reasonably priced apartments), a revamped shopping center (also part of OceanView Village, with a franchise drugstore and a large supermarket), and more trees, most of them young but a few quite old. This gives the streets in this flatter, more modern section of Ingleside Heights an appeal to younger residents, who like the easy access to the highway and BART. Older residents like the access to three nearby golf courses.

A couple of parks and playgrounds serve the neighborhood, both of them on the north side. Brooks Park on Shields Street is a “natural area,” meaning it has few landscaped areas beyond a few trails, some raised beds for community gardeners, and a picnic table and benches. Merced Heights Playground, also on Shields, has a couple of tennis courts, a basketball court, and a children’s play area with climbing equipment. Another of the neighborhood’s curiosities—Shields Orizaba Rocky Outcrop—has been described as “not quite a park,” and it’s fairly easy to see why: this bizarre promontory of serpentine and schist temporarily interrupts the normal grid, making dead-ends of both streets after which it takes its name. Local hikers and dog-walkers frequent it most, enjoying its views and lax leash rules.

The area is a prime candidate for undergrounding utilities. Look overhead on most of the streets, and it’s a tangle of wires and poles, eyesores that block views and add to the messy look of the streets. The city has begun replacing the modern “cobra” streetlights with a classic “teardrop” more in keeping with the era in which this area was developed, but lack of funds has stymied a full-speed ahead approach.

In addition to the aforementioned OceanView Village shopping center, many smaller shops, services, and businesses cluster along Randolph. Though it’s a main drag, with the “M” streetcar running down the middle, the street has a forlorn aspect, with only a shop here and there between somewhat seedy rental units and small homes. The Oceanview Branch of the public library (at Ramsell) is the one bright spot along this dreary stretch.

The “M” streetcar line cuts through the neighborhood’s middle, offering access to points north (Stonestown Mall, West Portal, downtown) as well as to BART at the Balboa Park station. The No. 54 bus traverses the area’s southern half, on the other side of Brotherhood Way, terminating at the BART Daly City Station. (A large parking lot for BART patrons lies just off St. Charles Avenue, just before it crosses over I-280.) Though parking is generally easy, the city’s Department of Parking and Traffic have issued “CC” and “B” permits for certain streets near schools or the BART station.

The lone school in the neighborhood—Jose Ortega Elementary, on Sargent Street, at the south end of Brooks Park—was rated 6 out of 10 by GreatSchools.

This is a marginally safe neighborhood, according to San Francisco Police Department figures, with a certain reputation for burglaries, robberies, and assaults. In any three month period, occasional vandalism (mostly graffiti) and disturbing the peace violations are committed as well. There have been three homicides in the last three years (all of them committed in 2007).

Real estate here is struggling to recover from the economic doldrums of the 2009/2010 period, with home prices suffering a 12 percent decline in the last year alone, according to Trulia. Many single-family homes with multiple bedrooms and baths sell for well under $500,000, with one three-bedroom fixer on Chester Avenue going for $392,000. Rentals, many of them in the OceanView Village complex, are also reasonable, with prices for a one-bedrooms starting at about $1,200 a month. As with apartments in adjoining areas, the student population from City College and SFSU drives the market here.