Townsend St, Mission Bay

Townsend Street is in the SoMa neighborhood where I used to work for a while. Me and the BF came here to go to District, a wine and tapas bars that caters to the Yuppie types which populate this part of SF. The wine selection was amazing and the food too! We loved it.

Marlowes is also on Townsend. I would love to try it, as I hear it has “the best burger in SF.” I am reserving judgement until I get the chance to go there and try it out.

Townsend however is mostly about the hip businesses that have their headquarters here. I am talking about a place like Playdom, a video game maker with titles like Avengers, City Girl and Armies of Magic. They are a little like Zynga, with games that are made for mobile. There are also a couple of radio stations here: Star 101.3 and KMEL.

As far as living here, there are some pretty cool looking modern apartments and the typical SoMa lofts--for which this area is known. Prices are way out of my (and most people’s) price ranges. I took a quick look to see what prices were like these days and this is what I found: a 2-bedroom condo around here will run you about $4000/month.

Yes. This is where you live if you are within reach of the 1%. So if you are the founder of a successful start-up, you might live here. Your workers, however, will have to commute up from The Mission or even farther. Luckily for you with BART and MUNI, SF has a pretty good public transportation system.

This is a pretty busy, urban street so it is a bit on the noisy side and you will get a fairly big number of homeless folks. Overall, it is prety cool though, as far as I am concerned anyway.

Townsend street is one of those places that back in the dot com bubble, it had huge potential. Since the bubble burst back in 2001ish, we've seen a lot of people come and go. Just recently in the past year or so, it has started to add some new additions that I hope will stay for a while, like the new trendy restaurant/bar Marlowe (check out the dining guide) and the yummy Mexican place called Tres Agaves.

The great thing about Townsend is that it's close to the Caltrain station and AT&T park (SF Giants). During the day, it feels completely safe. There's also MUNI buses that run all day and night. At night, probably seems a little less safe with some of the homeless and shady characters that lurk, but all in all, it's not like you are going to get mugged on Townsend.