Tag: sunset

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Owning a Home in San Francisco

There’s been lots of articles in the paper recently about owning a home being a bad thing. I was always scratching my head about this until I realized I’m one of the few people left that was born and raised in San Francisco and is STILL HERE. Most of the people you’ll find in San Francisco are lucky to have lived here for twenty years at most, so it’s time I gave you a little history lesson about San Francisco real estate.

Now for most people here they don’t remember the time when a house was affordable because they aren’t, well, old like me. I was born in 1962 and my parents had bought their four bedroom house in the Sunset in 1954 for a whopping $18,300. Yes, you saw that right, there isn’t a couple of extra zeros on that number. The builders, McKewan Construction were asking $23,500 and my parents underbid the asking price and got it. The early 50’s was a buyer’s market.

My parents never thought of selling the house and moving on. It was a home to them and you didn’t sell it every couple of years to turn a profit only to move into a bigger home that you’d again turn and sell at a profit a few years later again.

My Grandmother was always the business savvy one in the family and she consulted her lawyer who worked out a deal that because I was living in the house when I turned 18 that I could have my name added on the the title as an owner so that when everyone was gone there would be no inheritance. Smart move and if you have kids you should think about doing this. There’s nothing illegal about it and it gives your kids a pretty priceless place to live in California what with Prop 13 and all that.

Now housing prices rose a bit over the years, but it wasn’t until around the late 80’s that the prices started to soar. In the 70’s you could get the same house for around $50,000. That’s pretty much close to the cost of a Lexus today with add ons and closing costs. Somewhere around the mid 80’s the prices started to skyrocket. When my wife and I got married you could get a two bedroom for around $215,000 out in the Sunset. I know, we were looking into the idea at the time. Our first landlord got a two bedroom house with a 1 bedroom cottage house in 1994 for $205,000. It wasn’t a fixer upper either.

Prices kept going up and right before the dot bomb of 2000 my Mom’s best friend who was in real estate told us we could easily get $1.5 million for this house. Great, we were millionaire, but still trying to struggle to pay the bills. I remember having to write the check for my Mom for the property tax that year and it was $650. We were paying twice that for our two bedroom house we were renting at the time.

My friends from High School, the few that stayed around and ended up in a similar situation to myself are all doing pretty good. I’m happy for them. We had parents that thought ahead. Others can’t fathom this and the fact that the people writing for the Chronicle and Examiner never take this into account shows that they aren’t either. Probably because they weren’t born and raised here. There are lots of people who want to do away with Prop 13 so that the state can get more money from home owners, but I’m not going to stand with that group. I plan on dying in this home, probably not literally, but I want to pass this house on to our daughter when we go.

I used to hate the crotchety old guys who would sit out in front of their houses in a lounge chair watering their lawns talking about why, I remember back when we… fill in the snide comment of your choice. I want to be that guy when I’m in my 70’s. I guess it’s all because I’m a Sunset redneck at heart and I want to be around to remind people about that.

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The Outside Lands

Friday was an interesting day for me as I got together with a couple of friends for lunch in the Inner Sunset district. This is a great place to eat because of the area I refer to as “the Cross”. It runs from roughly 8th avenue to 10th avenue and from Judah to Lincoln Way. Every other shop is a restaurant pretty much and you’ve got a choice of foods from around the world.

As we were sitting and gorging ourselves at Crepevine we started talking about how San Francisco used to be before people decided it might nice to live here. Well, the picture here is of 7th and Lawton streets before the construction boom that finally killed off the last inland sand dunes somewhere around the 90’s [it’s now a soccer field behind St. Ignatius High School]. I remember the sand as a kid, it was everywhere. If you dug down less than a foot in the grass planted around my elementary school you hit sand. I think the street cleaners used to be there more for cleaning the sand off the streets than for picking up garbage.

When my parents bought our house in 1954 their backyard was a long strip of sand enclosed in low cost fencing [much the same as many of the pot farm houses still retain]. My dad used to tell me how he’d take my mom’s dog to rear fence and drop him over on the dunes and let him run. Don’t worry, it was a low fence. These were what was known as the “Outside Lands.” Because of Twin Peaks it didn’t used to be very easy to get here so people would have to drive from downtown out through the Mission and circle around until the street car tunnel was put in and roads were able to built to bring people over.

It probably had something to do with 1894 Midwinter Exposition that gave us Golden Gate Park as well. First thing built in the Sunset District was the Shannon Bar, the oldest remaining bar in San Francisco. If you travel out by the beach you might find some remains of Carville where people bought old streetcars and cable cars and turned them into housing kind of like what some people are doing with the steel shipping crates today. Steve “Woody” LaBounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project has written an excellent book on this time and I remember seeing him at a removal of an old earthquake shack from someone’s back yard several years ago. Oh, and what was in that backyard…sand. We still have it. If you travel along Taraval or Judah streets closer to the ocean you’ll see it filling in cracks along the streetcar tracks still, just not as much as it used to.

Our cool, foggy beaches are what says Sunset District to me along with the Indian summers that bring us out of our houses more to do nothing except be outside. Oh, and then there’s the sand.

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Are San Franciscan’s smug?

smug.JPGThere’s a podcast I occasionally give a listen to that is from Minnesota where the podcasters talk about sex. Sometimes it’s mildly amusing at other times they’re downright insulting sex nazis. On one of the recent podcasts one of the members said she’d like to move to San Francisco because of how open minded we are sexually. Then one of the other members made a comment that she’d have to be able to afford $7000 a month for rent and that the people here are smug.

Obviously this person has never been to San Francisco. Yes, rent is high here. Probably some of the highest in the US, but you can find deals if you look hard. The smug comment though got to me even more. I think with the economy crash all the techie yuppies that put the smug in San Francisco left to be smug somewhere else. They occupied only a small part of the city as well. If you travel out to some of the other parts of the city you find real community in the people who live there. I used to live west of Sunset Boulevard near Judah Street. Once you go west of Sunset the entire vibe changes. Everyone’s a little more laid back and relaxed. The people who run the stores and restaurants out there know your name and you know your neighbors as well. We all had something in common out there. We learned to tolerate the fog for the few days of beautiful sunshine we’d get by the beach. Over the years I’ve noticed that for some reason the Sunset is getting more sun and less fog which is a good reason for me to have stayed here.

We’re all good people here and I think it would be best to leave the smugness to the people outside San Francisco who like to look down on us even though they act like us or want to act like us. What do you think?

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You might be a sunset redneck if…

"The half of me that ain't yore sister wants to have sex with you!"

The Sunset District is a place I’ve called home for 40+ years. It’s an odd place that’s enveloped by fog which then will switch to hot sunny day. This is the secret of the Sunset that’s been kept from the rest of San Francisco and with global warming it only gets better as there’s less fog and more sun. Now the oddest part is that beachfront property in any other city carries a high price, but in the Sunset, it’s where we have all the low income, section 8 housing.

My guess is that came from the pre-global warming days when down at the beach there were two kinds of weather, raining, and gonna rain. There were cars up on blocks in people’s front yards or if they weren’t, they were rusting from all the salt air out at the beach. Now, thanks to C. W. Nevius of the SF Chronicle it has brought the Sunset Redneck to the forefront in an article I read today. Now I don’t remember meth labs and whorehouses in the Sunset when I was growing up, but I do remember the working class people who were trying to get ahead by saving money every way they could. I’ve decided to expand on C.W.’s article [what the hell does the C. W. stand for that it sounds so horrible he has to use C.W. anyway? It just reminds me of the actress S. Epatha Merkelson. How bad is that S if Epatha Merkelson is ok?] by creating a list of things common to the Sunset Redneck. See if you qualify even if you aren’t in the Sunset.

1. You have a car up on blocks in your front yard. [bonus if it’s an olive green 1967 Cougar]
2. The last minute and a half of Freebird is the ringtone on your cellphone
3. Girls: you put your makeup on after getting on the L-Taraval or N-Judah and are finished by Sunset boulevard
4. You’ve got a freezer in your basement
5. You’ve got an electric guitar in your basement, but you don’t play guitar
6. Someone says, “The Riptide”, “Kelly’s bar and no grill” or “Club Scirrocco” and you know the bartenders.
7. A sunny weekend means you pull 2 chaise lounges onto your driveway with a cooler of Budweiser.
8. Your lawn is what gardeners refer to as “weeds.”
9. Your mama still doesn’t know ’bout that tattoo you got.

Yep, I’m a Sunset Redneck and wees good peoples.