Relocating to SF from Boston: Possible to rent in Mission/Castro/Noe Valley/Hayes Valley for $2500 a month (San Francisco: apartment)

[amm131]

My husband and I (both in our early 30s, no children, though that may change in the next 2-3 years or so) are relocating to San Francisco from Boston later this year for my job. We're both pretty familiar with the city, and would love to live in SF itself in an area with an easy commute for my job (Financial District) and easily accessible to the Mission/Duboce Triangle area for my husband (he's an artist with lots of connections in these areas).

Is it possible to find a large one-bedroom or a small two-bedroom in the Mission, Castro, Noe Valley, or Hayes Valley areas in the $2500 range? We'd also consider Soma, and are open to any other suggestions for areas as well. Safety, proximity to work, and proximity to restaurants, nightlife, culture etc. are probably our most important considerations.

[mayorhaggar]

Absolutely. A very basic one bedroom in those areas would start around $1400 a month. The more you pay, the nicer the place will be--better amenities, more rehab work, etc. It's a great area but a lot of buildings especially around the Dolores Park area are really run down inside, but again if you pay more you should be able to find something nicer. A 2 bedroom would probably be around 2000 for a very basic place but that would probably be pretty run down but you can often find good deals if you are lucky, same goes for any size apartment.

The area around Dolores Park is my favorite part of SF--from Duboce Triangle to Noe Valley with Castro on the west and Valencia on the East. The park is nice, Bi-Rite is neat, and there's a lot of great restaurants and shops many of which aren't too expensive. Stay west of Mission St. to avoid the crime and grime that is on Mission and east of it.

I'd avoid SOMA unless you really fall in love with it. It's a lot of warehouses with a few residential buildings mixed in and it just doesn't feel like a nice SF neighborhood, there's not much retail (though there are some big box stores like Trader Joes and Best Buy and Costco) though it is fairly convenient to downtown SF. The eastern end of SOMA near the ballpark has a lot of very new condo-style buildings but the area feels pretty sterile.

I lived in Hayes Valley for about 2 years before moving to Oakland last July, before that I lived near Dolores Park. Hayes Valley is ok and it's centrally located but it's nowhere as fun and nice as the Dolores Park area. It's small and there aren't a lot of good restaurants, it's mostly kind of frou-frou boutiques and restaurants for the opera crowd. It's not far from places like the Mission or Japantown but it's enough of a walk or bus/train ride to get to those places that you feel kind of isolated, otherwise it's right next next to some public housing (whose crime doesn't really into Hayes Valley for some reason) and Civic Center which is basically an extension of the Tenderloin. It's great for getting to the Financial District though, just hop on the Muni Metro at Van Ness and you're at Montgomery in about 10-15 minutes.

[amm131]

Great to know! The area around Dolores Park is my and my husband's favorite area as well. We would absolutely love to live around there.

Would we be totally crazy to try to keep a car in that neighborhood? My husband really needs a car for his work. We've kept a car in the city before-- we lived in Manhattan for many years and kept a car on the street--but have been spoiled by the garage in our current building!

[gnomatic]

SOMA might be a good location in this particular case. It's walkable to FiDi. And Between 2nd - 5th, south of Harrison, north of the ball park, there are ALOT of artist studios. From the outside they just look like old warehouses/industrial space, inside, artists have workspaces, share facilities (kilns, glass blowing furnaces, printing press), etc. It's quite interesting to visit (check out SF open studio (SF Open Studios | ArtSpan (http://artspan.org/sf-open-studios - broken link)) that occurs around October). Here is the map from the 2009 event:
http://www.artspan.org/sites/default/files/2009SFOpenStudios_Weekend3.pdf (broken link)
There is a large concentration of artist studios (as the OP husband already has connections) in the Mission. Here are some in that area:
http://www.artspan.org/sites/default/files/2009SFOpenStudios_Weekend1.pdf (broken link)

[mayorhaggar]

Parking in the Dolores Park area is tough but doable if you have a parking sticker. You'll often have to drive around for quite a while to find a space. A lot of people around there work in Silicon Valley so they get home around 6pm so all the spaces is pretty well occupied by around 5:30pm or 6 or so. Eventually you'd figure out what blocks are promising. Noe Valley and Duboce Park area should be pretty similar. Hayes Valley is worse I would think, I didn't have a car but it seemed like there was a lot more metered parking and it's near City Hall so I think a lot of city workers park around Hayes Valley during the day. SOMA would be easier I guess because there's less residential stuff but I could be wrong.

[nei]

I doubt it could worse than Manhattan

[amm131]

That's sort of what I'm thinking -- and the car is used almost exclusively by my husband, who keeps off hours during the daytime and can often snatch up spots left by business-hours commuters. So it's not a huge concern, especially since most of our parking-related horrors revolve around snow emergencies and the like, which we will luckily not have to deal with in SF!