Discover San Francisco Neighborhoods

What makes a neighborhood? That’s for you to decide in your search for a home. How many does San Francisco have? The SF Association of Realtors says 90ish, and Wikipedia comes in with around 120.

Below are 94+ neighborhoods (our count) to help guide your search or focus your obsession.

East - Central SF

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North | Northwest | Northeast

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Central SF

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Southern San Francisco

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West

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West of Twin Peaks

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Why 94+ ? San Francisco Neighborhoods

Who names a neighborhood and how many does San Francisco have? Well, it’s a long story (or a lot of podcasts) and we discuss some of it on our podcast, Escrow Out Loud. The San Francisco Association of Realtors (SFAR), of which Matt is a Past President, runs the San Francisco Multiple Listing Service (MLS), the primary multiple listing service for homes in San Francisco and now part of the NorCalMLS Alliance.

The NorCalMLS Alliance powers Jackson Fuller residential real estate listing data and provides real estate listings from over 55,000 listing professionals serving a population of over 11 million consumers in 22 northern California counties covering more than 28,000 square miles: Alameda, Amador, Contra Costa, Marin, El Dorado, Mendocino, Merced, Monterey, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, San Benito, San Francisco, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus and Yolo.

The SFAR MLS (63* characters saved, we did a podcast about real estate acronyms) categorizes homes into 90 “sub-districts” — what normal people think of as neighborhoods  — and groups them into 10 geographic districts imaginatively named District 1 – District 10. Please note that the SFAR districts are completely different from the Board of Supervisor political voting districts and any other districts like community benefit districts, etc.

Wikipedia says the city has 121 neighborhoods.

We’ve read bloggers who have invented some crazy San Francisco neighborhoods, and we won’t even comment on the fascinating names we’ve seen on that mapping service.

Above are pages for 93 neighborhoods across San Francisco based on the SFAR MLS sub-district area boundaries. We didn’t invent any neighborhoods, but we did our best to address some historical anomalies and modern-day marketing changes.

For example: The SFAR MLS sub-district for The Castro is technically named Eureka Valley/Dolores Heigh.. (darn those character limits in database fields!). We wrote a blog post about why long ago, and we refer to it on our site as The Castro with a separate page for Dolores Heights.

What was Hunter’s Point naval base has been re-branded by the developer as The Shipyard. The neighborhood Wikipedia refers to as Bayview-Hunters Point is what the SFAR MLS calls Bayview. We refer to the SFAR Bayview sub-district as Bayview-Hunters Point and the SFAR Hunters Point area as The Shipyard.

* We didn’t actually count.

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