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(Full disclosure: I live on San Jose Avenue and the e-mail from Jennifer Rosdail was forwarded to me.)

Danny Della Lana, who lives on the west side of San Jose Avenue in what was once considered the Mission District, had just discovered in an e-mail that the new map from the San Francisco Association of Realtors moved him into Noe Valley.

“This detracts from our hipster cred,” he wrote in an e-mail to neighbors. “Maybe after 40 that isn’t a bad thing as there is nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster.”

Jennifer Rosdail, with Paragon Real Estate Group, who sent the map to potential homebuyers, said in her newsletter that while it may seem academic to some, it can be important when trying to sell. Her good friends on San Jose, she said, “have had the luck to move from the Inner Mission to Noe Valley at no expense and without packing a box!” (Download our map of the changes. )

While the Mission is cooler, she added, Noe is more expensive.

“The simple placement of the line that moved the Noe border from their (her friends’) back fence (where it was for the prior 10 years or so) to the back fence of their neighbors across the street will change what searches they are included in,” she wrote; “how their property might be perceived and what buyers would be willing to live there. Ditto goes for areas annexed from Sunnyside and Miraloma Park by Glen Park.”

The map, she said, has been changed twice since she began selling houses in 2002. Some of the boundary changes she notes in her newsletter:

Boundary Changes:

  • Dividing line between 7b (Pacific Heights) and 7d (Cow Hollow) jogs south for one block at the west end and changes so that both sides of Green are in 7d (Cow Hollow) between Lyon and Divisadero. The boundary between Divisadero and Van Ness remains the same, keeping both sides of Green in 7b (Pacific Heights).
  • 9h (South Beach) expands into portions of 9f (SOMA) and 9d (Mission Bay).
  • Dividing line between 6b (Hayes Valley) and 8f (Van Ness/Civic Center) moves from Gough to Franklin. Dividing line between 6c (Lower Pacific Heights) and 8f (Van Ness/Civic Center) moves from Gough to Franklin between Sutter and California.
  • Dividing line between District 8a (Downtown) and 8j (Tenderloin) moves from Geary to O’Farrell.
  • 5f (Buena Vista Park) expands to include Ashbury Heights, and is renamed Buena Vista/Ashbury Heights, accordingly.
  • 5e (Parnassus/Ashbury Heights) changes to include a portion of 5b (Haight Ashbury) which is commonly known as Cole Valley, and is renamed Cole Valley/Parnassus Heights, accordingly.
  • 9a (Bernal Heights) expands to include portions of 9c (Inner Mission) south of Cesar Chavez between San Jose and Mission.
  • Dividing line between 5c (Noe Valley) and 9c (Inner Mission) moves from Guerrero to San Jose between 24th St. to 26th St.
  • 5a (Glen Park) expands to include portions of 4s (Sunnyside), 4h (Miraloma Park) and 5c (Noe Valley).

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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22 Comments

  1. @generic: No, Ritual is still in the Inner Mission. Oddly it borders on Dolores Heights/Eurka Valley, but it is in the Inner Mission.

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  2. For years homes just east of San Jose Ave and between 30th and Army have been listed as located in “Baja Noe Valley.”

    For years it’s been called “Cesar Chavez”

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  3. I’ve always known that Church and 27th to 30th and over to Mission Street as “Pierree Valley”. I resent the encroachment of Bernal off the hill. If you’re not up a hill, you’re not in Bernal Heights or Noe Vally.

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  4. The need to change the boundaries and names of areas or sub names makes me crazy. Having grown up my whole life the existing names always did just fine. People need to just get over it. If you live in the TL it doesn’t change the fact some homeless tranny is shuffling past your door whether you call it TL, Downtown or Lower Pac Heights…it’s still a not so pretty sight first thing in the morning.

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  5. Glen Park ends at 280, no ifs ands or buts. Anything past the freeway is fake glen park. Also, any walk down Geary will tell you that its definitely part of the TL. Don’t believe me? Hop off the 19 polk and have a look for yourself.

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  6. The fact that the north side of Bernal Hill close to Cesar Chavez and the Mission Corridor b/w Chavez and Courtland is considered Bernal Hieghts is ludicrous. Furthermore, the back side of the “Mission” Safeway is now in Noe Valley??? For me, Bernal Heights is the west and southern slopes of the hill south through Holly Park with Courtland being the commerical district. The Mission extends up mission until it gets to the Excelsior bridge.

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  7. We in Bernal Heights know where our neighborhood starts and ends–and no real estate map is going to change that!

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  8. It’s a shame we can’t convince the people who write car insurance that Noe Valley extends east of Dolores; I’d save a few hundred dollars a year that way.

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  9. For years homes just east of San Jose Ave and between 30th and Army have been listed as located in “Baja Noe Valley.”

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  10. When we bought in ’92 on Bartlett near 24th, the real estate flier read ‘almost in Noe Valley.” We just laughed.

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    1. Kim: A committee of the San Francisco Association of Realtors, Lydia
      More details coming.

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  11. I live at San Jose and 23rd, closer to Guerrero than Valencia. Does this mean I live in Noe now? Good thing for rent control.

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