Hayes Valley

Hayes Valley is fascinating because it’s a tiny neighborhood featuring some of the most stylish, high-end stuff in San Francisco (a pretty stylish and high-end place in general), full of wealthy yuppies (some with hipster aspirations), and it’s immediately adjacent to some of the worst housing projects in the Western Addition—among the most enduring pockets of poverty and systematic disadvantage the city has got.

But its reputation for style and taste is clearly strong—a growing percentage of real estate advertisements for places in the Lower Haight, the Western Addition, and even the Civic Center district are calling themselves Hayes Valley nowadays.

I go here quite a bit - I live not far away, and my video store is here - and never fail to be surprised by the combination of dazzling and borderline frightening this ‘hood offers from block to block. Sort of San Francisco in a nutshell.