A fascinating snapshot of San Francisco demographics by Daniel415
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.
over 5 years ago
