Last night after dinner Jen and I took a spontaneous drive to West Portal — about a mile-and-a-half south of where we live — to check out a super-cool corner house for sale under probate. The asking price of $499,000 seems like a steal and I’m sure sold for way above that yesterday when bids were due.
We haven’t spent much time in this fog-saturated area of San Francisco (oh wait, what parts aren’t?), but we immediately fell in love. It’s very similar to our current Inner Sunset neighborhood, but has two important things that we don’t have: A movie theater and home prices that are significantly less than in the Inner Sunset. From what I can surmise, the difference is likely due to the increased fog (even more than in the Inner Sunset, which is saying a lot), the extra 1.5 miles from Golden Gate Park, and the perception that the neighborhood is much farther away than it actually is. But like the Inner Sunset, West Portal is connected to downtown via the Muni trains. There’s a rather large station in West Portal at the beginning of the very cute commercial district, which, unfortunately, has a Starbucks, contrary to the neighborhood’s “phobia about chain businesses,” according to SFGate.
We’ll have to spend more time in the area, but from our first impression, West Portal seems a very likely contender in our ongoing hunt for the first neighbhorhood in which we will be homeowners. The houses seem generally bigger and most streets actually have front lawns, something rare indeed in the City by the Bay.
I also like that “West Portal residents tend to be solidly middle class — primarily firefighters, teachers, health-care workers and small-business owners, according to 1990 census data.”
(House pictured above is the aforementioned one we went to see that had a probate offer deadline of yesterday.)
