Inner Mission

Housing in the Mission is mostly mid-rise, wood-framed multi-family buildings. Single-family homes are rare on the north end and more common on the south end, and there are plenty of condos in smaller and mid-size buildings.

Houses sold for a median of about $1,110 a square foot last year, condos about $990. With 99 condo sales and 27 TIC sales, this is where many first-time buyers find a way in.

The Mission has a reputation for the sunniest weather in San Francisco. Twin Peaks shelters it from the fog, which is why citrus and avocado trees thrive in backyards.

Mission, Valencia and South Van Ness are mixed-use, with homes above shops and restaurants. You could eat out for weeks before repeating a cuisine.

BART runs under the neighborhood with stations at 16th and 24th Streets, which makes downtown and East Bay commutes easy. Numerous Muni bus lines cross it as well.

As one of the oldest, if not the oldest, areas of San Francisco, the Inner Mission (often called just “the Mission”) has been home to native people, Spanish missionaries, Irish, German, Mexican and Central American immigrants, and more recent gentrifiers throughout its long history. Several areas of the Mission reflect this history through beautifully rich mural projects, including those along Balmy and Clarion Alleys, the Women’s Building, and at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts.

Other designated landmarks include the city’s oldest single-screen movie theater in the Streamline Moderne style, Grand Theater, and the San Francisco Armory, built as an arsenal for the National Guard in 1912-14 and in the Moorish Revival style. Throughout its history, the Armory has also played host to sporting events, a movie set for Star Wars, a rehearsal space for the San Francisco Opera, and a production studio for Kink.com.

Where do we even start? The Inner Mission is arguably the city’s most lively, vibrant, diverse, and chaotic neighborhood–a fascinating collision of histories, cultures, classes, and communities. One block of Mission Street can feature a Chinese donut shop, a Mexican taqueria, a movie theater, a check cashing joint, a storefront Pentecostal church, and sidewalk vendors. One block over, Valencia Street is a hip shopping and dining corridor with all kinds of international and fusion cuisines, art galleries, coffee shops, and both first- and second-hand furniture stores. The Inner Mission offers plenty of street festivals and parades throughout the year, including for Carnaval, the largest multicultural festival in the West Coast, bringing together San Francisco's Latino, Caribbean and African Diasporic

The Inner Mission has more of a “communities” vibe than many San Francisco neighborhoods, and a new condo development on Valencia Street will feel very different from a single-family Victorian-style home on, say, Alabama and 24th Streets. Quiet and sedate, it’s not. People move to the Inner Mission to be near the pulsing heart of urban San Francisco, within walking distance of every conceivable cultural attraction, restaurant, and public transit option, while enjoying some of the city’s sunniest weather (and flattest streets).

As an “already built” neighborhood, the Inner Mission is not a neighborhood where you should expect to find substantial new construction projects. Smaller developers may renovate/flip existing properties, or may take advantage of recent housing laws to add additional units to already existing housing. Transit corridors and major neighborhood streets are the most likely areas for new construction buildings in already built neighborhoods with existing housing stock.

Prices in The Mission move block by block and season by season, so a single average hides more than it tells. Our Market Notes track current values across the city. For a read on a specific home or street, ask us: we’ll pull the recent sales and tell you what they mean.