The home at 116 Elsie St. in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood recently sold for $4.7 million — $705,000 above the original asking price. The city’s artificial intelligence boom has transformed old neighborhoods that previously housed working-class San Franciscans.
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
We were 7 or 8 years old, right at an age when everything is possible. We all lived on Potrero Hill, and on sunny afternoons we’d hang out just up the street where some other kid had rigged up a rope on a telephone pole near a little bluff where we could swing out, like Tarzan did in the movies.
We got tired of that soon enough, so we sat around, drinking Cokes and telling stories. It was serious stuff, sometimes.
The main topic was simple: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “A fireman,” one kid said, and the talk went around: “a policeman,” “a baseball player,” “a nurse, like my mom,” “a truck driver” and so on. We saved the smallest kid for last.
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“A millionaire,” he said. “I want to be a millionaire when I grow up.” Of course we all laughed. That kid must have been crazy.
But, you know, if he’d worked hard, played his cards right, bought a small house and stuck with San Francisco, that kid would be a millionaire today. At least on paper. Almost any house almost anywhere in the city is worth a million dollars now. It’s crazy.
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It was crazy when I told that story about the millionaire kids on Potrero Hill 10 or 15 years ago. It’s crazier now.
The rebuilt home at 630 Precita Ave. in Bernal Heights, originally constructed in 1905, recently sold for $4.3 million.
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
It all hit home about a couple of weeks ago when the afternoon mail had an oversize postcard from Jessica Branson at Compass real estate brokers. It announced that a big house at 116 Elsie St. on the western slope of Bernal Heights with several stories and an amazing view had just sold for $4.7 million, the price of a mansion. The card said the house was sold in only three days for $705,000 above the original asking price.
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What was more amazing, at least to me, was that the $4.7 million house is on the next street. I can see it from my window.
A couple of days later, another card came, this one from Isabelle Grotte, another Compass agent, announcing the sale of a “newly rebuilt residence” at 630 Precita Ave., a few blocks away, for $4.3 million. The Precita Avenue house does not seem to have much of a view, but has four bedrooms and a three-bedroom in-law apartment.
Neither of these $4 million-plus houses is much to look at from the outside. Both have a clean, white, spare look, understated. But inside both have all the best the 21st century has to offer, what “the premium buyers are willing to pay for: exceptional location, design integrity and turnkey quality,” as Grotte describes 630 Precita.
Both come with neighborhood histories. The Precita property is near where Precita Avenue runs into Cesar Chavez Street at the foot of Bernal Hill. The original house was built in 1905, almost on the banks of the now-vanished Precita Creek.
The back side of the multistory home at 116 Elsie St. in Bernal Heights offers amazing views of Noe Valley and Twin Peaks to the south, and the Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais to the north.
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
The neighborhood was full of working people over the years when I was a kid and for years later: longshoremen, bus drivers, teachers, people who worked for the phone company. There was music and street art. The first Carnaval San Francisco celebration was held in Precita Park. It was off the beaten track: Some of the houses just up from Precita were converted chicken shacks, wrote Peter Booth Wiley in an essay published on the FoundSF website.
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The Elsie Street property on the other side of Bernal Hill is different: It is one of the houses built not long after the street was finally paved. Old-timers remember a dirt road there.
Elsie is still so narrow, two cars can’t safely pass. There is still one vacant lot on Elsie, thick with wild fennel. The back side of the big houses on Elsie is what makes them special — and valuable. The downslope opens up so the view extends over Noe Valley to Twin Peaks and, to the north, the Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais.
Time has gone by, but the neighborhood still has a village feel to it, with a modest shopping street and nearby small treasures: stairway streets, a few narrow back alleys, an occasional coyote sighting. Bernal Hill recently became the home of a family of great horned owls.
They say there are moments when everything changes, like the season when the Summer of Love shifted the way the world saw San Francisco, or the day six years ago when COVID shut down the city and set forces in play that meant huge challenges to downtown and the rest of the city.
This year may be that moment: An artificial intelligence boom has brought new money and a new economic force to the city. It is like a tide driven by basic economics: supply and demand. The flyer for the house at 116 Elsie put it best: The San Francisco real estate market “has been supercharged by the AI startup boom. … Stupendous amounts of new wealth are being created and market conditions may exceed those last seen in the IPO boom of 2019. … Demand is far outpacing the supply of houses for sale.”
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The recently purchased home at 630 Precita Ave. in Bernal Heights does not offer much of a view, but it has four bedrooms and a three-bedroom in-law apartment.
Carl Nolte/S.F. Chronicle
Another real estate broker, Jeff Salgado, says the market is driven by buyers “predominately from the technology industries … and from investors from all over the globe.”
If this is so, these are forces well beyond the control of local political leaders, or neighborhood groups, or neighbors who wish our pretty little city would stay the way it was.
I went for a walk just the other morning, down the block past a very small house, a funky place once covered with shingles. An old lady lived there, but she moved away and it sold last fall for just over $1 million, according to the Zillow website. The new buyer brought in crews that are rebuilding it — no small task because the house dates to 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War.
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Soon, the new owner will put it on the market, all new — new foundation, new roof, new everything, an old house that has been on the street for 128 years while San Francisco changed all around it. It’s like finding gold in an old mine.
There’s another side to those who stayed with the city and own property. If they sell out and move away, they can never return to San Francisco because they could never afford to buy their old house. San Francisco is too expensive for San Franciscans.