Neighborhood review: the mid-Sunset

Sure, Airbnb sucks and it’s taken apartments and houses off the market and turned them into hotels, we can all agree about that. I don’t think it’s a problem when someone rents a room in their house to a tourist for a few days or weeks but when entire buildings are turned into off-the-books hotels, that’s not good.

BUT but but I would argue that Airbnb did one really good thing. It got people out of tourist zone hotels and into neighborhoods and really into the fabric of a city. You may not agree but I think if you’re staying in a Hyatt Place next to the airport or in a JW Marriott in Union Square, you’re not experiencing the city. Just ask anyone who lives in New York what’s good to do in midtown Manhattan or a San Franciscan what spots to make sure and not miss in Fisherman’s Wharf and watch the faces you’ll get, somewhere between “bemused” and “I think there was a rat foot in this salad.”

ALL THAT BEING SAID I think it’s a good idea to occasionally vacation in your own city. I’ve been doing this for years and I highly recommend it. Sometimes I go in the opposite direction of what I just said and stay in Union Square just to get a feel for what tourists are experiencing (I even wrote about one such trip). But as we all know, SF is a city of neighborhoods, and sure, Union Square is technically a “neighborhood” but you know what I mean.

You may think at this point “It’s been 265 words, when in God’s name are you going to get to the point?” And the point is, as detailed in my previous post, we were forced out of our usual home and neighborhood by our own decision to destroy and hopefully rebuild two rooms of our house and after trying several non-Airbnb ways to find a place to stay for 2 months, we finally had to resort to the corporate giant and rented a place in a WHOLE! NEW! NEIGHBORHOOD! for 2 months. It was very expensive!

First off, I was to relieved to find out that the manager of the property isn’t some corportae goon but an actual guy who lives next door! I bump into him and/or his wife with some frequency and they’re super nice people so that’s good.

I’m not tryna get doxxed here but if you follow me on Bluesky (and if you don’t, what the hell?) you’ve probably figured out I’m in the mid-Sunset, around 19th Avenue and not far from the park. The first thing I learned from staying here is YOU DO NOT WANT TO LIVE ON 19TH AVENUE. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s basically a six-lane highway that connects I-280 with Golden Gate Park, where it makes a SHARP TURN and then becomes Park Presidio. It is full of drivers who are NOT SHY about using their horns. Our apartment, blessedly, has double-paned windows and the bedrooms are in the back so it’s not TERRIBLE but when it’s hot out like the last few days and you have to open a window, Jesus Christ, you motherfuckers need to CALM THE FUCK DOWN.

So on Irving between 19th and like 25th there is a bustling commercial sector with three main types of businesses: Asian restaurants, Asian and Asian-adjacent markets, and boba shops. They all appear to do a very good business! In between are sprinkled in some deli/liquor stores and a couple of dive bars and a weed store (of course, you can’t have an SF neighborhood without a weed store) and a perfectly serviceable pizza place (Hole in the Wall Pizza, with the unfortunate URL sfhole.com). Oh and a Starbucks. Oddly, this is one of the only neighborhoods I’ve spent much time in that doesn’t have its own cutesy local coffee place like Unfortunate Grounds or Brew Tabernacle. Do you wanna see? I’ll go take a picture right now.

If you saw me take this no you didn’t. This photo also highlights one of the chief features of the area - constant and unrelenting fog. It’s a nice neighborhood but man the weather fucking blows ass, and I don’t exactly live in the Mission normally. I’m used to a little fog but the weather here could have been concocted in a lab to give people Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is grim and there’s no way around it.

The other weird thing is that there are two deli/liquor stores ON THE SAME BLOCK and they’ve both been there forever. They (Handy Deli and Lucca Deli) both make great sandwiches and have incredible beer selections and they’re both great stores so WHAT THE FUCK, how are they both thriving within 150 feet of each other? Are they, like, friends or have they had a bitter rivalry going back years?

(Lucca Deli is actually called “Lucca Food Deli and Wine Shop” presumably to differentiate from the other Lucca Deli on Chestnut. There has to be a story there. FUTURE POST IDEA!)

There are also two good dive bars, Silver Spur, which opens at 8:30 a.m. and Durty Nelly’s, a you guessed it Irish bar down the street. I’ve been saying I have to go to the Spur one morning before I leave just to scope out who hangs out at a bar at 9 am on like a Thursday. ANOTHER POSSIBLE FUTURE POST.

So that’s the neighborhood. I’ve been here as a visitor before (specifically to Underdogs, a sports bar/burrito place hybrid before it moved over to the more thronged pastures of 9th Avenue) but now I feel like I really know the place. The homeless lady at the bus stop on 19th and Irving says good morning to me every day! That’s how you’ve made it.

I feel like now I want to pick another SF neighborhood and stay there for a couple days. Somewhere I’ve never lived and would never normally go.

FUTURE POST: This is how I ended up in the Marina.