Gangs of San Francisco (On a T-Shirt)

Happy Friday, Folks!

Thought I’d share a fun, and not too well known (at least not yet) site that features some AWESOME San Francisco T-shirts.

The site is www.gangsofsanfrancisco.com and their shirts rock!

From the site’s “about me” page:

Gangs of San Francisco is a one man operation out of San Francisco’s Outer Richmond. A work in progress, it is run by me, Laureano Faedi. A self taught maker of things, I do all the design work, silkscreening, shipping and research. Having migrated to the Bay Area from Buenos Aires 30 years ago I have found San Francisco to be one of the best cities in the world to live in. This project serves as an outlet for my learning of it’s history as well as a way to teach myself silkscreening. I hope that not only will people enjoy my products but that it might also inspire them to learn more about the city.

His collection is a great start, but I’d LOVE to see more!  Let’s not forget about the various racetracks in the City, the brothels (oh yeah, we had those), the cemetaries (all over the west side of SF until they were moved out to Colma) and even old sports teams like the San Francisco Seals!

Anyhow – the shirts are cool, the shirt maker is a small local business man, and what better way to dress your weekend best than in a comfy shirt that celebrates your San Francisco pride!

Enjoy your weekend!  And buy a shirt!

1896 San Francisco Firehouse For Sale!!! (And a Tour Business and Memorabilia to Boot!)

**UPDATE** 

We’ve determined pricing for the Firehouse and the Tour Business!!!! 

The Firehouse is $975,000

The Tour Business is $249,000

And if you are interested in grabbing the torch and taking over the complete lifestyle, then make a reasonable offer for both!!!  For once, the sellers are not JUST interested in the price (though money DOES talk), but more than anything, they would really love to see someone carry on the legacy they created.  And frankly, I’d like to see the dream kept alive as well! 

(And ideally, I’d like to reserve the right to slide down the firepole from time to time, but that’s not a deal breaker. )

I’m giving you a fair warning – this video is addictive, amazing and has a jingle you may not be able to get out of your head for days!!!  It is NOT your typical property listing video.  TRUST me. 

And thanks to the video, I’ve been singing the “The Big Shiny Mack Truck Fire Engine!” for DAYS now!  I haven’t had anyone complain yet, and may have been the cause of people all over San Francisco singing that jingle now too!

But the video and the song are just bonuses…. along with the song, you get over 4000 square feet where you can whirl around the firehouse which, to my knowledge, is one of the last San Francisco firehouses (if not THE last one) that has still maintained it’s historical integrity. 

The couple that owned it lovingly restored it (a before & after pic are below), and fell so much in love with the place and the lifestyle that they added a “Big Shiny Mack Truck Fire Engine” to their collection and used it to create a profitable tour business that had made kids (of all ages) from ALL over the world smile!!! 

But as many stories go, it’s time for the current owners to move on.  Which means you can pick up this HOT (badumpum) piece of real estate for yourself.    As a fellow colleague joked, it would make an especially “HOT” Valentine’s present. LOL!

Though the price is still not yet determined, numbers are being crunched and the list price will be announced in the next few weeks.  The building, business and historic collection will all be for sale – together, or separately. 

In the meantime, email me at luba@zephyrsf.com or call me at 415-307-1392 for more information. 

A Castle in SF’s Ingleside – Complete with a Drawbridge!

How to Tell You’re in a Safe SF Neighborhood

I hate to say it, but the title of this post is kinda of misleading.  It’s actually a bit of a trick question. 

Why?

Well, everyone has a different idea of what makes a neighborhood “safe.”  Frankly, each person has a different tolerance to risk. 

I live in the Outer Sunset where we seem have a higher than average amount of auto break-ins and thefts and grafitti tends to be fairly common (my fence AND my garbage can got tagged recently AND I chased down two teens I saw tagging on EVERYTHING they saw on the street) but I still tend to consider it a “safe” neighborhood.  Other neighborhoods have higher rates of drug dealing or prostitution.  Others, still, have a high rate of murders and homicides.   Others still have gang violence. 

San Francisco is diverse, and if you’re thinking about buying real estate here, you really need to examine YOUR tolerances. 

What YOU consider to be a safe neighborhood depends primarily on your personal aversion to risk.  Your standard of safety is not necessarily my standard of safety.  (Though I’d be so bold as to go out on a limb and say that most people feel less safe in areas with high murder rates, just sayin’.)

But that doesn’t mean that you need to jeopardize your safety by wandering the streets at night looking for crime. 

To find out about crime in SF, you need only look as far as your computer!

You can easily find statistics about San Francisco crime by pointing, clicking and filling out some parameters. 

CrimeMapping.com, according to their site, ”is a site developed by The Omega Group to help law enforcement agencies throughout North America provide the public with valuable information about recent crime activity in their neighborhood. Our goal is to assist police departments in reducing crime through a better-informed citizenry. Creating more self-reliance among community members is a great benefit to community oriented policing efforts everywhere and has been proven effective in combating crime.”

CrimeReports.com claims to be the world leader in online crime mapping, with over 600 law enforcement partners across North America. It also features sex offender data and allows you to create email alerts about crime in a specific area.

SF Crime Maps is a site that’s hosted by our very own sfgov.org.  To use the site, check out the various FAQ’s and then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “I Agree.”  From there, click the crimes you want to search for (you’ll notice homicides are conspicuously missing from the list!) and select the area parameters.  You can search up to the last 90 days. 

San Francisco Crime Blog picks up where SF Crime Maps leaves off.  The SF Crime Blog covers a variety of crimes in the blog section but really focuses on the murders that have occurred in SF.  In addition to a countdown of the homicides that have occurred, you’ll find a map that details those homicides for 2007 and 2008. *While I liked the format of this blog, a little birdie dropped a note in the comments that informed me of some potential copyright type issues surrounding the blog, and since I HATE it when people copy my content and put it all over the internet (y’all know who you are), I removed the link.*

Once you have access to statistics, you can make your own decisions whether the neighborhood you want to live in is safe enough for you.

More Animal Spotting – Tigers in the Haight

Tiger House in the Haight

I’ve been on a roll snapping pictures of houses with a little more character in the City.  But this one comes to me from Wolf Davidson, who has asked me to identify him as “a VERY pleased client.”    (I helped him sell his home last and he now lives in Oregon with his fiancee!!!  Congrats, Wolf!!! )

I’m not sure when Wolf snapped this photo, but it seems to be a home on Frederick Street in the Haight District.

If you’re got more unique homes to share with readers of The Friendliest San Francisco Real Estate Blog, send them over!

In fact, if you have ANY awesome San Francisco events, details, pictures, tips, etc. you want to share, send THOSE on over too… other blog readers want to hear from YOU!

San Francsico DPW Map from 1997

SF Department of Public Works Map from 1997

I was digging through emails that I meant to get to “one day” on my quest to someday address all the things on my “to do” list when I stumbled upon an awesome map that Mark Pfeiffer, reader of The City Update(TM) – San Francisco’s Friendliest Real Estate Newsletter, sent to me MONTHS ago!!!  Geez – I knew I was behind, but not THAT behind!!!!

Mark wrote:

Hi Luba,

I like your newsletter.  I thought you might be interested in the attached map of San Francisco Neighborhoods that was put out by the Department of Public Works in 1997.  My wife has worked for “the city” for 35 years, in DPW and now PUC, and she gave me a copy of  this map when it first came out.  I’ve searched the DPW web site and have been unable to locate it, so I scanned it.  I’m sorry about the cropping, but my copy is in 8^1/4”x17” format.

v/r Mark

Thanks, Mark!!!  The map is AWESOME!  And I haven’t had time yet, but I’d like to see how it lines up with the SFAR map.

San Francisco Association of Realtors Map

I’d also LOVE to know if anyone has a more current map???  Anyone in DPW now???  Email me if you do!

And for that matter, email me if you come across ANYTHING cool and San Francisco related! Readers don’t just want to read about San Francisco Real Estate, they want to read about San Francisco!  Right?

Da’ Jungle in Da’ Noe Valley

I swear one of these days I will start carrying around a real camera with me, though I can’t say my photos will come out any better!

I see this house all the time when I drive down Church Street to my office in Noe Valley – but never manage to find a minute to stop.

But, I decided today would be different.

My favorite parts of the artwork? The cheetah that looks like he wants to eat me and the sloth that just makes me sleepy.

Feel free to email me any of your unique San Francisco photos. I’m happy to share them with the readers because this blog isn’t JUST about SF real estate, it’s ALL about San Francisco.

Noriega Street Medians Getting a Facelift

Divisadero isn’t the only place in San Francisco getting a makeover.

Noriega Street was recently repaved and these little “traffic calming” medians were installed.  Sadly, they sat around naked and plantless for a few months.

But when I recently spoke to Carmen Chu, the Sunset District’s supervisor, she had mentioned that plants were their way.

I happened to be driving by today and caught the median greening IN ACTION! And in fact, most of Noriega Street’s medians are already finished and at the rate these SF employees are moving, I think there’s a good chance they’ll all be done today.

There’s nothing like watching the City you love get improved, even if it’s a few square feet at a time.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in Noe Valley

I got stuck parking a litle further from my Zephyr Real Estate office than usual today.  But I guess it was one of those serendipitous sorts of things.

I’ve been trying to go “green” just like everyone else is (or should be) doing.  So I was pretty excited to stumble on green11.

Located at 3980 24th St at Noe, green11 has all sorts of organic beauty products AND biodegradable cleaning supplies.

Big whoop, right?  Even Target sells those, right???

Well, green11 lets you bring in your OWN container, that’s right, ANY container and they fill it up for you from their big bottles full of organic and biodegrable goodness.  So that Tide detergent bottle you have?  Bring it on down, fill it up with some eco-friendly detergent, feel good about being green and then go home and do some laundry. 

My favorite part???

Their “business cards” are scraps of brown paper bags that have been cut down and their business info is stamped with a rubber stamp. 

Anyhow – it’s just one more EASY way that you can reduce your footprint on our precious planet. 

The Newest (and possibly best) San Francisco Photo Club

www.Caliber.com

I’ve been a huge fan of local blogger and photographer Plug1 of the photo blog WhatI’mSeeing.com.

You can imagine my nervousness when I read the tweet that WhatI’mSeeing.com was expiring soon. 

Who was going to bring me local photos that have progressively gotten better and better over the last few years?  Who was going to chase girafas around the City?  Who was going to wax poetic in a way that was reminiscent of the late great Herb Caen?

Well – my fears were quelled with the the announcement that Plug1, now officially Troy Holden, was joining a few other amazing local photographers in a collaborative photo club of sorts, Caliber.

So far, the few photos that are up are amazing – and I am not only put at ease, but pretty damn stoked to see the images to come.  Hopefully Troy Holden waxes as poetic as he did when he was Plug1.

From their first welcome post:

Hello, and welcome to Caliber: a group of four San Francisco/Bay Area photographers: Brad Evans, Stuart Dixon, Julie Michelle, and Troy Holden.

Our subject matter will focus on The City and its surrounding cities, with the occasional trek across state and international borders.

We hope you’ll take a look around and like what you are seeing. We’ve back-filled a couple of pages of images curated from our personal favorites, along with a little bit of insight behind each shot.

Make sure to check back daily, bookmark and/or RSS us — we will be updating this site more often than not.

If you’re like me and love San Francisco photography, San Francisco moments from the past and present captured in time and San Francisco in general, I’m sure you’ll enjoy Caliber as much as I’m sure I will.

Good luck on the project guys!  I’ll be watching!