This Week in Noe Valley: High End Homes Languish, More Bar Robberies & Fires, Gentrification 1977 Style

The latest news from, about and for Noe Valley from around the interwebs:

• 24th Street Luxe townhouses not selling [Curbed]
• More SF homes sit unsold as inventory grows [SFGate]
• Revamped and modern Little Chihuahua reopens [Hoodline]
• More bar robberies in the Mission - which sound a lot like the recent Noe Valley incidents [Mission Local]
• The helicopters you heard this week were for a fire at 24th and Valencia [Hoodline]
• Don't let the inactivity fool you: New beverage director named at Uma Casa (in the former Incanto space) [Eater]
• By 1977, Mission gentrification was framed as middle class spillover from Castro & Noe Valley [@enf]
• A good start: 60 news-rack pedestals will be removed from San Francisco sidewalks within the next month [SFGate]
• Cool old maps of SF [Curbed]

[Photo: Bougainvillea doorway via Beyond Ordinary]

This Week In Noe Valley: La Bou Closing Soon, The Root Wants You To Re-Wild And Local Blight From 1945

News from, about and for Noe Valley from around the interwebs:

• Driven out by rising rent, Cradle of the Sun finds a new home in West Portal [NVSF]
• Priceless: A 4 year old’s map of Noe Valley [@peteskomoroch]
• La Boulange closures have started – Noe Valley branch set to close Sept. 17 [Hoodline]
• Photo of blight on Sanchez between 25th and Duncan – from 1945! [Eric Fischer]
• ICYMI: Video Wave relocating to inside Buttons Candy Bar [NVSF]
• Olive This Olive That makes best “niche” store list [SFist]
• Photo: Manhole cover or transporter pad in Noe Valley? [suebraids]
• Noe Valley is like an art installation [@Omarmasry]
• Estate sale for former Noe Valley artist Jack Freeman [1608 Legacy]
• Found art: Street corners of Noe Valley [@Dunk_Ra]
• The Root Midwifery – an “opportunity for women to connect, normalize, re-wild and initiate the blueprint of birth” - opens this weekend, and already has a GoFundMe campaign [PR Newswire]

[Photo: Noe Valley summer day via daretoeatapeach]

This Week In Noe Valley: RadioShack Spared, Fun With SF Maps, And An Extreme Valentine

News from, about and for Noe Valley from around the interwebs:

• The fascinating story of Fernando Nelson, one of the most prolific builders in Noe Valley, Castro and Mission [Hoodline]
• Noe’s priciest home takes a $1 million price cut, and other weirdness [Curbed]
• Noe Valley RadioShack appears to be spared - for now [@pruzicka]
• It’s Beer Week in SF [esbale]
• NōVY, the restaurant replacing Pasta Pomodoro, hopes to open March 9th [@novysf4000]
• Extreme Valentine décor #anyexcuseforaparty [shertle23]
• Yoga Mayu is opening in March on 24th St between Castro and Diamond [@yogamayu]
• Hilarious: 21 San Franciscans draw and annotate SF from memory [Thrillist]
• Remember why you love San Francisco? [The Bold Italic]

[Photo: Cherry blossoms via chloeiot]

This Week In Noe Valley: Twitter IPO Real Estate Angst, Crime Rolls Downhill, and Where Locals Eat

News from, about and for Noe Valley from around the interwebs:

• With the Twitter IPO "expect home prices to go up, especially in and around Noe Valley" [ABC Local]
• "OH: 'Once we go public, we'll be in the 1%' #noevalley" [@karlsf]
• On the Bay Bridge opening: "In the year 2113, when our descendants celebrate the bridge's centennial, $6.4 billion might be enough to buy a nice house in Noe Valley." [SF Gate]
• But for now you can rent this mattress for $2,100 [@mikeindustries]
• Crime doesn't climb in SF (which is why buying on a hill isn't just about the view) [Socketsite]
• How SF maps to Seattle: Noe Valley = Ravenna? [Geekwire]
• Modern Market at 1401 Church Street posts a permit for transfer of ownership [CA ABC]
• Apartment fire on Clipper St [@nelson]
• Bernie's makes this top 10 best coffee shops list, but the quoted reviewer clearly doesn't know Bernie [Stuff]
• Where the locals eat in SF – La Ciccia makes the list [USA Today]

[Photo: "Between the Mission and Noe Valley, my shadow is the length of an entire block," Wndrlost]

Noe Valley Power Outages

Neighbors have reported multiple power outages in Noe Valley over the last month. We're curious: is the power going out more often than the historical norm or does Twitter magnify small outages? Here are examples of some Tweets from the last few days:

@noevalleysf @rle Electrical pole fire on 27 street takes the power out for neighborhood. PGE said that it was caused by fog
— Curtis Smolar (@csmolar) May 26, 2013

@noevalleysf is there public data on power outages in SF? My power on Clipper has been out for 3 hours in the last month.
— Nelson Minar (@nelson) May 24, 2013

@noevalleysf 4 power outages this month in Noe.Each take out several recessed lightbulbs. Today's killed our Tivo/XFinity/TV set-up. FAIL
— Rebecca Eisenberg (@rle) May 28, 2013

Yet another power outage in Noe Valley #SF - actually a brownout, grid at 66.0v
— Jim Constantine (@jgc94131) May 28, 2013

PG&E tracks current outages, but as far as we can tell doesn't make public data on power outage trends by neighborhood. So we're asking for your input - send us reports of power out within Noe Valley via email or Twitter and we'll map all data. Maybe there's a trend we can talk to PG&E about.

[NVSF: Map of Noe Valley Power Outages]
[PG&E: Outage Map]

This Week In Noe Valley: The Home Of Lux Homes, Another Stuck Bus, And The History Of San Francisco Street Names

News from, about and for Noe Valley from around the interwebs:

• Noe Valley was king of luxury home sales in SF for first quarter of this year [SF Biz Times]
• New to SF? From SF? This map will make you smarter [Noah Veltman]
• "Another great moment in corporate busdriving" [@bwalsh]
• Yet another realty company's video guide to Noe Valley [ClimbSF]
• Want to donate perishable food? This week we learned how. [@dolface]

[Photo: soniafaleiro]

A Most Excellent Map Of Employee Shuttle Bus Stops

No routes have been published of employee shuttle bus stops, but Realtors seem to know where they are - they're a huge bonus for selling or renting property in Noe Valley and other neighborhoods to those commuting to Silicon Valley. Neighbors have loved/hated them since around 2008. The City conducted a study concluding there's money to be made in regulation. But no one has quantified what everyone wants to know - how many people ride them and do they do more harm than good?

Data visualization experts at Stamen Design were commissioned by Zero1 to study how many people make the commute from San Francisco to the Silicon Valley, urban to suburban. It was a long process, and the above map was created. The nut? Besides the really cool graphic? "At a rough estimate, these shuttles transport about 40% of the amount of passengers Caltrain moves each day. Google alone runs about 125 trips daily, all over the city."

[Stamen: The City from the Valley (2012)]
[Zero1 Biennial]

Where Is Noe Valley *Really*?

With all the geeks/programmers/engineers/coders in San Francisco you'd think someone would have come up with a better map of San Francisco neighborhoods than realtors provide. Enter the The Neighborhood Project --they cull data from Craigslist housing posts and input on their own site to map out how people identify where they live. Call it democracy in mapping.

Check it out. If enough people help populate the map we may have to change the borders we use to cover Noe Valley.

[The Neighborhood Project (via Curbed SF)]
[SFGate: Familiar S.F. neighborhoods gain new names]
[NVSF: Fun With Maps: Where is Noe Valley?]

Noe Valley is Liberal

Fall Line Analytics (via Sweet Melissa) has compiled voter data (and probably more info than anyone really wants to know) about you and everyone you know.

It's no surprise that Noe Valley is mostly liberal, a little moderate and maybe just a tad conservative. Cool map, but it just enforces what a commenter on TheFrontSteps said about life here: "The people in Noe Valley simply have a fully realized liberal fantasy. The ‘charm’ of a tightly controlled social environment, while being near all of those other parts of the city that they can’t quite bear to give up…" But we knew that.

As an aside... if this map is truly accurate how did Chris Daly get elected? Twice!?

[Sweet Melissa: Off To The Races!]
[TheFrontSteps: Comment Du Jour...]

Fun With Maps: Where is Noe Valley?

Defining the borders of Noe Valley can be difficult, if not futile. Because of this we've decided to use the realtor map that defines District 5C. On our recent walk around the perimeter we were joking about "Noe" and "Not Noe" when looking at houses on the same street, and other times we felt like we were in entirely different neighborhoods. Take, for example, Diamond Heights Blvd: technically Noe Valley, but 24th St is not convenient for services. This map may be arbitrary, but it's what we'll use to define Noe Valley.

Here are some other maps that serve our neighborhood, with District 5C highlighted on each map.

Supervisor District 8.

Zip Code Map

SFPD Mission Station

SFPD Ingleside Station

[MLS District Maps]
[Zip Code Maps]
[SF Board of Supervisors Districts]
[SF Police Stations]