Forest Hill, San Francisco

What can be said for a neighborhood that is a museum of fine homes designed by some of the most notable architects of the 20th century? Where the blocks reflect the handiwork of Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Henry Hill, the leafy streets and entries and stairways a legacy of landscape architect Mark Daniels? If “exclusive” comes to mind, that’s certainly apt. But it’s also somewhat misleading. Though Forest Hill may once have touted its exclusivity as a selling point, today it plays up its more embracing nature, open to the city in general, much like an urban park. Among the lucky residents of its curved streets and country-like lanes are an increasingly diverse population of homeowners eager to preserve the neighborhood as a unique example of what the idealism of the City Beautiful movement produced in a city rebuilding from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake.

As with many of the residential parks west of Twin Peaks, Forest Hill had a checkered past. Much of the area was part of a manmade forest, planted by the late 19th-century entrepreneur Adolph Sutro. When the streets and first homes were being constructed in 1913, the developers advertised the district as a place where residents could have a “country home within the city,” a neighborhood graced by mature trees, decorative stairways, benches, and flower urns. It would be a development exclusively of single-family homes, with no apartments or “double”-flat units (as in the rest of the city), with houses set back from the street and separated from each other by a mandated number of feet. Moreover (this being the early 20th century), there would be, to quote a promotional brochure, “no Mongols, Africans or ‘shack builders’ allowed.”

Nearly a century later, most of the ideals promoted by the early developer still hold. Many of the neighborhood’s homes are among the most beautiful and historically significant in San Francisco, representing a cross-section of early- to mid-20th century architecture, as well as distinctive examples of regional design as practiced by, among others, Bernard Maybeck (who designed the iconic neighborhood clubhouse) and Frank Lloyd Wright (one of his “Usonian”-style houses is on San Marcos Avenue). The trees and landscaping have matured beautifully with age, with the street furniture and pedestrian steps, especially the main ones rising from Magellan Avenue to Path Street , still tastefully maintained. (One local historian called the stairway "by far the most elegant in San Francisco," noting how it imparts “a dreamlike, rococo quality to the setting.”) And the question of who is allowed to live here has been settled for decades, not only in the courts, but also in the attitude of the residents. (Willie Mays moved into Forest Hill in 1963; the neighborhood hosts the Arab Cultural and Community Center; and the Forest Hill Association boasts that it “long ago abandoned its founders' restrictive covenants, and today is proud to count … families representing all the ethnic, social and cultural groups which make up 21st century San Francisco.”)

Among the least densely populated places in San Francisco (there are some 650 homes on about a third square mile), Forest Hill is home to 3,000 or so residents, who, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, are mature (median age is 42-plus) and generally either white (55 percent) or Asian (38 percent), with African Americans and people of another or mixed race making up the remaining 7 percent. They tend to be upper middle class (median annual household income is $90,000) and overwhelmingly own their homes (80 percent).

Because the area was intended to have the feel of the country, there is limited commercial activity here, beyond a few restaurants and storefront shops at the intersection of Dewey, Woodside, and Laguna Honda. (There are also a number of shops along Taraval east of 14th Avenue, although many do not consider this Forest Hill, thinking of it more as West Portal.) Although the city assumed responsibility for maintaining the streets and sidewalks in the district in the late 1970s, homeowners within the Forest Hill limits pay an association fee annually for maintenance of the landscaping and street furnishings.

As for parks, the neighborhood—in addition to its manmade forest, grassy medians, stairways, and landscaping features—has a playground (J. P. Murphy) with several tennis courts, a basketball court, children’s swings and climbing equipment, and a clubhouse. Hawk Hill Park, another of San Francisco’s designated “natural areas” located next to Forest Hill’s boundaries, is a steep, sandy incline with great views to the southwest. Although there is a nominal path going through the “park,” it is not recommended that visitors stray far from it, for both safety and ecological reasons.

For such a seemingly “countrified” area, public transportation is quite good in Forest Hill, beginning with the elegant, Italianate Muni subway stop (the oldest underground train stop west of Chicago). Though the frieze above the highly ornamented doors proclaims that this is the “Laguna Honda Station/Twin Peaks Tunnel”—likely because when it was built in 1916 the so-named hospital was the more prominent feature of the area—today’s Forest Hill Station serves the K, L, M, and T streetcars, with their quick access to Civic Center and the Financial District. The No. 6 bus skirts the neighborhood’s western edge en route to points along Haight Street, while three buses—the Nos. 36, 43, and 44—run along Laguna Honda Boulevard on the eastern side, bound for points in the northern half of San Francisco.

Although parking is not difficult to find here, it can be limited, owing to the narrow, steep streets and the overflow from neighboring districts. For that reason, the city’s Department of Parking and Traffic issues “T” residential parking permits, which enable those who live on certain streets with hourly parking limits to ignore the restrictions.

Schools in the neighborhood are, predictably, nonexistent, none having been planned into the original residential-only scheme of the district. But a couple of good schools are nearby—West Portal Elementary, with its campus-like setting off the Kensington Way roundabout, received a 9 out of 10 GreatSchools rating and has a parent-run daycare program and a Chinese immersion bilingual program; and the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, a magnet alternative high school for the performing arts and sciences, on Portola Drive, which received an 8 out of 10 GreatSchools rating.

Forest Hill, while not crime-free, is among the safest places to live in the city. There are occasional burglaries in any three-month period, along with spotty noise nuisances and the even rarer vandalism or graffiti. Though car break-ins and vehicle thefts are reported, these are also rare. Assaults are so infrequent as to be negligible, and there have been no homicides reported in the last three years.

Real estate prices have maintained their value after the downturn, edging up slightly over the last two years, according to Trulia. A simple two-bedroom, one-bathroom home on Dewey Boulevard listed recently at $899,000, while a palatial, four-bed/four-bath home on Sotelo Avenue was asking $1.8 million. Although home rentals are rare to nonexistant, the average monthly asking price for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in or around the neighborhood is $2,300 to $3,000 a month.

Forest Hill is not for everyone—it was designed specifically not to be. But over the years, it has evolved into a quiet, peaceful, elegant neighborhood whose close-knit residents look out for not only themselves but their little piece of town and country as well.