Realtor Districts vs. Supervisor Districts vs. Neighborhoods

Photo ©Travis Monson (@travismonsonphotography on Instagram, travismonsonphotography.com). Used with permission.

Living in San Francisco can be confusing. Say you live at 18th and Noe Streets. You and your friends call it the Castro, but your real estate agent says you live in Eureka Valley. They also say you’re in District 5, but you are pretty sure you voted for supervisor for District 8. So which is it?

Here’s the thing: They’re all true. The city is divided into multiple districts and neighborhoods that are defined differently depending on context.

First, there are political districts defined by which is overseen by any given Supervisor. There are 11 such districts, with District 1 in the far northwest, and the rest striping across the city from west to east and north to south, with District 11 landing in the far south central area.

Within the purview of real estate, the San Francisco Association of Realtors® (SFAR) has their own districts to define areas of the city. In the SFAR universe, there are 10 districts, with District 1 also in the far northwest, but as the districts increment up, they tend to zigzag, first north to south in the west, then south to north in the center, and again north to south on the eastern edge. Each major district is subdivided into subdistricts that encompass areas that are most similar to each other demographically. These subdistricts most closely resemble what we think of as the city’s neighborhoods.

Neighborhoods are a somewhat more squishy thing. Ask any five people what the boundaries of the Castro are, for example, and you’re likely to get five different answers. To make matters even more confusing, some larger areas or groupings of neighborhoods are anecdotally referred to as districts (e.g., Sunset District, Mission District, etc.), but that has no significant meaning. However, the San Francisco Planning Department does recognize several dozen neighborhoods, the boundaries of which are used to highlight government services available in the area, including elected officials, nearby schools, libraries, parks, post offices, off-street parking, public transit, and street sweeping schedules.

So, if you lived at 18th and Noe, you would be in Supervisor District 8, SFAR District 5 (Central), subdistrict 5k (Eureka Valley/Dolores Heights), and still be in the Castro.

Using the map below, you can see how all these districts and neighborhoods align. In some cases, they tend to line up pretty neatly. In others, well, not so much. Click the icon in the upper left corner to bring up the legend so you can toggle each layer off and on; by default we are showing only the SFAR districts. We’ve added color to the supervisor and SFAR districts for better visibility.