By David Enos

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I missed this article when it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle back in December. It presents several of the city’s neighborhoods from the perspective of the homeless.

I work in neighborhood no. 2, the “service/crack sector.” Chronicle staff writer Kevin Fagan describes it pretty accurately:

During the day, soup kitchens such as St. Anthony’s and other programs for the poor reach out to the homeless, turning the Tenderloin into a service center as vital as Market Street. But it is also where those who traffic in crack can most easily find or sell the drug. At night, it becomes frightening — the only homeless people who sleep here are those who pass out or who group up with sentries, because bands of drug dealers roam the streets all night and terrorize the unprotected.

Didn’t Mayor Newsom have a plan for improving this?

BTW, the graphic — this map is only one section of the larger map — reminds me that, while the Chronicle gets a lot of (well-earned) criticism, one area in which it excels is graphics. I worked on a project once with one of the people in this department, John Blanchard; he was a real wizard with information graphics.

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Could violent criminals be going into upscale neighborhoods and mowing down the ruling class? Let’s compare that map to this one, which I posted last week, showing San Francisco housing prices. Hmmm.

Thinking of buying a house or two in San Francisco? The Trulia real estate prices heat map might be just the thing to help you narrow your search.

Shown are price averages as of January 23, 2008. As you can see, if you refuse to pay less than a million dollars you will have to scratch off several city neighborhoods.

For the most part, the city’s wealth resides at the top of its hills.

By 1938 the essential outlines of the city were filled in and established. Some names have changed — I didn’t know that Fort Point was called Fort Winfield Scott. The location of Funston Park was called Lobos Square. USF was the San Francisco College of Women. There were “bear cages” in the park, as well as “elk and deer corrals.” And so on.

A large (5800 x 4358 px) image of the map is here.

This cool San Francisco neighborhood map is currently sold out from ORK posters, but I assume it will be back in print at some point. It’s much more sophisticated from a graphic design point of view than this version.

The typeface appears to be FF DIN Condensed.

(Note that the map is copyrighted by ORK design and should be purchased from them.)

Dreamworld.org has a good overview of San Francisco neighborhoods, with some comment under the heading “a local’s guide.” Nice identification of SF neighborhoods, although the typography and color scheme would induce migraines. For the screenshot above I mellowed out the colors a bit.

The maps can be zoomed and dragged. In the following view I’ve zoomed in a little (but not nearly all the way) to show some of the detail that the maps contain.

As far as I can tell, the site does not as yet have a user-friendly overview page. You kind of have to go to a page — like this one for chart 18650 — and then back up a directory and hunt around — or you could just try entering contiguous numbers in the url. It’s worth the effort if you are planning on being out on the bay or if you have an interest in its shorelines.