When Lamisse Droubi was growing up in Noe Valley in the 1970s and ’80s, her St. Ignatius classmates had barely heard of the working-class neighborhood. Her mom was a real estate agent, but many of her neighbors held blue-collar jobs, and 24th Street was “definitely a little hardscrabble,” with a five-and-dime store and open-air bars. 

Droubi theorizes that it was the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 that started the neighborhood down the path to becoming a real estate juggernaut. When the quake brought down the Central Freeway, tech workers realized that Noe Valley offered shorter commutes to the South Bay, as well as charming Victorian cottages in one of the city’s warmest microclimates. By the early 2000s, Google and Apple buses were making Noe Valley their last SF stop before the highway, cementing the neighborhood’s reputation as a techie favorite.

“The trajectory has just been up ever since then,” Droubi said. She ended up following her mother into the family business and, as a City Real Estate agent, has a front-row seat for Noe Valley’s new era, where $3 million starter homes are the norm, strollers span the sidewalk, and bone broth has overtaken boba as a favorite teen treat.

Those who live and work there say the vaulting values are the unintended consequence of decades of time and financial investment from residents and merchants to build family-friendly amenities into a safe and sunny, village-like pocket of San Francisco. Some of the old guard are ready to retire and move on and the new families buying their homes aren’t firefighters and construction workers, but an alphabet soup of highly paid C-suite roles. Those who remain are optimistic that the next generation, wealthier but perhaps with less time to give back, builds on what came before them.

“Our old-timers brought a little hippie nature to the neighborhood,” Droubi said. “The hope is that along with being out and about with your strollers, you’re also giving back to the community and volunteering and caring about your neighbors.”

It takes a village

If you want a brief history of community action in the neighborhood, talk to Carol Yenne. The 50-year resident of Noe Valley (only newbies call it “Noe,” she said) has owned the children’s store Small Frys on 24th Street since the 1990s and has watched kids who once twirled around her store in tutus become parents themselves. She remembers when the police officers and nurses who used to be her neighbors left the “sleepy, out-of-the-way neighborhood” to get more space in the suburbs, replaced first by gay couples looking to settle down just outside of the hubbub of the Castro, then by techies drawn to the easy commute.      

She distinctly remembers one community meeting in the early 2000s at the old bookstore on 24th where neighbors complained about “Google buses” and tech workers buying up houses. But the store’s owner stood up and told the crowd that being mad at the newcomers wasn’t in the spirit of the neighborhood, since almost everyone there had also been a newcomer at one point. 

“We don’t want to shut ourselves off to new technology, to new people,” Yenne said. 

But that means new residents are expected to pitch in if they want to keep the village-like vibe that drew them to Noe Valley in the first place. 

In 2005, Yenne helped lead an effort to create one of the city’s first Community Benefit Districts, where owners pay for power washing, flower planters, and public benches. A decade later,  another grassroots campaign turned a former church parking lot into the Noe Valley Town Square, which is home to a popular weekly farmers market, free yoga and kids’ activities, and one controversial commode (opens in new tab). 

It’s part and parcel of community-led initiatives that have saved Noe Valley’s century-old library, split up vacant storefronts so big spaces don’t sit empty, and fundraised for an upgrade of the local rec center and playground.   

“It’s one of those neighborhoods that’s always come together,” said Yenne, who serves as treasurer for the Noe Valley merchants association. “Nobody dropped the ball. Nobody let something happen that would have really mucked it up.”

The strip’s lack of nightlife is a feature, not a bug. Neighborhood leaders have agreed about general operating hours — even the “night market” is over by 8 p.m. 

“We don’t want to be Union Street,” Yenne said, throwing slight shade on the bars and restaurants that populate the Marina into the wee hours. “That was a mantra.”

An all-volunteer group that started during the pandemic created a “slow street” corridor on Sanchez between 23rd and 30th streets. Unlike the persistent debate over the Great Highway, the community has been nearly uniformly supportive of the change, which recently reduced the speed limit to 15 mph. That’s partially because, for all of Noe’s strollers and dogs, it doesn’t have a substantial amount of public green space. More than 1,000 pedestrians walk the 1.5-mile route on a typical Saturday, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which ranks it as one of the city’s most used slow streets.

“COVID was the best thing that ever happened to us and the worst thing for the world,” said Maricar Lagura, whose Noe Cafe is on the slow street, as it brought residents together to support local businesses and neighbors.

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Lagura lives in the Excelsior and is rueful about not buying a Noe home back when they were less than $1 million. “If I would have known, I would have begged, borrowed, and stealed just to get a foothold,” she said. 

It’s more expensive now, yes, but the community feeling remains. Centimillionaires clear leaves from the gutters during the rainy season and help neighbors find lost dogs. 

“I mean, who does that?” Lagura said. “Noe Valley.” 

Cashing out 

Yenne is the first to admit that the community’s efforts to make the neighborhood safer, cleaner, and more desirable have unintentionally made it harder for each subsequent generation to afford a home there. Even into the mid-’90s, the median price in the neighborhood was less than $500,000; today that sum isn’t likely to cover the amount a winning bidder pays over the asking price.

“There’s no way in my wildest dreams I would have believed the prices,” she said of current home values.

Some seniors are committed to staying in Noe Valley, but others are ready to cash out and move to a warmer climate or less hilly neighborhood. Droubi said most of her clients this year have been baby boomers transitioning to assisted living or retirement communities. 

The recent sellers of her listing at 4048 23rd St. fit that mold. They bought their “classic John Anderson” turn-of-the-century home in the 1980s for around $250,000 and sold it this month for just under $4.8 million. 

Since homes in the neighborhood were originally built for a working-class clientele of European immigrant carpenters, tailors, and bakers, they often top out at about 2,000 square feet. 

That isn’t enough for many buyers, who aren’t necessarily looking for something as showy as a Pac Heights mansion but do want enough room for a family of four or five to spread out. Some homes have been torn down for modern rebuilds. Others kept their Victorian facades but were gutted inside. A 2024 law made it harder to build “monster homes” over 3,000 square feet in Noe Valley — but Droubi said that has only driven up the value of those that were expanded or rebuilt before the rule took effect. One Jersey Street rebuild with nearly 3,500 square feet that sold for almost $5 million in 2020 fetched $7.6 million this April.

“I think it’s a little short-sighted,” Droubi said of the size restriction. “We want to keep people who want to raise families here in San Francisco.”

Bone broth and nostalgia

The transformation from Noe Valley into Noe isn’t just about who’s buying homes; it’s about who’s filling storefronts. In 2021, brothers Jonathan and David Kim decided to open a brick-and-mortar shop for Trad, their bone broth company. On a walk from their home in the Mission, they scoped out Noe’s farmers market, the packed Whole Foods, and the range of Pilates studios.

“We’re like, ‘Wow, this is such a lovely, lovely neighborhood,” David said. “There’s a lot of wellness going on.” 

They liked that the storefronts were small, a perfect proving ground for a burgeoning business. Some residents were skeptical, but others had been making their own broth for years and were happy to outsource that labor, even at $26 a quart for the shop’s best-selling Immunity Broth, a mix of chicken bone broth, ginger, turmeric, black pepper, garlic, and ginseng. 

The brothers moved to the neighborhood when the shop opened and quickly became part of the community. They often meet their customers as they’re going through a personal health issue like prepping for a colonoscopy or trying to keep their weight up during chemo. Five years after they opened, they are thrilled to see kindergartners sipping their product as an afterschool snack.

A neighborhood full of kids chugging bone broth can be befuddling to old-timers. Tina Kouloulias has been visiting the neighborhood from her home in South San Francisco since the early 1970s, when her father started Haystack Pizza. While the restaurant has been a constant, making its own doughs and sauces and hand-grating garlic and cheese, the rest of 24th Street feels unrecognizable. Unfathomably for longtime residents, there are even tourists.

“It’s almost like the Golden Gate Bridge,” Kouloulias quipped of the neighborhood’s newfound appeal to out-of-towners. 

When her father died this year, she and her sisters became Haystack’s co-owners. She’s considering some updates to the menu and decor, but it’s clear that nostalgia is part of the appeal, she said. Many of her customers first came as kids. Like her, they’re astounded by how much the neighborhood has changed.

“People like it because it’s homey and comfortable,” she said of the pizzeria. “It’s not pretentious, which is what 24th Street is turning into.” 

Who keeps it going

The work of keeping the Noe Valley of the future rooted in its community-minded past now falls to young families like Brooke Ray Demko’s. An urban planner by day, she co-chairs Friends of Slow Sanchez on nights and weekends, organizing block parties and greening days and fielding complaints from homeowners who say a planter is blocking their driveway. “Sometimes I call myself an urban therapist,” she said.

She admits that the affluent people who can afford Noe have more free time to give back but rejects the idea that “only rich places can have nice things.” 

She has lived in San Francisco since 2009 and rented in several neighborhoods before moving to Noe when her daughter got into Thomas Edison Charter Academy. The “Brady Bunch family” with four step- and half-siblings was outgrowing their rental, with her infant’s crib crammed into a closet, but jumping into the cut-throat real-estate market was daunting.

After five failed offers that were “blown out of the water” by other buyers, she and her husband were able to buy a home in Noe after digging deep into their savings to pull off a winning bid. The house doesn’t have a backyard, but that’s OK with Demko, since it sits right on Slow Sanchez. 

Her kids draw with sidewalk chalk out front and have put on a lemonade stand with friends a few blocks away. A “herd” of people of all ages and backgrounds — “not tech bros” —  strolls by every Saturday at 10 a.m., making connections and building friendships. What started as a regular walk by a neighbor three years ago organically became a crew.

“It’s just wild, but it takes that level of caring and investment,” she said. “I’ve lived in San Francisco for almost 20 years, and I’ve never felt this much neighborhood-ness in the city.”