For decades, Bernal Heights has attracted residents seeking a community of like-minded progressives, where people organize and agitate to preserve economic, ethnic and cultural justice.

All of which has helped create a place where the average sales price for single-family homes this year is $997,000. Where the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center offers subsidized senior lunches for $2, while one block away a garden shop sells $43 leather-scented soy candles.

In short, it's a neighborhood like much of San Francisco - desirable and, in its own way, under siege. The eccentricities and diversity remain, but each new economic boom makes the housing pressures all the more severe.

"As much as a neighborhood could do, we've done - and we're still becoming a place where only the rich can live," said Buck Bagot. "We've failed. What can I say?"

Bagot arrived in 1976, a few years after he was suspended from Harvard University for antiwar demonstrations. Ever since, he's been an organizer for causes on the left, paid and pro bono both. Most recently he helped launch Occupy Bernal, which worked citywide to help keep more than 100 families threatened with foreclosure from losing their homes.

While the details of Bagot's story are his own, the arc isn't unusual in the neighborhood of 23,000 that he proudly calls home.

Into the 1960s, this was a working-class terrain distinguished mainly by its broad smooth summit, unlike anything south of the Mission District. Outsiders could easily get lost in the tangle of weary-looking homes along streets that pushed up and down the gnarled slopes, rural and wild at once.

The early signs of change were subtle: In 1968, Chronicle columnist Margot Doss Patterson came upon a mix of "hard-working artists, blue collar day-laborers, odd misanthropes, campy menages, eccentrics and ordinaries." A decade later, the neighborhood center was founded - led by young newcomers on the left but supported by St. Kevin's Catholic Church, where parish leaders saw the need for a community organization to answer needs ranging from aid for low-income seniors to job training for youth.

Legacy of activism

This sense of unity prevailed in the decades that followed. The center offers "social justice programs" to train teenagers to speak out on issues, and "hot-spot walks" to bring attention to blocks where crime breaks out. There's also a legacy of activism, even when it went against doctrinaire liberal creeds - such as finding new customers for the Bank of America in 1992 so that the giant corporation wouldn't close the neighborhood's only bank branch.

"I was always struck by Bernal's sense of community, its history of really engaged people," said neighborhood resident and District 9 Supervisor David Campos, who moved to Bernal Heights a decade ago.

Campos pointed to the Occupy Bernal effort as an example of how the engagement continues.

Bagot and a few friends gathered lists of homeowners facing foreclosure threats, then knocked on doors. Homeowners with sympathetic stories - like those talked into second mortgages they didn't need by salespeople who minimized the costs - became the human face of a larger trend at rallies often held outside the homes of bank officials.

"Interesting tactic," Campos said approvingly. "There was a level of sophistication and fun that helped it register ... the neighborhood really is on the cutting edge of a lot of issues."

But it's also where a three-bedroom home last month sold in one week for $1.285 million, its listing stressing the proximity to Interstate 280 and Silicon Valley. A 700-square-foot cottage is on the market for $699,000 - an obvious candidate to tear down and replace with a custom home, say real estate agents.

"We could not afford to move in today," Campos said.

Cortland Avenue, the commercial strip, doesn't have the boutiques you might find on Fillmore Street. But the influx of affluent younger couples can be seen at VinoRosso, a wine bar that on Wednesdays holds a happy hour for parents and their babies.

Two blocks away, a shop specializing in electric bicycles opened last year next to Wild Side West, a lesbian-owned bar that's been on Cortland since 1976.

'Bernal grew on us'

The scene was far different when Campos' predecessor, Tom Ammiano, moved to the neighborhood in 1972.

"Cortland was not a warm and fuzzy place back then, especially for a gay man," Ammiano said while sitting in Progressive Grounds, a coffee house where the only nod to the 21st century is the free Wi-Fi that's heavily used. "I didn't come over here for years."

What attracted Ammiano and his boyfriend at the time wasn't politics, but low prices: Their real estate agent said they'd be fools to pass up a $27,000 house with parking and a city view.

Pioneers by default, "Bernal grew on us," Ammiano said. "The neighbors were always fine. The creep of gentrification came almost unnoticed."


"It's bittersweet," Ammiano mused. "Bernal feels a lot safer, and people are engaged more. But I also know that most of the new wave doesn't know the history. I'm a little worried it will get more and more generic - the whole city is facing it."

The transitions are equally apparent to Rachel Ebora, executive director of the neighborhood center.

The center today has 30 full- and part-time employees and a $2 million budget, much of it from government grants that go to specific programs, such as the subsidized elderly lunches that continue to be a mainstay. The center's development corporation has helped build 445 units of low-income housing, with another 71 apartments under construction in the Ingleside neighborhood.

"I'm really proud to be a Bernal resident," said Ebora, who moved to the neighborhood from Portland, Ore., in 2005 and worked as a taiko drummer before joining the center as a community organizer. "All the different groups here can be like factions, but they're not afraid to be engaged about what's happening."

The question is what happens next.

Bernal is buffered from mass evictions by the fact that 58 percent of its homes are occupied by their owners, compared with a citywide rate of 38 percent. But each time an older house goes on the market, put there by the families of blue-collar parents no longer living, or aging children of the 1960s seeking an easier place to live, the economic diversity narrows a bit more.

Rabble-rousers sought

Carren Shagley moved to Bernal Heights in 1977, settling near Precita Park when drug addicts would leave their needles in the now-bucolic-looking green. A few years later she was a member of the neighborhood center, and a fledgling real estate agent - an occupation she now shares with her husband and daughter.

"There's still something in the water here. People looking to live in Bernal have a little bit of kink," Shagley said. "But the rabble-rousers, the ones who like to shake things up, they can't afford it anymore. We need younger rabble-rousers."

Asked if this is true throughout the city, Shagley didn't hesitate.

"When I started in real estate, you could buy your starter home in a neighborhood like Bernal for $100,000," Shagley said. "Now, you can't buy a starter home anywhere in San Francisco and do anything but work."


About the series

The Chronicle is retracing its 1958 Hills of San Francisco series - one hill at a time. Each Wednesday, Urban Design Critic John King explores what a specific peak reveals about today's city. Previous installments and additional images can be found at
