Outbound traffic

Longtime Bayview homeowners are cashing out and leaving town.

By Camille T. Taiara

EVEN WITH THE moving boxes on the floor and the usual knickknacks missing from the shelves, it's apparent that Stella Johnson has taken meticulous care of her Bayview house over the years.

A bouquet of fake flowers graces the plastic-covered dining room table. A thick plastic runner protects the carpet on heavily traversed sections of the floor. The faux-Victorian living room furniture looks like it could've been bought yesterday. Johnson, now 71 years old and a widow, has maintained a grandmotherly oasis behind the seven-foot-high steel gate that separates her front steps from the street.

Now, 30 years after she and her late husband bought the place, Johnson's careful attention is finally paying off. Her three-bedroom house on Shafter Street in the Bayview sold for $660,000 after only two weeks on the market. Johnson is headed for a better life in Houston, where she's having a house twice the size built in a gated community by a lake – for a quarter of the price.

She's not alone. District 10 – the southeast sector of the city – is witnessing a dramatic exodus of working-class families and senior citizens.

"There were only two houses for sale in [the Silver Terrace] area a month ago; now there are 12," Fabricio Fletes of Gold Key Realty and Investments told the Bay Guardian while conducting an open house.

A whopping 534 homes have sold in the district so far this year, compared to 409 by the same time last year, according to San Francisco Multiple Listings Service data provided to us by Urban Bay Properties.

In the heart of the Bayview, along streets near Third and Palou, you can find a For Sale sign every couple of blocks. Old-time residents there give two reasons for moving on: unrelenting crime and the high cost of living.

"I've been here since 1963, and I'm leaving. It's become a war zone down here," 56-year-old Roy Austen, who's selling his house on Jennings Street, told us with restrained bitterness before turning around and heading back inside. For him, it was too late for talk.

"About two or three years ago, it started getting worse and worse," Johnson explained. "It's not a place for a retired person. I'd love to spend my time in a nice, quiet place."

But for those who've owned their houses for 10 years or more, there's also money to be made – so long as they don't mind leaving San Francisco.

In 1995, the median price of a home in District 10 was $186,000. Now it's $690,000. Prices have gone up 19 percent from just one year ago. And properties are selling for 10 percent above list price. Yet that's still almost $300,000 cheaper than the citywide average.

"Most properties selling in the Bayview are properties that have been in the family one or two generations," Urban Bay Properties sales agent Tracy Parent told us.

As for who's buying, Parent said she's seeing mostly young professionals who are purchasing their first homes, in an area where you can still find a single-family house with a garage and backyard.

"Assuming a 10 percent down payment, you'd still have to be earning $150,000 a year gross income to afford the mortgage on a $650,000 property," she said. "Working-class families can't really afford a single-family home [there]. They can afford a condominium, but it's getting harder and more competitive."

Compare that to the days when a family could buy a house on a masonry contractor's salary, as was the case with the Johnsons, and a picture emerges of the changes down the road for southeastern San Francisco.

"My daughter and her husband have good jobs, but they just don't make enough money to buy a house in San Francisco," said Johnson, explaining that her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren will also be moving to Houston, from Stockton. One of her two sons plans on joining them when he retires in five years, she said as she fingered photocopied photographs of her new house under construction: a brick structure with large, arching windows, all on a single floor so she won't have to struggle up and down the stairs with her bad legs.

"Most of my friends are moving away," she continued. "It's sad for the older people because they've lived here so long."

Within 48 hours of this issue hitting the stands, Johnson's life in California will be over too. On her way out she'll pass a construction crew half a mile away on Third Street, erecting a massive condo building. She'll see people patronizing the Walgreens at a spanking new mini-mall further down the street, as the moving truck bounces over roads recently excavated and widened to make room for the new rail line.

She'll miss her congregation at St. James church, she said. But otherwise, she won't be looking back.

E-mail Camille T. Taiara at camille@sfbg.com.