No Love

Pissed Off Pete's is Mildly Irritated at Rich People Snubbing Excelsior

If you ever ride the bus down Mission and up-n-over Bernal, you get to this alternate universe known as Excelsior.  It looks, feels, and smells much like Mission Street in Mission proper, but without all the people debating where to eat oysters and white buses prowling about.

But it’s just that lack of shuttles that has Excelsior businesses miffed.

“It just sort of hopped right over us,” Pete Whitcomb of Pissed Off Pete’s bemoaned of the tech boom to the Chronicle. “We’re the Siberia of San Francisco. People think we’re Daly City.”

And that has left the neighborhood struggling.  8% of the neighborhood’s retail spaces sit vacant, real estate prices are suppressed, and the unemployment is three points higher than the city’s overall rate.

The situation to the south is so grim, the neighborhood is having to promote itself on the back of Oakland:

Less than 3 miles away in the heart of the Mission District, new condos sell for $2 million. In the Excelsior, the average home price is $580,000, or 32 percent lower than the San Francisco average, according to Trulia.com. Excelsior boosters have even launched a campaign to lure new blood with the slogan: “Alternatives to Oakland.”

Now the neighborhood finds itself warming up to corporate chains like Starbucks in an effort to become “more like 24th Street.”

It’s natural, of course—businesses rarely protest a more affluent clientele.  But it seems bizarre given everything else that’s happening in town.  As Pissed Off Pete’s enthusiast and local stand-up Jeff Cleary tells us over email, “It is a different world down there.  Everyone in the Mission is annoyed with the techies and down there, they’re wondering why they haven’t showed up.  That’s like a Chicago being jealous of NYC because of 9/11.  ‘Doesn’t anyone want to bomb us?’”

[SFGate]

Comments (10)

“Now the neighborhood finds itself warming up to corporate chains like Starbucks in an effort to become “more like 24th Street.””

Well…thats a misrepresentation of what the article said.

That said I can see his point

I love the Excelsior/Outer Mission.  Lots of great places down there.  Bummed that the Chick-N-Coop closed, but Geneva Steakhouse remains totally awesome, for instance.

That being said, I find it hard to listen to anyone who calls SF “Frisco”.  Ugh.

I see “Frisco” as being a regional colloquialism for those who grew up in Ingleside, Lakeview, Excelsior, et cetera. See the late, great Cougnut. I grew up in Ingleside Terrace and heard it a lot. But rarely when I went across and around the hill. 

Get over it, Herb! Locals call it Frisco, despite what transplants like you were told and continue to parrot.

Anyone who calls it “Frisco” can fuck right off.

AGREED: Excelsior/Outer Mission is full of goodness. Spent some formative years there, being up to no good in Cayuga Park … My pet turtle took up residence there with a family friend when I went off to college … As for the Frisco thing, it’s not like anyone would have intense City pride having grown up reading 3-dot columns, ignore their father’s lifelong pleading to never ever ever use That Word, decide to rebel, and work it into their Twitter handle or anything.

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Sorry, Herb, had to copy your style for this one. 

I’m a tech thousandaire living on the edge of Excelsior, but I spend my most of my fiat in Glen Park.  That stretch of Mission is far too bleak to deal with for the most part.  There is a good bagel place up there, Mexico Tipico has mexicellent breakfast burritos, and  Sushi Raw has good enough takeout sushi though.  So, I’ll occasionally wander into North Daly City and part with some of my soul-destroying gentrification credits there.

inb4 flood of incoming hipsters to the excelsior