Living in South Park
You’re thinking about moving to San Diego and you want to know everything there is to know about South Park in San Diego?
This is near and dear to my heart. I lived there for 4 years, and then I lived in the community North Park right next to it for about 8 years as well. I love South Park. I know it like the back of my hand and I’m super excited to share it with you.
Where is South Park located?
A lot of people don’t know where South Park is located. It’s kind of been discovered lately and people do know where it is a little bit more now. When I lived there, no one knew where it was and the way I describe it, do you know where North Park is or South Park is south of North Park. Sound pretty simple, right? But that’s the case.
It is south of North Park. It’s bordered by Balboa Park and by the huge San Diego golf course as well. You’ve got North Park to the north and basically there’s a canyon that runs through that splits North Park and South Park called Switzer Canyon.
Basically once you get past the south of that canyon, and especially once you get to Juniper Street, then you’re into South Park and South Park then runs down into Golden Hill. And basically right when you get to about A street, B street, that starts to become Golden Hill.
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You also have the 15 freeway to the east that borders it. And then the 94 to the south really is the final border of South Park. But that starts getting into Golden Hill and we will touch on Golden Hill and North Park a little bit just because they do border South Park.
Now there’s also a really cool community called the Burlingame that we’ll touch on as well. And that’s technically North Park, but a lot of people really do consider that to be South Park. The main road through South Park is 30th street. That is the main drag that’s where most of the shops are located.
There’s homes on there as well. But there’s also a lot of homes kind of located out from there, not too many shops located throughout South Park. They’re all right on 30th Street. Now there was a brewery located here. They’ve actually since been bought and relocated to Colorado called Green Flash Brewing.
And they actually made a beer called 30th Street Pale Ale because there are so many bars on 30th street in South Park, but also up in North Park as well. And a lot of craft beer bars. They made a beer specifically for 30th Street Pale Ale, which is really a fantastic craft beer.
Now the interesting thing about 30th street is it actually kind of jig jogs a little bit through south part. As we’re coming south and you hit Grape Street, you would actually have to turn right, s west and then head south again on 30th Street. You go right and then left and then you’re back on 30th street.
And then it jogs back over at A street and then becomes 30th Street again. That stretch between Grape and A street is actually Fern Street. It’s kind of weird how the road, it kind of jig jogs and it changes names to Fern Street. You have to move over to 30th street. It’s kind of weird, but if you live there, you just get used to it, not a big deal at all.
There’s some really, really great restaurants and bars here in South Park. Some of them have unfortunately closed due to essentially COVID Hamilton’s Tavern, Grant’s Deli and Del Sur were fantastic restaurants that are no longer there anymore. However, there’s still some great restaurants and bars in particular,
The Station. It has really, really fantastic hamburgers. You can get beef hamburgers, and you can get Turkey burgers that are really, really tasty and they have great tater tots as well. Definitely check out The Station and they have great craft beer and of course, wine. Whistle Stop Bar -they have no food, but they have craft beer and cocktails, and it’s a live music and comedy venue right there on 30th Street and Juniper.
30th and Juniperis also kind of the main intersection in South Park as well. A lot of the shops are kind of located right there. You’ve got a really great Italian restaurant right there with good pizza called Mazara. A new brewery just moved in at this intersection. They’re actually in the North Park/Normal Heights area up the street on 30th street and that’s Fall Brewing.
They have a tasting room that they have opened up in South Park as well, right there on 30th and Juniper. Now a little bit more to the south, you’ve got a really, really fantastic Italian restaurant that is absolutely top notch, Buona Forchetta. This is the Buona Forchetta original location. It now has multiple locations in Coronado, Liberty Station in Point Loma and up the coast and Encinitas, but this is where they started.
They actually took over an old house and converted it into a tiny little restaurant. And that’s how it started, they only had maybe 20 seats in the restaurant. But over time they expanded into the patio. They have a very large, enclosed patio.
They can roll down the sides. If there’s weather going on, if it’s raining or if it’s cold, they can put the heat lamps on. And most of the space now is actually outdoors, but they have absolutely fantastic Italian food. The pizzas are out of this world.
They have Neapolitan style pizzas that are absolutely fantastic. Once you order them, they actually come out really, really fast because they have this quick cooking wood-burning stove. They’ve actually imported directly from Italy.
I think they paid something like $65,000 for this a while ago, probably 6 to 8 years ago or more. In today’s dollars, probably more like a $100,000 with the way inflation’s going, but definitely worth checking out is Buona Forchetta.
Right across the street is a vegan restaurant called Kindred. It has great vegan food, but they’re also really, really well known for their craft cocktail. Definitely worth checking out Kindred. And then another great restaurant right up the street is called The Rose Wine Pub. Really great food and of course, wine and a really relaxing atmosphere to go to.
Like I said, I actually lived in South Park for about 4 years and I lived right on 30th Street. I lived in this old Victorian home that had been converted into an apartment sometime ago, I think there was 5 units in the apartment there and I paid super cheap rent.
This was a while ago. I missed those days. I was paying $750 a month. Utilities included for a little one bedroom apartment. And it was really funky because it was converted the kitchen. You could tell it was actually built in a hallway at one point, it was very, very small.
And then I lived there for about a year with my wife when she moved in with me after we got married and we had a wonderful time and great memories in this apartment, having people over at our little tiny apartment, but a really large porch. We would hang out on the porch a lot and then eventually bought her house in Santee and moved out.
But the really cool thing about it, because it was so central, we could just walk right down to the local pubs and have a beer and have a great time. The other cool thing about South Park, it is super, super central in San Diego. It’s just a short drive or bike ride to Downtown, San Diego.
What I would do when I was living in South Park and working Downtown building high rises as a construction project manager back then, I would typically ride my bike. I would get on my bike, I’d get in my work clothes and I would just ride my bike into work.
And I wouldn’t even break a sweat because it was almost all downhill and just a couple miles away. And then I’d of course work all day. And then I would change into my riding gear to get home because then you have to get up some pretty steep hills to get back into South Park.
And I would get my afternoon workout in. It’s also a really, really fantastic place to exercise. It’s all laid out on a grid in South Park. You kind of always know where you are and you can kind of map out your runs really well.
I used to run a lot in South Park and you could run over to Balboa Park and run through the trails in Balboa Park as well, or run around the golf course. You do have to be careful because Pershing Road, which runs by the golf course is a very, very busy road. If you’re running on it, it’s a little bit dangerous, but there is a dirt path just off to the side of it.
And it is protected by a guard rails. So you can run through there. You just got to be a little bit, a little more careful because you’re running on dirt. Don’t want to sprain your ankle, that kind of thing. As I said, it is right next to Balboa Park and specifically Morley Field, a really really cool place to spend time out.
They have Frisbee golf there. They have tons and tons of tennis courts. They have a velodrome and huge grassy fields to exercise and have picnics in the park as well.And there’s a dog park in Morley Field as well, but the best dog park almost in San Diego is actually at the Grape Street Dog Park. It’s a really fantastic dog park.
They maintain it really well. And all the locals from South Park go there and spend a lot of time there with their furry friends. There’s a really great school here in South Park as well called the Albert Einstein Academy. A lot of people send their kids to school here.
There’s typically a long wait list to get in, but if you can get in, that’s definitely a top notch school to send your kids to. As I mentioned, it’s actually bordered by Golden Hill and then North Park as well to the north. So Golden Hill to the south, same zip code, 92102. And there’s a lot of similarities here, but Golden Hill, I would say has gentrified slower than South Park.
There’s a lot more deals you can potentially get in Golden Hill. I personally really like Golden Hill, I have friends that lived there for quite a long time. Still have friends that live there. Really good restaurants here as well.
You got Dark Horse Coffee, you have the Turf Supper Club, which is super cool. Actually go and cook your own steaks there. If that’s kind of your thing, which is really fun to do, and absolutely great cocktails there as well. And there’s a fantastic pizza restaurant called Luigi’s Pizza, New York style pizza. I definitely recommend getting a crime scene pizza, which is a ricotta cheese and sliced meatballs with marinara sauce, it’s delicious, not typically on the menu, but order it.
All the main restaurants and bars are going to be right off 30th Street heading into North Park and then going down University and El Cajon Boulevard as well. The main difference between North Park and South Park, I would say is the number of condos versus single family homes and apartments.
North Park is going to have a lot more condos and apartments than South Park does. In the 1960s and 1970s and even now, there were a lot of condos that were built. They’re tearing down a lot of these older homes and building large condo and apartment complexes that is starting to occur again with recent laws that have passed that are making it easier for developers to build without putting any parking in, into these new developments.
That’s kind of a concern a lot of people have here in San Diego. You might be for it or you might be against it,. But they have taken out a tremendous amount of parking in the North Park area along 30th Street going down in the South Park to create bike lanes.
And they’re allowing for developments to go in with no parking at all. What they’re trying to do is encourage people of course, to bike and walk instead of take a car. That sounds great in theory, but San Diego is so spread out. You really need a car to get around in San Diego. There is not great public transportation.
We have the trolley, we have our bus system, but they’re just not great. They take a really, really long time to get anywhere. And it’s just not a place like New York or Boston or San Francisco where you can get around a lot easier with public transportation.
They’re trying to engineer it so that you’re kind of forced to take a bike and walk in there for a lot less parking it’s going in. It’s getting very, very difficult to park in North Park, and there’s a lot more condos and apartments there, mixed in with the single family homes.
Traditionally the parking has been really, really tough, but it’s gotten a lot worse. If you’re buying a home there, you definitely want to make sure that you’re getting off street parking if you have a vehicle with you.
In South Park, somewhat of an issue, there are some apartments, there are some condos, but for the most part, it’s single family homes. Parking is a lot more readily available in South Park. If you’re looking to get away from the crowds and the amount of people, South Park is the place to be. Much more walkable, in my opinion, than North Park actually is.
And a lot more parking ironically as well and walkable because it’s such a small community that all the restaurants and bars are within 5 blocks of each other, and you don’t have to walk 10, 15 blocks to get there or take a bike like you would have to do in North Park.
The homes in South Park, most of these are going to be Craftsmen style homes and Spanish style homes. Most of these homes were built in the 1920s. They are super, super charming, people absolutely love them. I absolutely love Craftsman style homes in particular.
I also really like Spanish style. You’re going to find a lot of these homes here in South Park. You’re really not going to find too many Mid-century style homes. You will find some as you get more in the east part of South Park, but in the main part of South Park, they’re going to be all Craftsmen and Spanish style homes.
A lot of 2 bedroom and 3 bedroom bungalow style, might find an occasional 4 bedroom, but they’re typically going to be 2 and 3 bedrooms, maybe 1 bath, maybe 2 bathrooms. And again, a lot of these are going to be older homes. There’s a lot to look out for in older homes specifically, you’re going to want to take a look at the foundations when they’re 80 to a 100 years old, they’re typically built without any reinforcement in the stem walls.
It might be on a post and pier system. If it’s strapped, it’s perfectly fine. That means it’s been upgraded to modern seismic earthquake codes, but a lot of these have it. You’d really want to check them out, get an inspector in there to make sure that they’re good to go. And you might want to get a foundations expert in there if you’re finding any cracking in there as well.
I’ve sold homes that are not reinforced, that are not strapped, and that’s just up to the buyer to ultimately strap them. If there’s no cracking and it’s just strapping, it’s really not a big deal. But if there’s settling that’s going on in the foundation, definitely needs to be taken care of and it can get expensive.
A typical foundation could be anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 for something on the simple side of thing. Maybe just some strapping, not really dealing with any settling issue. But if you’re actually having to jack the home up and report concrete and reinforce it, it can be $75,000-$100,000.
You really want to make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into when you’re buying these older homes. The other couple of things you want to take a look at with older homes is going to be electrical.Some of these homes have knob and tube wiring with fuses, as opposed to breakers. If they’re wired incorrectly, if they’re afraid, they can present a fire hazard, but oftentimes they function perfectly fine without any upgrades being done.
But it’s something that ultimately you want to get done, or maybe, hopefully you’re buying a house that already has that done for you. Also, you want to take a look at the plumbing. Some of the plumbing is going to be older, especially the old cast iron plumbing or clay plumbing for the sewer system.
Again, looking to make sure that that’s either been replaced or lined, or if it’s under the house, you definitely want to switch that out to ABS plumbing. Take a look at that when you’re buying these older homes.
The home prices in a very rapidly rising home price environment right now here in San Diego, but generally speaking, most of these homes, the 2 bedroom, 3 bedroom Craftsman style homes, you’re going to be in the low $1 million range. If you take a look at the median price for 92102, it’s actually a little bit low, but that’s because it’s pulling in areas that are south of the 94 and a little bit Golden Hill, which are dragging that price down. Some of those areas aren’t quite as nice as South Park.
And so the actual homes in South Park, if you’re looking for a Craftsmen or Spanish-style home, 2 bedroom, 3 bedroom, you’re pretty much in a $1-$1.2 million range. When you get into areas like Burlingame, is a really acute, cute pocket of South Park slash North Park. There is a really fantastic high school that a lot of people here in San Diego send their kids to, and that is San Augustine Catholic High School.
And the homes here in Burlingame are larger, definitely in the 2,000 plus square foot range, potentially a little bit larger lots. And these homes going to be more in the $2 million plus range and is really hard to find a home for sale here. It’s possible, but they just don’t come up that frequently.
Curtis Chism, Realtor
858-281-2568 | Mobile
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Chism Team | DRE #02105113
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