Locating the city’s best neighborhood all depends on your priorities. We’ve pored over the numbers and done the homework for you, whether you’re a foodie or a family person, looking for a real-estate deal or just a piece of the sun. Now all you’ve got to do is decide which San Francisco you want most.

Best For Families: OUTER SUNSET
The farther south and west you go, the more kids the city has. But when you look at the percentage of homes with kids combined with proximity to good schools, the Outer Sunset wins, hands down. Thirty percent of its households have children, and of 20 schools with a “9” or “10” rating on greatschools.org (which rates both public and private schools), fully half of them are in the Outer Sunset (with two more nearby in the Inner Sunset). The Outer Sunset’s also got its fair share of playgrounds, parks and, of course, the ocean and the zoo.
Runner-Up: OUTER RICHMOND: 24 percent of households have kids; 3 top rated schools.

Best Transit: DOWNTOWN/SOMA
This is a no-brainer. If you’re a commuter, and you don’t want to drive or hop a bus, then live within walking distance of Market Street, where you can catch BART or one of six Muni underground lines from either the Embarcadero, Montgomery Street, Powell Street or Civic Center stations—or Muni from the Van Ness station as well. Let’s say you lived at Fourth and Harrison streets; you could walk four blocks north (to the Powell BART) or south (to the Caltrain station) and be virtually anywhere, except Marin, quicker than you could drive. You’d never need to own a car—or ride a bus—again.
Runner-Up: CASTRO: 2 Muni stations, 5 Muni rail lines, and within walking distance to 16th Street BART stations

Best Restaurant Scene: MISSION (84 Zagat-rated restaurants)
Admittedly, this category demands subjectivity. Yelp lists the number of restaurants and their user ratings, while Zagat shows a more curated sampling of those that get the most buzz. And, of course, we here at 7x7 have been covering this scene for a decade. Turns out the numbers don’t lie: When you take Downtown (which necessarily has a large number of restaurants, not all of which are built to serve locals) out of the equation, the neighborhoods with the most Zagat-rated restaurants are the same three our food editors picked, in the same order. Your takeaway? From top-notch Italian to kill-me-now tortas, Michelin-rated California cuisine to the city’s best ice cream, the Mission is foodie ground zero.
Runners-up: SOMA: 65 zagat-rated restaurants; MARINA/COW HOLLOW: 48 zagat-rated restaurants

Most House for Your Money: NOPA ($243 per square foot, $635,000 median selling price)
We all want to know where to buy. And SF’s newest neighborhood, replete with everything an urban dweller needs (Panhandle for grass and trees, Falletti Foods for groceries, Little Star Pizza and Nopa for restaurants, The Independent for music, Flybar and Madrone for drinks) shakes out at only $243 per square foot. Compare that to $712 in Pac Heights and $899 in Noe Valley. It’s not surprising that nearby Western Addition, with its gritty image, closely trails Nopa at $322 per square foot, but it is surprising that chichi Nob Hill comes in at only $346. (That $346 probably won’t get you parking or green space, but hey, you can’t have everything.)
Runner-Up: NOB HILL: $346 per square foot

Safest: PRESIDIO (19 crimes per half-mile radius)
Since the Presidio is, after all, a national park, it makes sense that it’s less crime-ridden than anywhere else in SF, along with its neighbor, tony Presidio Heights (29 crimes, including everything down to noise disruptions). But safety in Presidio Heights costs about $1.65 million, whereas two-bedroom rentals in the Presidio start at less than $2,000 a month. If you want to buy in a neighborhood that’s safe and affordable, look to the Inner Sunset, where houses go for $759,000 and there were only 75 crimes. (Compare that to the Mission, with more than 800 crimes during the same period, or the Marina, with 453.)
Runners-Up: RUSSIAN HILL: 61 crimes; INNER SUNSET: 75 crimes

Most Walkable: LOWER PACIFIC HEIGHTS (Fillmore Street)
Most SF neighborhoods score in the 90s on Walkscore.com, but for our money, the strip of Fillmore from Sacramento to Eddy has everything you could need within a few blocks. Eat at Pizzeria Delfina or SPQR. Buy groceries at the Japantown Safeway or high-end Mollie Stone’s. Hear music at the Fillmore, Yoshi’s or the Boom Boom Room. Shop for everything from midcentury furniture to designer labels to hand-me-downs. There are cinemas, coffee shops, bakeries, salons, bookstores, a drugstore, a gym, two nearby parks (Alta Plaza and Lafayette Square) and even a good hospital (CPMC) should you exhaust yourself, which is very possible.
Runners-Up: RUSSIAN HILL/NOB HILL (Polk Street); MARINA (Chestnut Street)

Most Luxurious: SEA CLIFF (Median Selling Price: $2.4 million)
While Pac Heights may have the widespread reputation of being the city’s most luxurious neighborhood, it’s definitely Sea Cliff, the tiny patch of land tucked between the Presidio, Lincoln Park and the ocean, that ranks as SF’s most exclusive, outlandish real estate. Pac Heights’ list prices average out to around $2.8 million just like Sea Cliff’s, but its actual selling prices can’t touch the astronomical amounts the wealthy plunk down for SC’s sprawling Mediterranean-style villas perched above the Pacific, and the chance to be neighbors with Robin Williams and (it’s rumored) Tom Cruise.
Runner-Up: ST. FRANCIS WOOD: $1.63 million median

More Neighborhoods by the Numbers

Best Rental Deals: Outer Sunset ($1,946 average for a two-bedroom)
Most Access to Nature: Richmond (bounded by two national parks and an ocean)
Priciest per Square Foot: Financial District ($1,018/square foot)
Youngest: Mission (average age 34)
Oldest: Chinatown (average age 48)
Most Singles: Castro (66 percent single), followed by Marina (62 percent single)
Most Diverse: Bernal Heights, Downtown, Richmond, SoMa, Western Addition
Most White Folks: Marina (85 percent white)
Most Foreclosures: Bernal Heights and Mission Bay (at press time, both had 61 foreclosures listed on Trulia)
Biggest Price Dip: Diamond Heights (median down 41 percent from last year)
Biggest Price Spike: Tenderloin (median up 57 percent from last year)
Sunniest Spot: According to meteorologist Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services—who’s been tracking SF weather patterns for decades—the warmest, sunniest patch of SF theoretically lies in the southern Mission, away from water, hills and wind patterns. “Right around Garfield Square,” he says. Debate over.

 

*NOTE: Information gathered from 511.org, Craigslist, City and County of San Francisco, Crime Mapping, Golden Gate Mothers Group, Great Schools, Trulia, Yelp, the US Census Bureau, Zagat and Zillow.

By 7x7 editors

Most find the FiDi desolate and quiet on the evenings and weekends, but seriously after a long day at the office why would you want to return home to a noisy and overly busy area?

I'll admit it is true that it doesn't have much personality, such as Russian Hill, Noe Valley, or NOPA (the three other neighborhoods I would give consideration to), but as with anything in life it is what you make of it. And for me it is the best reminder that I live in a city, not to mention it is central to everything.

If you are considering relocating to SF and/or looking to move 7x7 did a pretty good job this article.

Replacement for current media center (option 2). I ended up going w/ option 1 as option 2, albeit customizable was too tall. Lead time 4-6 weeks for construction and delivery.

Just talking w/ Matt@Eastvold I could immediately tell I will do business with again. Maybe for a custom kitchen next go round when it's time to settle down, and the significant other and moi decide to get a house. ;-)

When he goes on a business trip, Jerome Griffith, president and chief executive of bag maker Tumi, keeps his own luggage as minimal as possible.

To simplify traveling and save on airlines' bag-check fees, Mr. Griffith tries to limit himself to one carry-on suitcase—even for trips as long as a week. "When you're going through an airport, you want to get in and out as quickly as possible," he says.

Mr. Griffith is judicious about what he puts in his suitcase, which is 20 inches long—comfortably within airlines' carry-on limits—and made of black leather, a color he says won't "show dirt." To start his packing, he takes out the "suiter," a compartment designed for suits, in order to free up more room. He works in a casual business environment, he explains.

Jerome Griffith, CEO of Tumi, packs his shirts in a 'packing cube' that compresses them.

Typically, he wears a white collared shirt, black jeans or slacks, boots and a dark blazer on the plane, and he packs an extra pair of jeans or slacks and a shirt for each day that he'll be on the road. He tries to keep the items he packs in the same color range—gray, white and black, for example. "Sometimes you have to wake up at 4:30 or 5 a.m., and you don't want to have to think too hard about what to wear," he says.

For exercising, he brings T-shirts, workout pants and karate shoes, which are like sneakers but lighter and less bulky, he says. Even on short trips, Mr. Griffith brings an additional pair of shoes so that the leather has "a chance to dry out" between wears.

When packing, he often rolls up his underwear and socks and places them in his shoes to help the shoes retain their shape. He places his shoes in bags to keep them from soiling his clothes.

Mr. Griffith layers the bottom of the bag with pants and then puts in his bagged shoes, along with his toiletries. Heavier items, he says, should go on the bottom and preferably toward the side of the suitcase that will be the bottom when it's standing upright. This makes the bag more stable, he says.

He carefully folds his dress shirts and T-shirts and puts them in a "packing cube," a lightweight fabric box designed to compress its contents so that they take up less space. Then he places the packing cube with shirts and an extra jacket on top of the bag.

In addition to his carry-on suitcase, Mr. Griffith will usually bring a backpack, a style he finds easy to carry. Inside are his iPad—which has recently replaced his laptop on trips because it is lighter—as well as his passport, checkbook, paperwork, chargers, his iPod and a little folder with a picture of his wife and two children.

Mr. Griffith is careful to use a black leather backpack that is "very sleek and very modern in style so that he can also use it to carry things to business meetings. "This is business-appropriate," he says.

—Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Today's 3-D movies are far more spectacular than the first ones screened more than 50 years ago, but watching them--both at the movie theater and at home--still means donning a pair of dorky, oversized glasses. Now a new type of lens developed by researchers in Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group could help make glasses-free 3-D displays more practical.

Split screen: Microsoft’s 3-D screen can project multiple images simultaneously. Here it is projecting a block of red and a block of blue onto a screen two meters away. Credit: Microsoft

Multimedia   Watch Microsoft’s new display in action.

The new lens, which is thinner at the bottom than at the top, steers light to a viewer's eyes by switching light-emitting diodes along its bottom edge on and off. Combined with a backlight, this makes it possible to show different images to different viewers, or to create a stereoscopic (3-D) effect by presenting different images to a person's left and right eye. "What's so special about this lens is that it allows us to control where the light goes," says Steven Bathiche, director of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group.

3-D technology has seen a renaissance recently. Thanks to the success of movies like Coraline, Up, and Avatar, Hollywood is spending more money than ever to give audiences a stereoscopic experience. And electronics manufacturers are racing to replicate the 3-D theater experience in the home. The market for 3-D-capable televisions is expected to grow from 2.5 million sets shipped in 2010 to 27 million in 2013, according to the research firm DisplaySearch. However, the glasses required to watch 3-D video is a turnoff for many would-be early adopters.

At the Society for Information Display International Symposium in Seattle last month, companies showed off 3-D displays that don't require glasses. These sets often use lenticular lenses, which are integrated into the display and project different images in two fixed directions. But a viewer needs to stand in designated zones to experience a 3-D effect; otherwise the screen becomes an out-of-focus blur.

Microsoft's prototype display can deliver 3-D video to two viewers at the same time (one video for each individual eye), regardless of where they are positioned. It can also shows ordinary 2-D video to up to four people simultaneously (one video for each person). The 3-D display uses a camera to track viewers so that it knows where to steer light toward them. The lens is also thin, which means it could be incorporated into a standard liquid crystal display, says Bathiche.

The idea of tracking viewers to make the glasses-free 3-D easier has been around for decades. One of the big challenges, explains Ken Perlin, professor of computer science at New York University, is that the computers used for eye-tracking were too expensive and too slow to make such a system practical. As computers have become faster and cheaper, viewer-tracking systems have gotten up to speed; other components, particularly those needed to target viewers, have remained bulky and impractical to manufacture on a large scale.

Microsoft's wedge lens is about 11 millimeters thick at its top, tapering down to about six millimeters at the bottom. A traditional lens, found in a projector, sits between a point of light and its focal point--the spot where the light is focused. This is the reason why viewer-tracking 3-D systems are often so bulky. The design of the wedge lens bypasses this problem, explains Bathiche. "Instead of having light travel in air, it travels within the lens," he says. "It allows us to compress the distance between the projector and the screen."