THE NEW YORK TIMES: East Cut, San Francisco: A Newly Rebranded Neighborhood Takes a Bow
A walkable, high-rise neighborhood has opened for business in a hilly, mostly low-rise city.
SAN FRANCISCO — After commuting from his home in San Mateo, Calif., to Austin, Texas, for several years, Cristian Azcarate landed a job at the San Francisco-area headquarters of his company and settled in the Bay Area permanently. He and his husband decided to sell their home in Silicon Valley and buy a place that felt as close to the opposite of suburbia as possible. They settled on the East Cut, one of San Francisco’s most recently renamed, and densest, neighborhoods.
Mr. Azcarate, 41, a director of a cross-respiratory field team at Genentech, the biotechnology company, and his husband, Darrin Ketter, 49, toured several high-end buildings in the neighborhood, which is located in the northeast corner of San Francisco, at the foot of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. They were initially put off by the steep homeowners association fees. Though they’d sold their house in San Mateo, the couple also owned a weekend home in Walnut Creek, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, so they were considering the carrying costs of double homeownership. They settled on a condominium in the Harrison, a 49-story building that opened in 2017.