A 1948 split-level on Encanto Avenue tells you more about Anza Vista's market than any headline number does. The house sat on an oversized 4,599 square foot lot, listed for $2.3 million, and closed at $2.2 million after 104 days on the market. That is a long runway for a neighborhood where inventory rarely sits, and it is a hundred thousand dollars off the ask. Meanwhile, Redfin's own neighborhood data for Anza Vista showed the median sale price up 105 percent year over year in December 2025, reaching $1.2 million. Read those two facts side by side and the neighborhood looks like it cannot decide whether it is overheating or stalling.

It is neither. The contradiction is the point, and understanding why it exists tells you something about what actually drives value here now.

A Median That Doesn't Mean What It Says

Anza Vista is small. Roughly twenty blocks of it sit between Geary Boulevard, Masonic Avenue, Turk Street, and the University of San Francisco campus, and single-family sales happen in handfuls per year, not dozens. When a neighborhood's monthly closing count can be counted on one hand, a single high or low sale swings the median in a way that has nothing to do with underlying appreciation.

Look at what actually closed around that December 2025 reading. On Broderick Street, one home at 1059 sold for $1.2 million. Another at 1121 sold for $1.3 million on January 2, 2026, which was 37 percent over its $949,000 list price after 52 days on market. A third closing folded into the same window, a condo at 1909 Eddy Street, sold for $1,481,000 on December 10, 2025. That last one is not a single-family home at all. When a neighborhood's reported median blends three sales, one of them a condo, one of them a steep overbid on an underpriced listing, a 105 percent year-over-year swing stops looking like a market trend and starts looking like arithmetic doing what arithmetic does with a small sample.

By June 17, 2026, active listings told a calmer story. Two homes were on the market with a median list price of $2,195,000 and an average of 54 days sitting there, hardly the picture of a neighborhood doubling in value.

None of this means Anza Vista is quiet. It means the number a buyer or seller sees first is not the number that should guide a decision.

The Building Permit That Explains Everything

The more useful story is happening at 230 Anza Street, a 2,600 square foot lot on the block bounded by Anza, Collins, Woods, and Geary, overlooking the tree-lined edge of the USF Lone Mountain campus. Public records show the property last sold in early July 2025 for just under a million dollars. The original plans called for three units, a project that would barely register against the city's housing needs.

Then San Francisco's Family Zoning Plan changed the math. The plan was adopted by the Board of Supervisors and signed by Mayor Daniel Lurie on December 12, 2025, rezoning the city to meet state housing mandates, with its effects concentrated in nearly 96,000 parcels along transit corridors in the western and northern neighborhoods, Anza Vista among them. The plan's centerpiece is the Housing Choice-SF Program, a local density bonus that lets a developer trade the state's density bonus law for form-based standards instead, meaning height, bulk, and setbacks govern what gets built rather than a fixed ratio of units to lot size.

At 230 Anza, opting into that program let the developer triple the unit count, from three to eight, and take the building to eight stories and 85 feet. Renderings went public ahead of a Planning Commission hearing held July 23, 2026. We have not seen a final ruling reported, and the project still has to clear the rest of the entitlement process. But the shift from a modest three-unit plan to an eight-story proposal on a lot smaller than a fifth of an acre is not a rounding error. It is what happens when a zoning program rewrites what a parcel is allowed to hold.

Why Single-Family Lots Carry the New Risk and the New Upside

Here is the detail that matters most if you already own, or are considering buying, a single-family home in Anza Vista. The Family Zoning Plan carved out one significant exemption: buildings with three or more rent-controlled units are shielded from the increased heights. A single-family home is not a rent-controlled multi-unit building. Neither is a duplex. Which means the housing stock that makes up most of Anza Vista, the post-war single-family homes built between roughly 1948 and the early 1960s that gave the neighborhood its reputation as a quieter, less expensive alternative to the Victorian-heavy blocks nearby, is precisely the housing type most exposed to the new density math.

That cuts two ways. For an owner sitting on a standard lot near Geary or another transit corridor, it can mean the land under the house now carries entitlement value that has little to do with the structure's condition or square footage. For a buyer comparing that same address to a similar home in a neighborhood already dense with 3+ unit rent-controlled buildings, the risk and the upside sit in different places entirely. One parcel might be worth more as a redevelopment site than as a place to live in as-is. The other is protected from that pressure by its own tenancy structure.

What the Market Is Already Pricing In

You do not have to wait for more case studies. The market is already behaving this way. A listing at 930 Baker Street, a shovel-ready site with approved plans for a four-unit, roughly 8,000 square foot building designed by EAG Studios and Vincent Leger, was on the market in mid-2026 asking $2,995,000, a price built around entitlement and buildable square footage rather than an existing home's finish level. Other listings in the same stretch of the neighborhood have marketed themselves the same way, describing a development opportunity that includes demolishing an existing single-family residence to build a larger multi-unit structure.

These are not distressed properties being sold at a discount. They are lots being priced for what a buyer can build, which is a different appraisal question entirely from what a buyer can live in.

Two Lawsuits Worth Knowing Before You Bank on This

None of this is settled law in the sense of being immune to challenge. Shortly after the Family Zoning Plan's adoption, the city was sued by two separate sets of organizations, one arguing the environmental review behind the plan was insufficient, the other arguing the plan does not create enough capacity to meet the city's state-mandated housing targets. Neither suit has been resolved as of this writing. That matters for anyone treating a parcel's new "local program height" as a fixed number rather than a current best estimate. The entitlement exists today. Whether it survives litigation intact is a separate question, and one worth asking your own attorney about rather than assuming away.

What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods

If you are shopping Anza Vista against another central San Francisco neighborhood, the citywide or even neighborhood-level median price is close to useless here. The sample is too thin, the housing types too mixed, and the real driver of value on any given lot now depends on where that specific parcel sits on the city's rezoning map, whether it carries a base height or the higher local program height, and whether its current use as a single-family home leaves it exposed to or exempt from that density bonus. Two homes on the same block can carry very different underlying value once you account for what each parcel is legally allowed to become.

That is not a reason to avoid the neighborhood. It is a reason to look at the parcel, not the postcard version of the market.

A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly

Does the Family Zoning Plan apply to my specific address, or just the neighborhood generally? The plan rezones specific parcels, not entire neighborhoods uniformly. The only way to know your address's base height and local program height is to check it against the city's official Family Zoning Plan map.

If my lot has a higher allowed height now, does that mean it's worth more today? Not automatically. Entitlement capacity is potential, not cash in hand. It affects what a developer might pay for the land, but realizing that value requires actually pursuing the permitting process, which carries its own cost, timeline, and current legal uncertainty given the pending litigation.

Is a three-unit rent-controlled building in Anza Vista exempt from this? Buildings with three or more rent-controlled units are exempt from the plan's increased heights. Single-family homes and duplexes are not.

Anza Vista's next chapter is being written parcel by parcel, not by a single citywide number. If you are trying to figure out what your address is actually worth in that context, or which lots nearby are quietly carrying more potential than their listing price suggests, that is exactly the kind of question worth a direct conversation rather than a portal search.

Domain SF Marin works both sides of the city and the county, and we would rather walk you through your specific parcel than let a citywide average do the talking. Let's meet, request a personalized home valuation, and get a read on what your address is actually positioned to do next.