University Heights and Point Loma are spotlighted as San Diego’s most friendly neighborhoods.
SAN DIEGO — San Diego is the nation’s seventh most neighborly city according to a new study from online real estate broker, Redfin.
Redfin crowned Salt Lake City as the most neighborly metro area in the U.S., followed by Portland, Kansas City, Denver, Nashville, and Atlanta, and then San Diego.
“The good life in San Diego goes beyond the beach,” reads Redfin’s study. “The coastal city is known for its friendly residents; it ranks highly partly because neighbors often help neighbors. San Diego neighborhoods are often tight-knit, with neighbors gathering at beaches, parks, or community centers.”
The study found University Heights and Point Loma as the most “neighborly neighborhoods” in San Diego County.
University Heights, which has a strong sense of community through events like holiday parades and street fairs, and Point Loma, home to community centers and local events like a summer concert series.
“We defined a neighborly city by looking at certain key metrics that are tied to neighborliness, such as charitable giving, the amount of social connections that people can make in the neighborhood with access to parks and memberships in social associations,” said Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist. “We also looked at economic connectedness and the number of civic organizations per capita as well as overall community health.”
Fairweather said those factors matter to homebuyers who increasingly see “neighborliness” as part of what they’re buying. “Location certainly always matters to home buyers because when you’re buying a home, you’re not just deciding to live in a particular structure, you’re deciding which neighborhood you want to live in, who you want to have as your neighbors,” Fairweather said. “So neighborliness is something that people seek out.”
As for University Heights being named one of San Diego’s most neighborly communities, Fairweather University Heights is known for frequent events and a mix of ages. “They have a lot of events, and there’s a large range of ages that live in that area,” she said. “That fosters a lot of neighborliness because you can help out an older neighbor or an older neighbor might help out a younger person because they have different things that they can give and different things that they need.”
San Diego’s high home values, more than $300,000 higher than Denver, which had the second-highest price city in the study, didn’t keep it from making the grade.
Fairweather said the company intentionally included metros with a wide price range, including places like San Diego, where the median home-sale price is $900,000.
“When it comes to neighborliness, having an economically integrated neighborhood is important,” said Fairweather. “In really affluent neighborhoods where people can just afford to hire a nanny or hire somebody to house sit or hire a dog walker, they’re not going to have as much of a motivation to even ask a neighbor for help.”
The report found that 34% of San Diegans help a neighbor at least once a month, the ninth-highest share among the metros analyzed, and 18% regularly talk with neighbors about civic, societal, or local issues, ranking eighth on that measure.
To compile the rankings, Redfin looked at cities of at least 30,000 residents within the 75 largest U.S. metro areas that met basic housing criteria, then scored them on social and community factors such as charitable giving, volunteering, neighbor-to-neighbor help, social connections, access to parks and civic engagement.