Census data analyzed by the SF Chronicle puts Potrero Hill and Dogpatch at the top of the city for tech-worker density — about 37% of working-age residents. The likeliest reason is the plainest: it's one of the few neighborhoods that actually built housing.

Almost 37% of working-age residents on Potrero Hill hold a job in tech or a field adjacent to it — the highest share of any neighborhood in San Francisco, according to a Chronicle analysis of Census data from 2020 to 2024 by reporter Olivia Borgula. The paper's "analysis neighborhood" folds in Dogpatch, and the first reasons it offers are geographic: the blocks run along the Caltrain line, wedged between Highway 280 and 101, an easy trip to the offices of Salesforce and Anthropic in adjacent Mission Bay and SoMa — or south to the job centers of the Peninsula. Mission Bay itself lands second.

The more durable reason is the plainest one, and it's a reason most of the city can't claim: Potrero Hill actually built housing. It's one of the few analysis neighborhoods to add a meaningful amount over the last two decades, the Chronicle found, and one of the only ones where the average age has fallen as residents in their 20s moved in. Where there are units, there are new arrivals; where the arrivals badge into Mission Bay every morning, the tech share climbs.

You can read the smaller version of that in the permit record. Along 18th Street and up the private blocks off Missouri, the filings run to remodels rather than teardowns — a $68,500 alteration at 530 18th, a $60,000 job at 215 Missouri, the steady churn of kitchens opened up and units modernized for whoever moves in next. It is not dramatic construction. It is the sound of an existing housing stock being turned over, one permit at a time.

That churn has an underside the census share doesn't show. Six eviction notices were filed on Potrero Hill in the last 90 days, city Rent Board data shows — two on the 1200 block of 19th Street on June 29, one on the 500 block of De Haro on May 28. The neighborhood logged 218 requests to 311 in the past week.

And not all the new housing here is market-rate. On the hill's east flank, at 700 Missouri, the city is clearing the old Potrero Terrace and Annex public-housing complex under its HOPE SF program; the replacement, EVE Community Village, is planned for 157 affordable homes, most of them reserved for residents who already lived on the site. Two housing stories share one hill — a market drawing 25-year-olds with company badges, and a public rebuild for households at a fraction of the area's median income.

What someone walking Missouri Street tomorrow will notice isn't a census percentage. It's the remodel dumpsters at the curb, the fenced public-housing lots below, and the downtown skyline the whole hill is named for its view of — the one everyone up here, badge or no badge, is still paying to look at.