Oceanview, Merced Heights & Ingleside (OMI), San Francisco Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

The OMI is three older neighborhoods that grew separately and now share one name, spoken letter by letter. Ocean View came first. The San Francisco and San Jose Railroad ran through in the 1860s along the line I-280 follows today, and two homestead associations platted land beside it: the Railroad Homestead Association in 1867 (the east half of Ocean View, west to Orizaba Avenue) and the City Land Association in 1870 (west of Orizaba to today's Junipero Serra Boulevard). Their grids do not line up at Orizaba, which is why streets dead-end there and why Randolph and Broad Streets meet with a dip. Broad Street was platted wider than the rest.

Ingleside grew along the old Ocean House Road, which became Ocean Avenue. Its street grid and most of its street names come from an 1890 subdivision called Lakeview, but the area took its name from the Ingleside Inn, a roadhouse at Ocean Avenue and today's Junipero Serra Boulevard, and from the Ingleside racetrack (1895-1905), whose site became Ingleside Terraces. A streetcar reached Ocean Avenue in December 1895, and after the 1906 earthquake the area filled in quickly: Sanborn maps show about 57 buildings in Ingleside around 1900 and about 450 by 1915, some of them refugee cottages hauled in and joined together as starter homes. The K Ingleside, the first Muni line through the Twin Peaks Tunnel, arrived in 1918.

Between the two runs the Merced Heights ridge, about 500 feet high, with high points near Thrift and Summit Streets, Shields Street and Orizaba Avenue, and Shields and Vernon Streets at Brooks Park. Without streets or utilities it stayed mostly open until after World War II, when builders covered it with stucco houses and flats. The OMI's 2010 historic context statement finds that most of today's buildings date from 1925 to 1955 and that the large majority are one-story houses over garages.