Outer & Central Sunset, San Francisco Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

Until the 1920s this was largely open sand. The city platted the Outside Lands in 1868 as a straight grid of numbered avenues and lettered streets, but the streets existed mostly on paper; Planning's Sunset context statement notes that a 1926 survey map showed a single north-south road, 34th Avenue, crossing the central dunes. The early exceptions sat at the edges. Near the beach, old horse cars and cable cars were reused as cottages and clubhouses from 1895 in a settlement first called Carville and later Oceanside. Along Lincoln Way, builders put up Craftsman rows in 1910-1913, and in 1916 Fernando Nelson & Sons laid out Parkway Terrace, a five-block tract by the park known for its rounded built-in corner benches.

The N Judah, running through the new Sunset Tunnel in 1928, and the car changed the math. Sunset builders put the garage inside the house, with living space on the floor above, and packed houses onto 25-foot lots. Henry Doelger built his first tract in 1927, a row of barrel-front Mediterranean Revival houses on the 1400 block of 39th Avenue; by 1940 his brochures called 26th to 36th Avenues between Noriega and Quintara Streets 'Doelger City.' Oliver and Arthur Rousseau built small runs of picturesque Period Revival houses, starting with 24 on 33rd Avenue between Kirkham and Lawton in 1931 and ending with 93 beside Sunset Boulevard in 1933.

Sunset Boulevard, a block-wide parkway with landscaped strips, was finished by 1931, though many blocks beside it stayed dune until the late 1930s. Construction peaked around 1939-1941 with federally insured mortgages, stalled during World War II and resumed after it, with postwar tracts concentrated south of Noriega Street between 37th and 46th Avenues. The newest chapter is at the shore: the Upper Great Highway closed to cars under Proposition K (November 2024) and opened as the 50-acre Sunset Dunes park on April 12, 2025.