As anyone who has tried to track down a pet-friendly apartment in San Francisco can attest, finding a rental that accepts cats and dogs in the city is often tricky. Rental website HotPads has come out with a map of the most pet-friendly zip codes around town. SoMa is by far the most welcoming to animals, with more than 79.7 percent of apartments in the neighborhood open to pets, according to data from HotPads listings compiled between August 2013 and October 2014. SoMa is followed by the 94131 zip code, which includes neighborhoods like Glen Park, Diamond Heights, and Twin Peaks, as well as 94109, home to Russian Hill, Nob Hill, and parts of the Tenderloin.
At the other end of the spectrum are the Sunset, the least pet-friendly area in the city, and zip code 94114, which is home to Noe and Eureka valleys, the Castro, and Duboce Triangle. Unfortunately, the map cuts off above many of San Francisco's southern neighborhoods (sorry, residents of Excelsior, Portola, and Visitacion Valley!).
HotPads also looked at how much more pet-friendly apartments cost than apartments that don't accept pets in cities across the country. In San Francisco, pet owners pay a median of 11.6 percent—or $153.63—more per month for their apartments than non-pet owners, a figure that does not include any additional pet rent or deposit that comes on top of a normal rent. That premium percentage is the third highest in the country, after Atlanta and Queens, New York. Many pet-friendly buildings are not those run by mom-and-pop landlords; instead they tend to be big, amenity-stocked towers—a state of affairs that tends to funnel pet owners to the more expensive buildings and neighborhoods from the get-go.
Of the zip codes surveyed, SoMa's had the most rentals offered (542), bringing the total of pet-friendly rentals there to a healthy 431. The pool for the runner-up zip code, 94131, by contrast, had just 114 units in the time period HotPads measured—which perhaps explains some of the premium pet owners pay, since SoMa's rent routinely ranks high up there on our maps of the median rent of a one-bedroom in San Francisco.
· Top Pet-Friendly Cities for Renting With Pets [HotPads]
· Looking for a Rental That's Pet-Friendly? Curbed's Got You Covered [Curbed SF]
· Mapping the Median Rent of a One-Bedroom in San Francisco [Curbed SF]