Alta Vista, San Diego, CA

Curving residential streets with no shopping strip at all make up Alta Vista, a small hillside neighborhood in southeastern San Diego. Encanto and Valencia Park sit above it, Paradise Hills below, Bay Terraces on the east side, and the National City line runs along the west. Locals shorten the name to A.V. Housing is close to all single-family. Detached houses line streets such as Leaf Terrace and the blocks off Valencia Parkway, and duplexes or small multi-unit buildings are rare. Because the ground rolls, plenty of homes sit above or below street level, and few blocks are completely flat. For a park, residents head a few blocks north to Martin Luther King Jr. Community Park on Skyline Drive in Encanto, which has its own recreation center. Closer to home, walking means hills, and bike lanes are scarce, so most exercise starts with a climb. Food and errands happen just outside the lines. Division Market, at 5402 Division Street on the Valencia Park side, covers milk, snacks and the forgotten ingredient for dinner. Bigger grocery runs and sit-down meals mean a drive, usually to the Food 4 Less on Euclid Avenue in Lincoln Park or into National City. Nye Elementary School is on Valencia Parkway. Several bus lines run along the main roads, and the Orange Line trolley stops at the Encanto/62nd Street station on Akins Avenue, a quick drive north. The catch is that Alta Vista has no cafe, restaurant or green space of its own. Every coffee, dinner out or trip to the park begins with getting in the car or walking uphill. What Alta Vista offers instead is a compact run of hillside houses with neighbors on every side, close to Encanto's parks and the larger stores in National City without any commercial traffic on its own streets.