CA-11 large apartment buildings — how to reach each one
Built 2026-09-20 from free San Francisco open data. Cost: $0.

WHAT THIS IS
All 11,359 residential buildings of 5+ units in California's 11th
Congressional District (San Francisco), each tagged with the channel a
canvasser should use: mail, knock, try the buzzer, or recruit a resident
volunteer. Totals are broken out by neighborhood and by supervisor district so
field time goes where the knock-access buildings are, and postage covers the
rest.

HEADLINE NUMBERS
- 11,359 buildings / 235,816 units total (2,291 buildings of 20+ units,
  157,496 units, plus 9,068 buildings of 5-19 units, 78,320 units)
- Mail only: 542 buildings / 64,863 units — no canvasser gets in. 217 of these
  are fire-department-confirmed high-rises; 325 are inferred from year built
  and height (see "known gaps" below).
- Condo/mixed-use - resident volunteer needed: 689 buildings / 48,751 units
- Knock - try the buzzer: 1,095 buildings / 44,285 units (pre-1970, inferred
  keyed entry unlikely)
- Knock (5-19 units): 9,033 buildings / 77,917 units
- SRO and residential hotels: 71 buildings / 4,270 units (voters, different
  outreach mode) — 52 of these are also counted in the 20+ list above

Where the pain concentrates, reading straight off the tabs he'll open:
Supervisor District 6 (SoMa, Mission Bay, South Beach, plus slivers of the
Tenderloin, the Mission and Hayes Valley) has 49,986 units in buildings of 5+
units, and 29,684 of those (59%) are mail only — the biggest mail-vs-knock
gap of any district. In the Mission Bay neighborhood specifically, 6,205 of
7,988 units (78%) are mail only. In Financial District/South Beach it's
12,683 of 19,933 (64%). See "By supervisor district" and "By neighborhood"
for the full reconciled totals across all four channels.

CHANNEL LEGEND
- Mail only - high-rise, fire dept. confirmed: controlled lobby, staffed fire-
  control room. Mail. Do not attempt to canvass.
- Mail only - 8+ stories (inferred): almost certainly secured entry. Mail.
- Mail only - built 1970+, keyed entry likely (inferred): keyed entry is the
  norm for this era. Mail, or a lobby drop with manager consent.
- Condo/mixed-use - a resident volunteer may canvass (inferred from the
  city's land-use table, not a confirmed condo association): recruit a
  supporter who lives in the building (see legal note below). Do not send an
  outside canvasser.
- Knock - try the buzzer (pre-1970, inferred): buzzer panel usually works.
  Try it, fall back to mail if there's no answer.
- Knock: standard doorknock. Covers every 5-19-unit building, including small
  condo/mixed-use buildings in that size range — ring from the street door;
  only a resident may canvass inside the hallways (Civ. Code 4515(b)), so a
  volunteer who lives there still gets the same legal protection as in a
  larger condo building.

HOW TO USE THIS
1. Open CA11_large_buildings.xlsx. Start on "By supervisor district" or "By
   neighborhood" to see where mail spend should concentrate versus where field
   shifts pay off.
2. Use the five list tabs (or the matching files in csv.zip) to build walk
   lists or a mail run for one channel at a time.
3. "Mail only", "Condo - resident canvasses" and "Knock - try buzzer" each
   import straight into Google My Maps (its limit is 2,000 rows per import;
   all three are under it). The 5-19-unit knock list is 9,033 rows — too
   big for one import — so it ships pre-split by supervisor district in
   csv.zip's walk_5to19_by_district/ folder (largest file: 1,752 rows).

LEGAL NOTE — the condo tier
Civ. Code 4515(b) says a common-interest development's governing documents
cannot stop a MEMBER OR RESIDENT of that development from canvassing or
distributing political material inside it. It gives an outside canvasser
nothing. So for the 689 condo/mixed-use buildings, the move is to recruit a
supporter who already lives there, not to send a stranger with a clipboard.
Source: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=4515

KNOWN GAPS
- Units are housing units, not voters.
- 325 of the 542 mail-only buildings are inferred from year built and height;
  217 are fire-department-confirmed high-rises. The inferred group can be
  spot-checked by a canvasser on any shift.
- Before tiering, 65 building records (5,142 units) that shared the exact
  same location and a matching unit count with another record were merged
  into one — the same building was carrying two city records (once from the
  assessor roll, once from the land-use table). Every count in this workbook
  is post-merge.
- 69 buildings in the 20+ list have no street number yet (new construction).
  They ship with a parcel number and lat/lon instead of an address; 19 of
  those are in the mail-only tab.
- Condo/mixed-use unit counts come from the city's Land Use table and can lag
  new construction by about a year; the "CONDO_OR_MIXED" building type is a
  land-use category, not a confirmed condo association, so a few of these are
  actually mixed-use or rental buildings.
- 75 development-area records (15,633 units citywide) are area totals, not
  individual buildings, and are left out entirely.

DATASET LINKS (data.sf.gov)
- wv5m-vpq2 — Assessor Secured Roll
- c5ge-t6pj — Land Use
- wb4c-6hwj — Fire Department high-rise inspections
- acdm-wktn — Parcels, active
- qczv-wabc — Congressional Districts 2022-2032
- f2zs-jevy — Supervisor districts (map file)

Cost: $0.
