Back in 1987, when Jessica Burdman and her then-husband were shopping for a house in San Francisco, they found themselves priced out of their popular Noe Valley neighborhood. They looked southeast — and up — to nearby Bernal Heights. A working-class community, it offered small vintage houses on a severely raked hillside with majestic views, when you scrambled to the top. The couple paid $189,000 for a 900-square-foot house on a street not inappropriately called Bonview. They added a second floor.

Theirs wasn’t just any house, but an “earthquake shack,” one of the thousands of wooden cottages built to temporarily house San Franciscans left homeless by the 1906 earthquake. Originally clustered in camps, some of the cottages were relocated throughout the city and fitted with plumbing and electricity for long-term use. Only a handful have survived. The last to appear on the market in Bernal Heights was a one-bedroom, one-bath house listed last summer at $900,000.

Bernal Heights has the ambience of a village, with small shops, public bulletin boards papered over with notices and even a wild coyote whose welfare many in the community fuss over. But some Bernalese declare themselves ambivalent about the San Francisco real estate boom that has put their once-humble neighborhood out of reach to many.