Mission Hills sits on the mesa west of Hillcrest, above the Old Town valley, with streets lined almost entirely by early twentieth-century housing — Craftsman bungalows, Spanish Colonial Revival houses, and Mission Revival apartments from the 1910s and 1920s. The neighbourhood survived the mid-century enthusiasm for demolition that stripped most of San Diego's historic residential stock, and it is now one of the city's more architecturally consistent districts.
The commercial strips on Washington Street and Fort Stockton Drive have a neighbourhood scale: small restaurants, a bakery, a wine shop, independent businesses that serve the residential community around them. The Sunday flea market and the small park at Pioneer Park at the neighbourhood's western edge are local gathering places.
Mission Hills is a ten-minute walk from Old Town and a ten-minute walk from Hillcrest — it functions best as part of a walk through both rather than as a standalone destination. The views from the bluff edge at Sunset and Orizaba avenues look west over Mission Valley toward the ocean.