The Latin Rock House, San Francisco, is now a protected music landmark

The Latin Rock House, San Francisco, has been declared a historic landmark, protecting a Spanish-style home on 25th and York from being painted over, altered or demolished by any future owner without the city's permission. Lawmakers voted for it unanimously last month.

The house is impossible to walk past. Its exterior is a painted forest of faces, Latino artists, activists and musicians caught mid-motion, with a spotted jaguar sprawled across the garage door and a line running around one window in capitals: "It takes the hood to save the hood." It is also a working home, where Richard and Tammy Segovia live.

San Francisco has more than 300 historic landmarks, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the colonial-era Mission Dolores church, and a handful of them are houses. Most of those are traditional in style or marked by something that happened inside; the best known are the row of pastel Victorians used in the opening credits of Full House. None of them look like this one.

Richard Segovia is 72, a fifth-generation San Franciscan born and raised in the Mission, and his family moved into the house in 1963 when he was 10. "Now we can say this piece of the city is ours," he said. He has been open that he could not afford to live on the block today had he not inherited the property.

The neighbourhood around him has been rebuilt twice over. About 11% of Mission residents were Latino in 1950, according to the California Migration Museum, and by the 1970s that was close to half. The tech boom of the 1990s pushed prices and eviction rates up together, and Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who represents the Mission, says the area has lost more than 12,000 Latino residents in the past 25 years. Property values on Segovia's block now sit close to $2 million.

The mural itself is a decade old, painted after Segovia won a grant from the California Art Commission. The walls commemorate Santana and the jazz percussionist Pete Escovedo alongside civil rights figures such as Dolores Huerta, and Fielder counted more than 87 musicians on the facade next to Chicano and Aztec motifs. She has pointed out that San Francisco is where Latin rock began, when Latino artists in the 1960s folded Afro-Cuban rhythms and percussion drawn from jazz and salsa into the city's psychedelic scene.

Inside, the house still functions as a studio. The all-female salsa group Agua Pura and the young band Los Jefes have taken unofficial residencies, using Segovia's instruments, recording booths and contacts. Rebecca Rodriguez, 26, who leads Agua Pura, calls it a museum that is still alive, and the walls of the performance space carry the signatures of everyone who has come through.

Not everybody reads the vote as a win. Sergio De La Torre, a University of San Francisco professor who studies the Mission's demographic change, argues that landmarking one building is an inexpensive way for the city to say it cares while leaving housing assistance, street vendor support and youth programs where they were. The house files under latin and rock; the neighbourhood question is still open.