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Dennis Richards, the neighborhood association’s president, added, “We want people to accept more historic preservation districts in the city, and we don’t want to have a battle every time.”

But they are in a battle.

“What you’re seeing is months of pent-up aggravation,” said Jean Paul Balajadia, who so far has spent $3.1 million buying and restoring the 1898 Queen Anne Victorian across the street from Beckstead, “of not knowing what they are going to do.”

Balajadia and a score of his neighbors showed up earlier this month at a neighborhood meeting hosted by Supervisor Scott Wiener to complain about the proposed landmark district.

The Historic Preservation Commission, the Planning Department and the Board of Supervisors will soon consider whether to turn the blocks surrounding Beckstead’s house into historic landmarks. If any one of those groups sides with property owners in the district, the once-grand plans to control construction in central, southern and eastern San Francisco could falter.

“If there are a good number of complaints, this district will just be put on hold, and the others won’t progress,” said Jim Chappell, a planning consultant. “It’s what happens in anything when the pendulum swings too far in one direction; there’s an equal and opposite move in the other direction.”

In response to complaints about strict interpretations of historical guidelines, Wiener has proposed rules that would require polling of residents before a landmark district is created. He has also proposed establishing local historical preservation standards that are less strict than ones used for federal historic landmarks.

Mike Buhler, executive director of San Francisco Architectural Heritage, a leading preservation group, said he was against the proposed rule change. “The source of our concern is, if you make something discretionary, or optional, you don’t have meaningful standards at all,” he said.

Mary Brown, the Planning Department staff member who is working on plans for the Duboce Park landmark district, said an additional layer of protection is needed to keep homeowners from adding new garages, or destroying old retaining walls, in ways that would undermine the neighborhood’s historical integrity.

“It’s not just a landmark district, it’s historic property,” Brown said. “And there needs to be more care in the design of alterations and additions, to make sure they’re compatible.”

But even compatible plans can be frustrated by burdensome regulations, some property owners said.

“I consider myself a preservationist, and I encourage preservation,” said Robin Levitt, an architect who lives in an 1890s false-front Victorian house in the Hayes Valley neighborhood. Levitt said he abandoned plans to replace rotted staircases on the front of his house because historic preservation requirements were too expensive and time-consuming.

“When regulations make it prohibitive economically to make improvements on your property,” Levitt said, “it’s over the top for me.”

This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.