rfmcdonald | [URBAN NOTE] "How gentrified is your neighborhood (circa 1985)?" (Reply)

Facebook's Ned was kind enough to link to this very insightful San Francisco Chronicle article from 1985 taking a look at the consequences of gentrification in San Francisco. I have seen many of these processes at work in different Toronto neighbourhoods in my decade here. Documentation of this going on earlier in North America history is insightful.

Why Success May Spoil S.F.

By Mark Z. Barabak and Tim Schreiner

Picture the year 2000: A wave of Asians and white- collar professionals has lifted San Francisco to a wealth unprecedented for a major American city.

There would be no poverty or blight, thus none of the associated headaches afflicting most urban centers.

In many ways, it may seem ideal: a pristine city populated by 712,000 well-educated, well- heeled residents savoring a flourishing array of restaurants, theater, opera, symphony and other first-rate amenities.

Already, the city has realized dramatic increases in household income, property values and commercial growth. Although all the signs point to prosperity, an underlying question has emerged: Is success spoiling San Francisco?

The city “may be pricing out its janitors, its teachers, its nurses and its gas-station attendants the way Marin County already has, ” says Richard Le- Gates, head of the urban studies program at San Francisco State University. “Aside from humanitarian concern for people, there’s a tremendous social cost of pricing them out. On the more mundane level, there’s just the texture, quality of life, being made more interesting by a mix of ages and incomes and backgrounds.”

The case of the city’s black community, which lost 10,000 residents between 1970 and 1980, illustrates LeGates’ fear.

Rotea Gilford recalled what it was like to grow up 40 years ago in the Western Addition. Despite crime and poverty, he remembers a tightly knit, thriving neighborhood filled with “good sounds, good food, good talk, good music.”

“That’s all gone now, ” he said. “It has been displaced.”

Gilford, an aide to San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, is troubled by an attitude he senses in the city.

“People who have come here and bought the housing they can afford, or moved into the rental housing they can afford, want to change the neighborhood, ” he said. “All of a sudden my neighborhood, the way it has existed for all these years, isn’t good enough.”