

San Francisco Eviction Protests - jmillikin
http://elias-levy.tumblr.com/post/74103701680/san-francisco-eviction-protests

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jacobquick
He's looking at citywide data rather than "what is happening to the Spanish
Mission down around 24th Street," which is where the "uptick of evictions"
comes from and also where the protests are. There was a wave of evictions
before around "Mission/Dolores" which is immediately west of Mission Street,
but the new ones are east of that street. This is a somewhat run-down
neighborhood (compared to Dolores) where everyone speaks spanish and all
business is (or was) conducted in spanish. The evictions amount to an attack
on one of the last really cheap places to live in SF.

I've only been living here since 2011 but even since then a lot of businesses
have been replaced with hipster coffee houses and bars, and a lot of triple
deckers have changed hands and then mysteriously burned down. If you lose your
apartment in this part of the city you will pay thousands more to get another
one just like it, or you won't make that kind of money and literally no longer
be able to afford to live anywhere in the city you probably work in. As an
example I took the cheapest place I could in 2011 at $1200/month for something
about the size of the cube you work in, and I'm sure I am paying more than
twice as much as my neighbor. The next cheapest place was $1650, and over by
Dolores was about $2k. I look at apartment listings and there's nothing studio
sized in the area for less than $2500 now. If our place changed hands and
burned I'd be inconvenienced and maybe have to cut back on comic books, but my
neighbors would literally have to leave the city. It seems to me they have a
legitimate gripe over having their neighborhood ripped out from underneath
them, though I don't know what they should do about it. They might start
demanding the city intervene or build public housing, but the existing new
apartment fees that go into a pool to build public housing either don't get
paid or just don't get built.

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WalterSear
>If you lose your apartment in this part of the city you will pay thousands
more to get another one just like it, or you won't make that kind of money and
literally no longer be able to afford to live anywhere in the city you
probably work in

Except that the rest of the city hasn't had this massive bump in prices. Where
I live in the excelsior, prices have barely risen at all in the last decade.
No one would need to leave the city - they would just need to leave the
hipster hoods.

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seandougall
> No one would need to leave the city - they would just need to leave the
> hipster hoods.

And find something affordable, until the hipsters find _that_ neighborhood,
and then shove over again to make room... I hope I'm misreading your
statement, because that attitude is really distasteful. It's not the less-
affluent person's fault for living in a neighborhood before it becomes cool.

Maybe the Excelsior has escaped this phenomenon, but the Mission, the Inner
and Outer Sunset, the Richmond, the Castro, the Tenderloin, and even Oakland
haven't. And those are just the places where I personally know people who are
getting priced out. Just because the author can explain gentrification with
microeconomics doesn't mean that it isn't real or that it isn't detrimental to
the city and its inhabitants.

