
San Francisco most intensely gentrified city in new rankings - aritraghosh007
https://ncrc.org/san-francisco-most-intensely-gentrified-city-in-new-rankings/
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shuckles
Read past the headline and it is in fact Oakland that is gentrifying. San
Francisco was almost entirely too rich to be considered.

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viscanti
5 of the 41 gentrifying areas were in SF. The rest are all of East Bay or in
South Bay. It's incredibly misleading to call that SF. SF had completed it's
gentrification process much earlier.

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albntomat0
How does a community (edit: geographically defined, not the people living
there at time X) receive investment while avoiding gentrification?

There seems to be a logical pattern of receiving investment -> community gets
more resources/becomes better -> more people want to live there -> prices
increase -> gentrification and the original residents being forced out.

What am I missing?

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nickff
Gentrification is a symptom of limited supply. The way to reduce housing
prices in the face of increased demand is to flood the market with supply, by
increasing high-density zoning, and loosening requirements such as parking. SF
will probably respond with even more rent control, which won't work.

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topher515
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! The number 1, 2, 3 and 4 problems the Bay Area
specifically (and CA generally) faces are an undersupply of housing.

Fixing this problem will be huge steps towards addressing homelessness,
gentrification, desegregating schools, and general wealth inequality.

If there is a focus on high density housing near public transit, then this
will also have a positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions

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umvi
High density housing? That sounds like it's going to devalue my own property.
Not in my back yard!

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bradlys
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. From what I've heard, if you own a SFH and
SFH are being torn down for apartments then your SFH becomes more desirable
over time because SFH are less common. (Presuming finite land and SFHs) And if
a developer can make 5x the housing on your one lot then probably $$$ - right?

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matchbok
Read another way: neighborhoods are getting investment and safer.

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rayiner
Read another way: white people are moving into neighborhoods that black people
had previously been redlined into, and are reaping all the benefits of that
investment and safety instead of the former residents.

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rootcage
In SF's case it's probably a good mix of asian and white tbh

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novok
Asians are the new white people

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usaar333
For anyone wondering, gentrification in the study is defined as increase in
median income and house value as well as college educated levels.

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idoh
In that case this report is figure out. From the report, "Do Opportunity Zones
benefit or gentrify low-income neighborhoods?" If one is looking just at
socioeconomic indicators, and after an investment they go up, and that's
defined as bad ... I have trouble following the logic from the report. Don't
we want investment to improve the numbers?

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anw
I no longer live in SF, but I found it funny seeing the dissonance of people
new to the Bay Area who moved there for a high paying tech startup and then
talk about how bad gentrification was while being blind to the fact they were
doing exactly what they were saying was wrong.

Not an exact conversation, but along the lines of what I've run into:

Rob: "It's terrible what's happening to these communities. The Mission used to
be a haven for artists. Now those people are moving out and it's losing its
history"

Mayk: "dude, didn't you just move here 2 years ago and have a $2,500 studio in
the Mission?"

Rob: "Yeah, but it's not like any of those people could have afforded it
anyway, so I'm not taking it away from somebody else or anything".

SF is a boiling melting pot of many different communities and cultures, and
it's interesting to see which cultures people ascribe to while also being part
of others that run counter to what ideals they say they believe.

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WWLink
The programmers have as much of a right to be there as anyone else does.
People who owned their condos and houses weren't pushed out, they usually sold
to buy something bigger. That would be practically everyone my parents knew.
(Edit: Of course, people who rented apartments for 20 years and then had their
rent jacked sky high by a new landlord, that's a different story...)

The fun part for me is I was born in SF. My family relocated to a suburb when
I was little to get a bigger house. They never could afford to move back. Now
that I'm a programmer, I can afford to take us back there! Would I feel guilty
about it? Abso-fucking-lutely not.

That said, if I were to do that, I'd be buying an old beat up house in outer
sunset. The only thing I'd be displacing in that case, are the people who
decided to sell it after owning it for 20+ years because they wanted a bigger
house in Fairfield or something. (Let's be real though, I can't afford to buy
a house in SF at all haha. Maybe a few more years of saving.)

I don't know, there's a large gap between "I've got mine, fuck you" and "You
must be apologetic for having a good career and being able to afford the
rent."

Of course, I feel that displacing all the old hole-in-the-wall restaurants for
shit like starbucks and panera bread is a disgrace. Especially because I don't
eat shit like starbucks or panera bread lol. I'm all about the $5 lunch
special at the chinese place. (Although now it's a $20 special!)

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ironmagma
Buying a house at SF prices is always contributing to displacement, for in
your absence there would be less demand for houses and the prices would be
lower.

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shuckles
This depends on a very liberal interpretation of what "displacement" means.

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ironmagma
Disagree, I think the opposite interpretation is very conservative. If a tech
bro moves in to a house that was just vacated voluntarily by someone who had
lived in the city for twenty years, have they not displaced anyone, since that
house would be vacant anyway? What if they moved to a nicer place in the same
city, and the tech bro is taking their old residence? What if the last tenant
passed away instead?

You can split hairs all you want, but anything that causes even a perceived
(by the landlord) increase in demand contributes to keeping that price from
going any lower. In an extreme case, that could be data from the housing data
broker saying that the average apartment in their zip code goes for $X. In an
even more extreme case, maybe their proxy for a data broker is the weekly
number of Craigslist views for an ad they put up. Sometimes landlords keep
vacancies open for multiple months or even years on end, hoping to get someone
who will pay their asking price.

Either way, the perceived demand is the thing keeping it up, and someone
buying a house as opposed to them not being able to sell the house is also
what stops them from renting it out to Joe Schmoe who can only pay $900/mo in
the meantime.

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shuckles
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Is it that buying a house from an
owner occupier at high market rates displaces the person who couldn't bid
market rate for the property?

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ironmagma
Exactly; buying the house contributes to the displacement in the sense that if
they weren't buying the house, someone of less means could buy it instead.

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shuckles
Displacement the word means moving something out of a place it currently
occupies. You should find a better word.

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shuckles
I described a situation where an owner occupier was selling their home. You
are describing being priced out. The concepts overlap, but what I described is
certainly not displacement.

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ironmagma
If someone says you are contributing to the mistreatment of animals by buying
fur coats, they are not implying that you personally skinned a
beaver/fox/what-have-you. Although your purchase of a house does not
necessarily directly cause someone else to get ousted, it is still
contributing to the problem of displacement, because through a sequence of
events it does cause someone to get displaced when their landlord says, "I can
rent this place out for 4 times the amount you're paying, so get out."

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pmdulaney
Imagine if San Francisco had not been lumped in with Oakland!

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fataliss
To the risk of being naive, I'd imagine that gentrification can be at least
somewhat mitigated by adding housing as the location becomes more desirable.
This can take various shapes and forms depending on where. In the Bay, open
space is mostly inexistant in desirable areas, so (one of) the main solution
would be increasing density.

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ed25519FUUU
I’ve always wondered why we have two pejorative words for opposite effects:
when rich people move in, it’s gentrification. When the rich leave it’s “white
flight”.

Is there some kind of equilibrium term here where a neighborhood is staying
exactly the same, getting neither richer nor poorer?

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smccully
Stagnation

