You hit the nail on the head about transit, because the Bay Area's poor transit system exacerbates the problem creating by gentrification and rising rents.
I used to work in Midtown, and commute in from New Rochelle, a city that's mostly working class hispanics with a few yuppie high rises near the train station. The ~18 mile trip used to take just over 35 minutes on Metro North, and the service was highly reliable as well as highly available (8 trains to GCT between 7:02 am and 8:47 am). One stop closer to Manhattan was Pehlam, an upper middle class white area. The next stop after that was Mt. Vernon, a working class black area. There were two other lines through Westchester, each stopping in dozens of towns and with similar service. In sum, it was very practical to work in Manhattan but live in a town where rent wasn't totally unaffordable for people outside the upper middle class.
There is nothing comparable in the Bay Area. Rising rents don't just mean moving a slightly longer walk away from the train, or down another stop, but possibly moving somewhere else entirely.
I used to work in Midtown, and commute in from New Rochelle, a city that's mostly working class hispanics with a few yuppie high rises near the train station. The ~18 mile trip used to take just over 35 minutes on Metro North, and the service was highly reliable as well as highly available (8 trains to GCT between 7:02 am and 8:47 am). One stop closer to Manhattan was Pehlam, an upper middle class white area. The next stop after that was Mt. Vernon, a working class black area. There were two other lines through Westchester, each stopping in dozens of towns and with similar service. In sum, it was very practical to work in Manhattan but live in a town where rent wasn't totally unaffordable for people outside the upper middle class.
There is nothing comparable in the Bay Area. Rising rents don't just mean moving a slightly longer walk away from the train, or down another stop, but possibly moving somewhere else entirely.