Saying that you can’t control any of these factors does indeed sound like a libertarian/republican market mentality. Calling any of these factors of gentrification unstoppable and inevitable natural forces ignores all the unspoken policy decisions that allow them.
I was actually arguing that you shouldn’t try to control who moves where. But before new people can move in, there needs to be vacancies. In my neighborhood, this means landlords abusing the court system to get poor/elderly people kicked out of their apartments, or declaring “owner occupancy” of entire floors of buildings for the minimum amount of time to evict tenants before re-renting at market rates. I think these landlords are much more to blame for gentrification than me (white, middle-class tech worker) moving into the neighborhood to have an apartment with a reasonable commute to my office. I represent demand, but am not creating supply or purposefully displacing anyone.
This nice elderly woman’s contribution to gentrification by selling her house doesn’t get brought up much by those who paint gentrification with a broad brush. I’m guessing her story represents a minority of the cases. Most gentrification involves booting low-income renters, not through an equitable transfer of wealth to lucky “native” homeowners. In a world of better policies, however, this woman wouldn’t need the system of housing-as-financial-asset to retire, and in the end, housing-as-financial-asset does the world, and her community, more harm than good.
Zoning can definitely restrict an “expensive new coffee shop” from opening up. Again, rent-jacking can be used to force out local businesses, creating artificial vacancies for these new posh places to open up. That can definitely be controlled. Loans and rentals can also be extended, to some degree on a preferential basis to businesses owned by local residents, or laws that require companies to hire locally, and operate in ways that meet the needs of the local community.
Unfortunately SF has been so difficult to build in for so long you have a huge amount of pressure and financial incentive to massively knock down and rebuild, so the organic slow growth doesn’t happen.
The Golden Coast of the West is beautiful and a desirable location. Prices in these areas are destined to lead the way and until there is a fairly large re-arrangment of salaries among job types or a flattening of the financial stratification of society, “working class” (low and middle income) folks will be squeezed out.
But you are (your class in general) giving them the current owners incentive to get rid of people for a payday.
How is blocking new businesses that people want a real win though? My neighborhood has changed over the last 10 years that I’ve lived in it (and it has been gentrifying with force for the last three or four). The best thing that has happened is that instead of a strip of closed businesses and empty shops, we have coffee shops and restaurants now. Is keeping a slum slumlike really good?
Update: I should add, I’m a tech engineer too so it is “my” class also. I’m also a landlord with rentals because I’ve invested my salary, in the ten years since I got my own place, in property local to me.
I actually agree with you and that’s not happening fast enough in SF. But
the Mission District is a unique case for two reasons:
It’s got some of the best public transportation in SF and the areas
around the stations are completely under-built. There was always supposed
to be mid-rise development in many places that people are complaining about
developers. It really is the best place for this kind of development
SF and the entire Bay Area is woefully underdeveloped compared to
demand. You won’t see significant price reductions in SF unless we build
100k new housing units and we aren’t on a pace to do that within the next
decade. The Bay Area is nearly 1 million units behind demand. In other
words, at the extremes, the supply and demand curves don’t really move much
because supply is saturated. But in SF we have the anti-development crowd
which hates tall buildings and much of the bay area doesn’t want to go to
6-8 story mid-rises.
In SF, we are redeveloping both Pier 70 and Hunters Point and Mission Bay
is almost done. All of these have led to fights against density. The
western SoMa plan which is almost entirely in an industrial area is mostly
4-6 stories - and people are still complaining about the height. What
drives me nuts are the complaints about “greedy developers.” If we let them
build in western SoMa or in Hunters Point and promised (and delivered)
transit improvements, then that’s where they’ll build.
My knowledge of SF’s specific situation is admittedly non-existent. But the point remains that people who own property in areas being gentrified usually benefit by selling out to the over-eager and monied people looking to move in.
Oh hell even the surrounding areas as well. How many of those new tech folks would ditch their SF homes in a heartbeat for a 10 minute commute to work if housing was available near enough instead of hours each way and have to take the company bus?
You’re confusing “San Francisco” (which is like 400,000-500,000 people) with “the Bay Area” which is about 10 million. There are a lot of other cities here and the entire ring around the Bay is filled with them.
Me. This is why I work from home instead of driving 1.5 hours to my Mountain View office or fighting through BART on foot for a 60 minute public transit commute from Oakland.
SF is a 49 sq mile (7 miles by 7) penninsula poking into the Bay. The Bay has shoreline all around it, including San Jose, one of the largest cities in America.
Yeah, every city I’ve ever lived in has pavilions, picnic tables and fields in parks that can be reserved for a reasonable fee. It helps when you are having several people gather to celebrate, or play together. Generally, it’s a good thing for people to be able to hold their events in public space, in the outdoors. The other options to do so at private facilities are only available to people with considerably more money to spend. As long as there are plenty of other areas freely available for whoever wanders up, it’s not a crime against humanity.
But San Francisco seems to be having a struggle for who gets served, with rich people throwing their weight around and getting some well-deserved pushback. So everything is magnified. In the grand scheme of things, this is not a big deal, but in context, I can understand how it’s seen as another usurpation by the privileged of common space.
Right, San Francisco actually has a pretty impressive amount of park space for a city of its size (GGP is bigger than Central Park in NYC). The problem is that most of it is in a handful of large park areas like GGP, the Presidio and McLaren Park, all of which are inconvenient to get to if you live in the Mission or Potrero neighborhoods.
Seriosly, @enso? When in addition to displacing people you also disproportionately incarcerate them in institutions which directly or indirectly contribute to their premature death, than maybe ethnic cleansing is not a misnomer.
The Parks Department is incarcerating people? @Doctorow is comparing forcing people to reserve a tiny portion of Dolores Park for a fee to ethnic cleansing (and he used those words).
I’m not sure who “you” is here since I am not doing any of these things. I don’t even live in San Francsico. I’m an Oaklander.
It’s the same black males who are pushed out of the park who are also incarcerated. Point being there are manyfold intricate ways to get of undesirable sections of the population. And the US prison system is pretty effective in one of those ways.
At the bare minimum, I’m going to need you to draw a flow chart explaining how San Francisco Parks & Recreation fees are responsible for incarcerating and killing African-American men.
