6 ms·

Gentrification Spreads an Upheaval in San Francisco’s Mission District

33 points by zonotope 11y ago

sethbannon 11y ago
There is clearly a problem with the rapid rise in inequality and the tensions gentrification create within a community like The Mission District, but what's the solution? Have there been successful efforts elsewhere that have helped moderate the negative effects of such rapid changes?
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Can there be a solution? I don't really think so. More people want to live there than the area can fit. Someone has to lose out. The newcomers think they should get to live there because they have a lot of money to pay for scarce resource. The incumbents think they should get to live there because they were there first. Right or wrong, one group loses.
  - grossvogel 11y ago
    If you presuppose that an entire group must win and the other lose, then there probably can't be a solution. Any real solution would prevent that outcome.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      The only thing I'm presupposing is that more people want to live there, than the area can fit. Maybe too many even if they built lots of high density housing, which SF won't allow anyway. It won't happen on a purely group vs. group basis, that's just a simplification for the purpose of forty-word internet comments.
  - bhickey 11y ago
    Here's a politically infeasible solution: Make the pie bigger. People want to live in San Francisco because Silicon Valley is an awful alternative. What are some concrete steps we could take to increase the stock of housing? * Repeal Prop 13. While Prop 13 stands, cities have a huge interest in combating new residential development because it'll erode the tax base. It serves as a tax on newcomers and discourages people from moving and downsizing. * Prohibit rent control, it's the surest way to destroy housing stock short of bombing. * Strip local zoning authority from municipalities. Los Altos Hills has a 1 acre lot requirement and prohibits multi-family construction. Menlo Park has a 30' height limit and a 15' curb setback requirement. * Institute land value tax. It's inexcusable that 24th Street is surrounded with two-story construction. Compare it with Central Square in Cambridge: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.365178,-71.103326,3a,75y,273.3h,96.9t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s5En2leDaMgVcLGj9Lt2POQ!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@42.365178,-71.103326,3a,75y,273...
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      People want to live in San Francisco because Silicon Valley is an awful alternative. Maybe that's the answer right there. San Francisco doesn't need to fix itself if Silicon Valley can be made attractive, and Silicon Valley has a lot more space than San Fran.
      - sthu11182 11y ago
        the only construction i see is in redwood city. the rest refuse to change.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  There have been successful efforts in Pune (India) to moderate those effects. It's called "build enough houses for everyone": https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8cMeVTIMAEMyzk.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8cMeVTIMAEMyzk.jpg For comparison, a nearby city (Mumbai) takes a more SF-style approach - height/FSI restrictions, rent control, etc - rent there can exceed a lac/month (yes, Mumbai rent is a little less than NYC rent).
  - lolpep8 11y ago
    Gentrification would still exist as the previous owners and renters would be forced to live in the perifery of their towns, as newcomers would settle in their neighborhoods.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Only if you don't build enough houses in the central part of town. These housing issues work out to nothing but simple arithmetic - if N people want to live in a region and you have K < N houses, N-K people are unhappy. Set K=N and all the problems are solved.
      - lolpep8 11y ago
        Old buildings have to be demolished and new ones built, which may not be in the range of the former tenants. Old residents have to leave either way, which is both the problem itself and the root of other ones. Anyway, it's the mutation of a city into another one, there are too many variables. Higher density sounds appealing but it may bring other problems, and the old residents end up displaced anyway. It's not going to be pretty, and the result is not going to be the San Francisco everyone loves, but well... it's not my city so why do I care. Edit: quite a few edits
        yummyfajitas 11y ago
        If you can build arbitrary amounts of new housing the only way that anyone will be displaced is if (marginal cost of building new unit, amortized to a monthly rent) > (what old tenant can pay). You are right that new Pune isn't the same Pune it used to be (or so I'm told) - now there are Gujus, Punjabis, Africans, white dudes and other non-Marathis there. As an American I'm a bit unsympathetic to "there goes the neighborhood".
- azakai 11y ago
  An article on HN just a week or two ago argued that allowing more building is one approach, and gave Miami as an example. The old neighborhoods there stay as they were, while a lot of the new influx of people go to a small set of newly-built hi-rise luxury buildings. I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but it makes sense that if building is very constrained, as in SF, then it increases the pressure and raises prices.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    Supply and demand. Build more high density housing and it should help alleviate demand.
- a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
  > Have there been successful efforts elsewhere that have helped moderate the negative effects of such rapid changes? Redlining definitely worked for a long time.
snappy173 11y ago
It's ironic ... The NIMBY's didn't want the BART to go through their neighborhoods, but having two stops in Mission is part of why it's so attractive now.
- skybrian 11y ago
  So they were right? Unless they wanted to sell.
  - snappy173 11y ago
    No. The concern is that it makes it easier for the wrong type of people to get there ... from Oakland, etc.
    - nulltype 11y ago
      My understanding of the NIMBY thing is it's either: A) keep everything the way it is so that things don't change for me or B) keep everything the way it is so that my home value goes up. The arguments you use to enact a NIMBY strategy are not really important. So type A NIMBYs were "right" in that they didn't want BART to go through their neighborhood because it would case the neighborhood to change, and lo and behold it did. Type B NIMBYs were "wrong" if they argued against BART because it had a positive effect on their home values.
deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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lnanek2 11y ago
I wish they had a reasonable argument that benefitted everyone. They want the owners of properties not to be able to set the rent. But my family had an apartment building in NJ that unfortunately, due to laws, we couldn't raise the rent more than a set amount per year. Soon there was just no way to even pay for maintenance when the roof leaked and things like that and it had to be shutdown. So giving these people what they want, the ability to force owners not to raise rent, just does not benefit anyone in the end. She runs a chile shop, how would she feel if protestors were sitting in front of city hall demanding she can only charge ten cents per bowl of chile? Sure the protestors love the idea of nearly free food, but that is just going to kill the business, not give them nearly free food forever.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  And that is the problem in a nutshell. Price fixing a single thing (in this case rents) means the market moves without those prices changing and that results in huge imbalances. Now if the NJ government funded a fixed rate building maintenance team you're family could use the price appropriate maintenance team to keep the building in repair, of course they could not pay them market wages (that is why maintenance costs more) so the people working for the maintenance group would have to go to the state run stores where they could get their fixed priced foodstuffs. Of course the manufacturers selling to that store would need fixed price ingredients which you would get from state run farms selling their crops at a set price. It is a silly ad nauseum sort of response but the kernel is accurate, you cannot successfully control one aspect of prices without somebody getting disadvantaged. Since you want more housing, the answer is to let people build more market rate housing, not to control rents.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    Since you want more housing... Trouble is what people really want is for nothing at all to change. Prices stay flat, no new housing is built, nobody gets evicted, no new people come to town. Sadly, since they want to have their cake and to eat it too, nobody seems to be approaching it from the POV of: We are up against an inexorable force of change; how do we channel that change in a way that is most acceptable? Instead they demand the impossible and lose all control of where that inexorable force is going to take them.
jkot 11y ago
> luxury condominiums .... are rapidly replacing ... rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District Anyone who comments on this subject should disclose if they hold rent-controlled apartment. It is a huge conflict of interest. I know from my own country, how journalists and politicians will jump through hoops to keep it. Also article tries to create unfair image of new comers. If I would move to SF, I would probably shop in a dollar store as well, since I have children.
anaximander 11y ago
Luxury condominiums, organic ice cream stores, cafes that serve soy lattes and chocolate shops that offer samples from Ecuador and Madagascar are rapidly replacing 99-cent stores, bodegas and rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District It's a minor tragedy to set up the conflict this way. "Largely useless and hedonistic shops replacing stores that actually matter! How long can the city tolerate these too-wealthy, dandy scum?!" Certainly, if the stores are being replaced, that's a function of property-owners' decisions to change tenants, is it not? Why are we blaming financially-successful technologists for actions taken by greedy land-owners? Don't you think these "gentrifiers" would be happy to pay the same amount that the "natives" have been paying for so long? The property-owners are extracting as much from the world as they can, because they have a monopoly on the land/property and nobody except maybe the government can argue with them. They were taking as much as they could from you before, and now they're taking as much as they can from the wealthier people moving in. This is capitalism: they've earned their right to set the price for their property by buying it/building it/inheriting it before you did. What options do we have, if we want this to change? Let's not pit the victims against each other.
- patcon 11y ago
  imho the landlords shouldn't shoulder the blame either. Regional wealth in general seems to lead to a surplus of culture consumers and a deficit of culture creators, for a variety of structural reasons. it's funny, because we conflate two sides of gentrification that are actually separate: 1) the harsh reality we impose on oppressed communities of people living in poverty, and 2) the loss of artistic culture-creators from a neighborhood that they are living in because society doesn't know how to reward those who create culture. Both the marginalized and creative artistic class share a problem, and so have reason for solidarity, but they're not necessarily tightly coupled in all possible societies.
pbreit 11y ago
The statistic that "29% of rental inventory is being leased on AirBnB" is absurd. They're calculating it on the number of rentals that just happen to be unoccupied/available right now which makes no sense at all as a statistic.

33 points by zonotope 11y ago

There is clearly a problem with the rapid rise in inequality and the tensions gentrification create within a community like The Mission District, but what's the solution? Have there been successful efforts elsewhere that have helped moderate the negative effects of such rapid changes?

sliverstorm 11y ago
Can there be a solution? I don't really think so. More people want to live there than the area can fit. Someone has to lose out. The newcomers think they should get to live there because they have a lot of money to pay for scarce resource. The incumbents think they should get to live there because they were there first. Right or wrong, one group loses.
- grossvogel 11y ago
  If you presuppose that an entire group must win and the other lose, then there probably can't be a solution. Any real solution would prevent that outcome.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    The only thing I'm presupposing is that more people want to live there, than the area can fit. Maybe too many even if they built lots of high density housing, which SF won't allow anyway. It won't happen on a purely group vs. group basis, that's just a simplification for the purpose of forty-word internet comments.
- bhickey 11y ago
  Here's a politically infeasible solution: Make the pie bigger. People want to live in San Francisco because Silicon Valley is an awful alternative. What are some concrete steps we could take to increase the stock of housing? * Repeal Prop 13. While Prop 13 stands, cities have a huge interest in combating new residential development because it'll erode the tax base. It serves as a tax on newcomers and discourages people from moving and downsizing. * Prohibit rent control, it's the surest way to destroy housing stock short of bombing. * Strip local zoning authority from municipalities. Los Altos Hills has a 1 acre lot requirement and prohibits multi-family construction. Menlo Park has a 30' height limit and a 15' curb setback requirement. * Institute land value tax. It's inexcusable that 24th Street is surrounded with two-story construction. Compare it with Central Square in Cambridge: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.365178,-71.103326,3a,75y,273.3h,96.9t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s5En2leDaMgVcLGj9Lt2POQ!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@42.365178,-71.103326,3a,75y,273...
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    People want to live in San Francisco because Silicon Valley is an awful alternative. Maybe that's the answer right there. San Francisco doesn't need to fix itself if Silicon Valley can be made attractive, and Silicon Valley has a lot more space than San Fran.
    - sthu11182 11y ago
      the only construction i see is in redwood city. the rest refuse to change.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
There have been successful efforts in Pune (India) to moderate those effects. It's called "build enough houses for everyone": https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8cMeVTIMAEMyzk.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8cMeVTIMAEMyzk.jpg For comparison, a nearby city (Mumbai) takes a more SF-style approach - height/FSI restrictions, rent control, etc - rent there can exceed a lac/month (yes, Mumbai rent is a little less than NYC rent).
- lolpep8 11y ago
  Gentrification would still exist as the previous owners and renters would be forced to live in the perifery of their towns, as newcomers would settle in their neighborhoods.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Only if you don't build enough houses in the central part of town. These housing issues work out to nothing but simple arithmetic - if N people want to live in a region and you have K < N houses, N-K people are unhappy. Set K=N and all the problems are solved.
    - lolpep8 11y ago
      Old buildings have to be demolished and new ones built, which may not be in the range of the former tenants. Old residents have to leave either way, which is both the problem itself and the root of other ones. Anyway, it's the mutation of a city into another one, there are too many variables. Higher density sounds appealing but it may bring other problems, and the old residents end up displaced anyway. It's not going to be pretty, and the result is not going to be the San Francisco everyone loves, but well... it's not my city so why do I care. Edit: quite a few edits
      - yummyfajitas 11y ago
        If you can build arbitrary amounts of new housing the only way that anyone will be displaced is if (marginal cost of building new unit, amortized to a monthly rent) > (what old tenant can pay). You are right that new Pune isn't the same Pune it used to be (or so I'm told) - now there are Gujus, Punjabis, Africans, white dudes and other non-Marathis there. As an American I'm a bit unsympathetic to "there goes the neighborhood".
azakai 11y ago
An article on HN just a week or two ago argued that allowing more building is one approach, and gave Miami as an example. The old neighborhoods there stay as they were, while a lot of the new influx of people go to a small set of newly-built hi-rise luxury buildings. I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but it makes sense that if building is very constrained, as in SF, then it increases the pressure and raises prices.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Supply and demand. Build more high density housing and it should help alleviate demand.
a8da6b0c91d 11y ago
> Have there been successful efforts elsewhere that have helped moderate the negative effects of such rapid changes? Redlining definitely worked for a long time.

snappy173 11y ago

It's ironic ... The NIMBY's didn't want the BART to go through their neighborhoods, but having two stops in Mission is part of why it's so attractive now.

skybrian 11y ago
So they were right? Unless they wanted to sell.
- snappy173 11y ago
  No. The concern is that it makes it easier for the wrong type of people to get there ... from Oakland, etc.
  - nulltype 11y ago
    My understanding of the NIMBY thing is it's either: A) keep everything the way it is so that things don't change for me or B) keep everything the way it is so that my home value goes up. The arguments you use to enact a NIMBY strategy are not really important. So type A NIMBYs were "right" in that they didn't want BART to go through their neighborhood because it would case the neighborhood to change, and lo and behold it did. Type B NIMBYs were "wrong" if they argued against BART because it had a positive effect on their home values.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

lnanek2 11y ago

I wish they had a reasonable argument that benefitted everyone. They want the owners of properties not to be able to set the rent. But my family had an apartment building in NJ that unfortunately, due to laws, we couldn't raise the rent more than a set amount per year. Soon there was just no way to even pay for maintenance when the roof leaked and things like that and it had to be shutdown. So giving these people what they want, the ability to force owners not to raise rent, just does not benefit anyone in the end. She runs a chile shop, how would she feel if protestors were sitting in front of city hall demanding she can only charge ten cents per bowl of chile? Sure the protestors love the idea of nearly free food, but that is just going to kill the business, not give them nearly free food forever.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
And that is the problem in a nutshell. Price fixing a single thing (in this case rents) means the market moves without those prices changing and that results in huge imbalances. Now if the NJ government funded a fixed rate building maintenance team you're family could use the price appropriate maintenance team to keep the building in repair, of course they could not pay them market wages (that is why maintenance costs more) so the people working for the maintenance group would have to go to the state run stores where they could get their fixed priced foodstuffs. Of course the manufacturers selling to that store would need fixed price ingredients which you would get from state run farms selling their crops at a set price. It is a silly ad nauseum sort of response but the kernel is accurate, you cannot successfully control one aspect of prices without somebody getting disadvantaged. Since you want more housing, the answer is to let people build more market rate housing, not to control rents.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Since you want more housing... Trouble is what people really want is for nothing at all to change. Prices stay flat, no new housing is built, nobody gets evicted, no new people come to town. Sadly, since they want to have their cake and to eat it too, nobody seems to be approaching it from the POV of: We are up against an inexorable force of change; how do we channel that change in a way that is most acceptable? Instead they demand the impossible and lose all control of where that inexorable force is going to take them.

jkot 11y ago

> luxury condominiums .... are rapidly replacing ... rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District Anyone who comments on this subject should disclose if they hold rent-controlled apartment. It is a huge conflict of interest. I know from my own country, how journalists and politicians will jump through hoops to keep it. Also article tries to create unfair image of new comers. If I would move to SF, I would probably shop in a dollar store as well, since I have children.

anaximander 11y ago

Luxury condominiums, organic ice cream stores, cafes that serve soy lattes and chocolate shops that offer samples from Ecuador and Madagascar are rapidly replacing 99-cent stores, bodegas and rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District It's a minor tragedy to set up the conflict this way. "Largely useless and hedonistic shops replacing stores that actually matter! How long can the city tolerate these too-wealthy, dandy scum?!" Certainly, if the stores are being replaced, that's a function of property-owners' decisions to change tenants, is it not? Why are we blaming financially-successful technologists for actions taken by greedy land-owners? Don't you think these "gentrifiers" would be happy to pay the same amount that the "natives" have been paying for so long? The property-owners are extracting as much from the world as they can, because they have a monopoly on the land/property and nobody except maybe the government can argue with them. They were taking as much as they could from you before, and now they're taking as much as they can from the wealthier people moving in. This is capitalism: they've earned their right to set the price for their property by buying it/building it/inheriting it before you did. What options do we have, if we want this to change? Let's not pit the victims against each other.

patcon 11y ago
imho the landlords shouldn't shoulder the blame either. Regional wealth in general seems to lead to a surplus of culture consumers and a deficit of culture creators, for a variety of structural reasons. it's funny, because we conflate two sides of gentrification that are actually separate: 1) the harsh reality we impose on oppressed communities of people living in poverty, and 2) the loss of artistic culture-creators from a neighborhood that they are living in because society doesn't know how to reward those who create culture. Both the marginalized and creative artistic class share a problem, and so have reason for solidarity, but they're not necessarily tightly coupled in all possible societies.

pbreit 11y ago

The statistic that "29% of rental inventory is being leased on AirBnB" is absurd. They're calculating it on the number of rentals that just happen to be unoccupied/available right now which makes no sense at all as a statistic.