Gentrification of San Francisco
The gentrification of San Francisco has been an ongoing source of tension between renters and working people who live in the city as well as real estate interests.
A major increase of gentrification in San Francisco has been attributed to the Dot-Com Boom in the 1990s, creating a strong demand for skilled tech workers from local startups and close by Silicon Valley businesses leading to rising standards of living.
[1] As a result, a large influx of new workers in the internet and technology sector began to contribute to the gentrification of historically poor immigrant neighborhoods such as the Mission District.
[3] Many locals in San Francisco attribute the negative effects of gentrification to the large number of technology companies in the surrounding metropolitan area.
Therefore, the city will make connections or changes with whoever has the most wealth at a given time, which in this case happened to be big tech companies as the hope was to increase both job opportunities and the economic well-being of San Francisco.
[6] In 1994, San Francisco voters passed a ballot initiative which expanded the city's existing rent control laws to include small multi-unit apartments with four or less units, built prior to 1980.
[7]: 1,44 [8] [9]: 1 [10][11] The authors stated that "This substitution toward owner occupied and high-end new construction rental housing likely fueled the gentrification of San Francisco, as these types of properties cater to higher income individuals."
[20] In the broadest strokes of the matter, scholars have described anti-gentrification groups as all finding themselves more or less opposed to the Bay Area’s ‘mainstream liberal establishment.’ [21] According to historian Nancy Mirabal, in the eyes of anti-gentrification leaders, San Francisco city officials exert the “collective belief… that gentrification, despite all of its potential drawbacks, was a positive… byproduct of growing Bay Area prosperity.”[22] In retaliation to the rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape of San Francisco, accelerated by the influx of high paying technology jobs, anti-eviction movements such as the San Francisco Tenants Union,[23][24]Causa Justa :: Just Cause, Right to the City Alliance, and People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (PODER)[25] have been created by the local community as a measure to hinder the effects of gentrification.
Besides tenants' rights, social, economic, environmental and cultural public concerns have also been addressed by The Mission Anti-displacement Coalition (MAC),[26] an organization created by PODER to counteract the effects of gentrification in the late 1990s due to the rise of tech jobs.
[21] Karl Beitel has written about how this traditionally progressive faction has monopolized the most visible levels of anti-gentrification discourse— showing up at city council meetings, maintaining large Twitter followings, and organizing frequent street protests.
As a response, the Chinatown Resource Center created a proposal to make structural changes in land use policy to decrease or slow "revitalization.
After the dot-com bubble burst, the Mission District experienced less gentrification during the period of economic recovery, however, it remained an area with an increasing influx of high-income, tech workers.
A notorious example of resistance was the 'Mission Yuppie Eradication Project,' an anti-capitalist direct action group which advocated and committed acts of vandalism and sabotage of expensive vehicles, luxury housing, and bars and dining establishments catering to wealthy newcomers.
The MYEP aimed at defining gentrification in terms of irreconcilable conflict between classes and elicited a considerable amount of media coverage.
The flourishing of technology sector at Silicon Valley and rapid recovery from the Great Recession have caused for the job market to skyrocket for popular professions, while others decline.
[38] Burlingame, Mountain View, San Jose, and Santa Clara are also affected by Silicon Valley's growth, as the region has no defined bounds and continues to proliferate along the central coast.
[43] Even though African Americans represent a significant demographic minority in East Bay cities,[44] they are more likely to be displaced and gentrified due to low socioeconomic status and less financial wealth.
[48] The discourse surfaced when San Francisco emerged as the center of technological development that gave rise to rapid job growth and transformation of the housing market dynamics.
[49] Communities of color in the Bay Area began to see the arrival of new millionaires, which gave landowners opportunities to engage in the process of evictions and drastically increase in rent.
[50] Numerous reports state that during this period of time, the number of faultless evictions in Oakland tripled while rent increased more than 100 percent.
However, many of the loans offered did not include income verifiability so many homes were foreclosed, affecting thousand homeowners and tenants living in the Bay Area.
[54] The Bay Area is now currently facing a new wave of gentrification caused by the expansion of technology industry and investment of private business developers.
