San Francisco most intensely gentrified city in new rankings

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.

Ah, that probably explains why Seattle isn't in there.

I just expected to see a list of cities with the fastest rising prices, but its probably a list of cities that still have some capacity to go up.

Does the community actually receive "investment" if the investment causes the community to no longer exist? I think you're mistaking the process that happens here. Investment targets a geographic area, but that doesn't mean that it's intended to benefit the inhabitants of that area at all.

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.

Growing cities can avoid gentrification if the investment improves opportunities for people that already live there.

For example, a city could plow money into K-12 education and the local college.

Then, it could provide small businesses loans to students graduating from the local university.

I don't have great citations on this, but my understanding is that Tokyo has done a good job at this mostly by aggressively continuing to build housing. The housing prices there have remained much more stable than those in SF for example.

When you make a place attractive to live in, people will want to move there and costs will rise. You can increase supply but that still leads to more costs, you're just shifting them from housing to transport/shared services/groceries/etc.

There are some kinds of tax breaks and protections that can help reduce the harm of gentrification by helping people who own their home to avoid losing it.

People owning their homes?

There's tension between leading a place and a people. If you lead a place, it seems only good that investment goes up, housing prices increase, wealthier people live here, more tax dollars, and so on. If you lead a people, specifically the people who lived in the city when you assumed leadership, then gentrification can clearly be a bad thing - e.g. "Now our people can't afford to live here."

It doesn't, and why would it? Gentrification is by definition a good thing - making the area nicer, more modern and more prosperous. All these things require investment.

People are confusing gentrification with displacement, which are two separate concepts. Gentrification simply means improvement.

I think this is a matter of quite a lot of debate with no simple answer, but I would suggest you're misrepresenting the causality. The series of events usually looks more like:

Round 1. More people want to live there -> prices increase -> original residents start being forced out -> receiving investment -> Round 2. Even more people want to live there.

Gentrification is only really happening in Round 2+ of this cycle. A lot of people think if they oppose new buildings they cut off gentrification at the source, and maybe it's possible to slow down some occurrences of gentrification this way. But it ignores the factors that put this process in motion in the first place in Round 1 of my example - that new people wanted to live there before the area received any investment. Which is either the result of these people moving from nearby neighborhoods that they may have been priced out of, or the result of overall growth attracting people from far outside the region.

So it's really a lose-lose situation - if you don't build new housing, newcomers need somewhere to live and will end up forcing out existing residents somewhere. If you build some new housing, that's when people take notice and start calling it gentrification, and it may even create a flywheel effect that accelerates the gentrification. (But in a place like San Francisco, I don't really even see this flywheel effect anyway. Nobody is moving here because of the pretty new condos that are going up, people decide to move to the city first and decide later whether that means living in a new condo or an old walkup with charm).

The only way out of it is to build enough new housing to overcome the shortage. If the people being forced out could just move down the street into a new apartment, it wouldn't be such a big deal that they are forced out of that particular unit. As it is now, these people are often locked in and barely hanging on, maybe they've known the landlord for 30 years and are getting a break, or they have a low rent control price and wouldn't be able to afford the market rate price anymore. These things are obviously good in some ways, but it means a lot of people are in very precarious situations. In the long term, as we're seeing, this is clearly not a good situation to be in. And in the short term, we need protections for these people while the equilibrium is fixed, such as having subsidized housing available for them to move to, paying them housing stipends, or paying them out when they are evicted to help cover their costs of moving and finding a new place to live.

You need to crush the nimbys and build a home for every person who moves in (or family, etc. you get the idea).

The part you're missing is that affordable housing is condemned and bulldozed in favor of luxury apartments. At least, that's how it works in DC. They evict the poor, bulldoze the existing businesses and residences, and put up pretty buildings for the trust fund kids that want to party and live in the city.

One simple change is to upzone areas that aren't poor too. That will lower the price of housing everywhere, which is good. In most US cities, rich neighborhoods buy their way out of upzoning. For example the area around Dewey Blvd and the Forest Hill MUNI station has excellent transit access (subway in walking distance!) and there are a few km of street frontage without too much pitch for walkability but it's all SFH on relatively large lots by SF standards with commercial confined to a tiny strip mall. Why? Owners are rich! See also: Peskin ratfucking the North Beach central subway station.

However, this isn't a complete solution because it's not just a side-effect to have mid-to-high income people moving in to a lower-income area; it's intended. Concentrated poverty leads to weaker education and healthcare systems and other social disorders that perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Making those areas mixed-income is something social planners dreamed up as a way to increase access to jobs and improve schools etc. Mixed-income environments have a good track record where they occur naturally, so we've tried to replicate that success.

You've got to deal with the business sector. Analyses that look at housing prices and incomes alone inevitably find that housing price increases don't exceed the benefits of new job availability. But what also happens is that everything else in the community becomes more expensive. Cheap restaurants close, expensive ones open, survivors raise their prices; the same thing happens to grocers, bars, theatres, hairdressers etc. This is the big unsolved problem in "investing in poor communities": even in places with rent control (like SF), this kind of gentrification can price people out.

But do note, however, that the problem described in the first paragraph exacerbates the one in the third paragraph by increasing the mean income of people who move into poor communities and thus increasing the disparity in the price point of services in demand in those areas.

The missing thing here is property ownership. If the existing residents owned their properties, then the investment in those communities would accrue to them. Even if property taxes got too high and the existing residents left, they would be cashing out a big chunk of equity.

The problem is that, due to historical and ongoing discrimination, most of the existing residents in neighborhoods being gentrified are renters with no equity: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history....

Indeed, black and brown residents face the problem that their very presence depresses property values, and property values skyrocket when they leave. In DC, the area east of the Capitol has been gentrifying over the last 15 years. If you look at homes districted first Maury elementary school, their prices have skyrocketed (doubling in many cases) in the last 5-7 years. That’s far faster than the city as a whole. Why? Because in that time frame Maury flipped from majority black to majority white. Everything is in DCPS. The district has a highly equitable funding formula. It’s the same teachers, etc. Many of the fancy new school buildings are in fact majority black schools. But upper middle class parents are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more to send their kids to majority white schools. So the very fact of black residents leaving causes property values to go up—gains which obviously those former residents cannot capture.

From its definition, it follows that gentrification will have resulted in existing resident landowners getting outbid and/or renters outbid or otherwise being forced from their homes. To avoid gentrification, you need to devise a market distortion (e.g. incentive, regulation, etc) to keep people in their homes, or provide them with comparable replacement homes that are still within the community.

But, then you must also discourage or disincentivize the relocated residents from immediately losing and/or selling these homes to newcomers who are willing to pay more. Owner-occupied homes allow each owner to evaluate whether or not they wish to sell, whereas renters rarely get a say. If all owners willingly sell to richer newcomers, would you look back and consider the community to have gentrified?

Rent control is one such market distortion. Prop 13 is another. These tools serve to keep certain houses off the market, while largely allowing their residents to stay in place.

These mechanisms are irrespective of supply, because the supply is always finite. The mechanisms act on the demand-side.

I think the best way to avoid gentrification is to reduce income inequality. Gentrification often does not make the community better. The original residents' favourite businesses close, unaffordable options take their place, and the culture changes. I doubt most new people who move to these neighbourhoods want to change the neighbourhood culture or displace the original residents but it happens regardless. If there was less difference in wealth between the rich and the poor, that displacement wouldn't be so extreme.

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.

Neighborhoods are constituted by people not just shitty new wood frame construction.

You've never been to SF, I take it. The neighborhoods are in fact not getting any investment because all that's happening is the very oldest homeowners are getting massive payouts after decades of falling-in-real-dollars taxation. Furthermore the new people who move in, whose tax bills are absolutely astronomical because they paid five million dollars for their houses, are so burdened by the cost of their housing that they have little left to invest in their neighborhood, in terms of both money and time, since they are so busy working to pay off that house that they bought from Grampa Flowerchild for, again, five million dollars.

Random example, 120-year-old wooden house, price quadrupled in only 6 years. Was assessed for only $63k in 2014/2015!

https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/164-Belvedere-St-941...

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?

The thing is, the fault of all of that rests with the people and the system, but mostly the system. Any individual is not responsible for gentrification, least of all one who just moved to the area. It’s the same principle as that citizens can rightfully criticize the overuse of fossil fuels, even though shutting off their AC would lead to a possible heat stroke.

This is an example of, as they say, "liberal bullshit". Knowing enough not to be ignorant, but behaving exactly as if they were.

It just doesn’t feel the same when you don’t have to throw grandma and her wheelchair down the steps yourself. All those artists living in Ghost Ship, just what were they thinking?! Nothing to do with me...

The difference between an artist and a techie is that the artist does not feel they’re entitled.

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!)

Stagnation