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Comment by matchbok | Hacker News Reader

Read another way: neighborhoods are getting investment and safer.

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.

In SF's case it's probably a good mix of asian and white tbh

Asians are the new white people

In most tech cities in the States, that's the main mix.

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/06/20/will-silicon-v...

Facebook in this article's paywalled chart even has more asian employees than white in its tech ranks.

Bay Area was mostly white and Asian anyway.

My grandpa used to be an engineer at Xerox decades ago. My family helped settle San Francisco. Most of us left because of gentrification in the other direction.

Whites are to blame if they gentrify a place but also to blame if they leave (white flight). No winning. 100% accountability.

BUT! Your original assumption is wrong anyway. it’s not mostly whites moving in this time. SV is a major world hub for tech. Lots of immigrants from India, Pakistan, China, Europe, South America.

was mostly white and Asian anyway.

From

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_in_San_Franc...

"African Americans in San Francisco, California, comprised less than 6% of the city's total population in the 2010 census, down from 13.4% in 1970."

http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty4...

1940 was 95% white and 0.8% black.

so in the 30 years from 1940 to 1970 it went from .08% to 13.4%. that's gentrification too, which was my point.

The 2nd Great Migration was not 'gentrification', is my point.

So is it a case of white's replacing blacks who had previously replaced whites?

This particular study did not cover that.

From the report: "Consequently, we did not analyze displacement by race and ethnicity, a task that requires precise counts of the residents in a neighborhood. Instead, the present study focused on socioeconomic data related to income, home value and education level to assess neighborhood-level gentrification."

https://ncrc.org/gentrification20/

Yep. DC is going through this now despite the rich history of DC being a chocolate city.

DC is a tragic story. During Reconstruction, DC was home to a thriving black elite: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/books/review/original-bla.... Dunbar High School (where today, 100% of students are classified as “economically disadvantaged”) was an elite secondary school for black people where at the turn of the 20th century, the majority of students went to college, including many to Ivy League universities. The Shaw neighborhood had hundreds of black-owned businesses.

The end of Reconstruction and the return of southern white people to political power ended that. Woodrow Wilson, a progressive southern Democrat and vicious racist, kicked things off by segregating the federal workforce, which up to that point had employed many black professionals. Segregation eventually took over the whole city, decimating the formerly thriving black elite. During the latter half of the century, Shaw was a typical disadvantaged black neighborhood. It remained that way until the 21st century, when the neighborhood was gentrified by progressive white millennials: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/black-branding--how-a-d...

That is also true, and unfortunate.

Part of the reason for the 2008 financial crash was loans made to people who would have traditionally been "redlined" (denied credit for legitimate reasons) after a federal push for more inclusive loaning. IIRC this was a big chunk of overrated securities and at the very least contributed to instability by increasing the nationwide average probability of default.

While this is not untrue on its face, the bulk of the blame should go to initiating banks, who became more willing to make untenable loans because they could package and securitize the loans and sell them off to investors, avoiding the consequences of their own actions.

Do you have a source with additional information on this? Not doubting your information, just looking to learn more. Thanks!

I read a few paragraphs and this seems to be a good source for what I'm describing. As usual, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

https://fee.org/articles/how-the-federal-government-created-...

Thanks! I'll take a look

You snooze you lose unfortunately.

"all the benefits"? That seems most doubtful indeed.

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...

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

Are migrants not considered "people"? Seems to me like a nativist argument.

I don't understand how this relates to my comment.

I think the parent was asking: why do we think that people who H1B immigrants who move in will make a worse neighborhood than current "native" residents?

Ah, I think I understand but the logic still seems a little twisted. Gentrification is an economic process, so the passport of the gentrifier doesn't really matter here.

Part of the reason I was confused is because -- at least where I live -- communities with a high number of foreign born residents are actually the ones most at risk of gentrification.

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