If you haven’t already noticed, we real appreciate our readers and will publish most, if not all, of your contributions. This time AMITinSF sends us his/her thoughts:
The first article, is a totally regressive neo-socialist diatribe (predictably, from the sf bay guardian) on, get this, how Google’s shuttle bus is bad for the Mission district!
The second article, from the sf weekly blogs, is a roundabout response, from leading urban historian Joel Kotkin, who has interesting insights.
I think these two articles make for an interesting juxtaposition on how SF is changing. Clearly the writer for the guardian article is bitter, and in my opinion, hypocritical. He claims to have moved to SF 8 years ago, excuse me? That’s like 1999, the height of the dot com boom!?! Also, the endless whiners from some circles of SF’s loony-left need to understand that ‘cool, hip’ artists that came to the mission in the early 90’s were merely a precursor for gentrification.
These artists are partly responsible for displacing working class Latin Americans, who previously displaced Irish families, who… it’s so counterproductive to blame different ethnic and demographic groups for how you don’t like the changes. Get over it! No place stays the same; no one is entitled with permanence to live forever in the mission or anywhere else for that matter. But, will they ever learn?
p.s. Be sure to read the comments at the end of the sfbg article- they rightly ream this guy a new a$$hole. But of course, sfbg will not have the balls to reprint any of these critical responses in the next ‘pulp’ issue.
God, am i the only one who reads the crap-guardian during lunch breaks to get my weekly laughs (as god only knows, sfbg takes its preposterous self so seriously.)
Very interesting take on the matter, and thanks for sending it in.
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I read the Guardian and the Weekly for the music listings and that’s it. Even the reviews suck. They are rags and everyone who works there realizes it. When they get talent it’s gone in a year or two, max.
I have noticed that the line to get on the Google Bus that stops at the corner of Carl & Cole is getting longer and longer. You used to be able to go to Reverie to get a coffee and hang out there until the Bauer’s bus shows up. Now, you have to queue up or you won’t get on.
What can you do. The hipsters move into the Mission because it’s diverse and it’s artsy. That drives out the diversity and the artsy so in a few years, it will just be filled with aging hipsters. It’ll become Noe Valley :)
Meantime, the suicide girl crowd and aspiring Keith Harings are moving out of the Mission and into Oakland. Perhaps that’s where we should all put our real estate investment $$.
As a side note, I once read an article in NYT that interviewed a real estate agent who had a knack for discovering up and coming neighborhoods to buy real estate. Her secret? Ask your gay waiter where his friends are buying houses…
Wait I found her blog: http://www.barbaracorcoran.com/blog/?p=98
[Editor’s note: One of my gay friends just moved to Oakland…from Bernal…maybe you’re right.]
With the Fed Rate cut, housing prices will keep going higher as credit eases. Gentrification will continue.
I don’t think people realize how large Oakland truly is in area. There’s rural parts, ghettos, and there’s hoity-toity parts of Oakland. The only up and coming places left in Oakland are east and west Oakland and if you’re willing to compromise your safety (and seriously, it takes a lot for me to say that I think a neighborhood is unsafe) until it’s a more desirable to live by all means go right ahead. Otherwise, most other parts of Oakland have already up and come and went and are equivalent in price and what you get to the *up and coming* neighborhoods in SF.
these articles about the gentrification were great. i especially love the fact finding that discredits the windbags at sfbg. did you hear the editor spent an hour or two writing up a review of gavin’ state of the city address before he realized he’d reviewed last years?
as for googlers taking over any part of town, i have a lovely 3 bedroom 2 bath place with panoramic views i’d be happy to sell them for 2.5mm.
Sorry Randy, prices in Oakland are still much lower than in The City. Temescal is an up-and-coming part of Oakland and prices there are $400/sq ft. The same SFH in The Mission is 50% higher. The same is true of Fruitvale. West Oakland is even cheaper.
Rockridge, which is a quite nice place, comparable to Noe Valley, has homes that are $500/sq ft. Similar homes in Noe are probably $800/sq ft.
And prices in Oakland have actually been going down the last year or so, while they have gone up in The City.
Hi jim,
yes, fruitvale is cheaper but again that’s fruitvale and not oakland per say. rockridge is still very pricy compared to some parts of sf. we looked for a long time in both sf and rockridge/piedmont and certain parts of berkeley and at the end of the day bought something comparably in sf. not noe valley but noe valley wasn’t what i was aiming for. again, it depends on where and what your’e looking at but in my case of where/when, things were very comparable btwn oakland and sf.
I am curious what neighborhood in San Francisco you think is comparable to Rockridge. DQ News has 94168 (Rockridge) at $528/sq ft for the year of 2006 and it is actually a bit lower today. The only two zip codes in The City lower than that are 94124 (Bayview) and 94134 (Vis Valley). There are a bunch of areas close though, like The Excelsior, The Outer Sunset/Parkside area and Portola.
Fruitvale is a neighborhood in Oakland, btw.
Where did you end up buying? Congratulations on your home purchase, btw. I know how hard it can be, we spent literally two years shopping on both sides of the bay before finally landing where we are now.
An old post, but as a friend of a gay waiter, I moved to Deep East Oakland. Lot’s of change in wind here…and safer and quieter than Channel 2 News would have you believe.