Bay Area's Young Tech's "Clusters of Affluence" Rattle Established Neighborhoods

The local impact of Silicon Valley's gold rush attained unwanted publicity in late 2013. At that time, some San Francisco and East Bay residents protested Google commuter buses whisking away young, prosperous tech engineers to their Valley employers. Beyond the free, employer-sponsored transportation, residents cited how the young tech crowd drove up rents, transformed working-class areas into hipster enclaves, and seemed largely disconnected to their established neighbors.

Mission Dolores
Image: Michel Mintaka/Flickr Creative Commons,
found on missionlocal.org

The Mission district, home to a large Hispanic population, has become a favored bedroom community for the young, the tech, the proud. A generation ago, I briefly lived adjacent to the Mission district. The area had the singular advantage of being in San Francisco's sun belt, which I enjoyed. My apartment's kitchen window looked out over the neighborhood and the Bay. Mission Dolores, after which the neighborhood is named, was a short walk from my residence. Very, very few of the homes or apartment buildings (and certainly not mine) seemed made to order for $10,000 per month rents.

Times change, and $10K per month is what a two-bedroom in the Mission neighborhood can now command. Who can afford them? You guessed it: the "I-can-have-it-all" tech employees. And are they paying? Yes, they are. The disruption to an established community such as the Mission's is palpable, ongoing, and in some circles, desirable.

Today's sfgate.com includes an article in which a data specialist identifies San Francisco's "clusters of affluence." The Mission neighborhood is among them. The story notes how legislation called the Ellis Act was used by some San Francisco landlords to shoehorn out lower-paying (but paying) tenants and welcome prosperous techies at substantially higher rents. (Ah, the "rule of law!")

Image: sfgate.com

The "clusters of affluence" notion makes a great deal of sense. New York (Manhattan and Whole Foods Brooklyn), Seattle, and Chicago, for example, include neighborhoods where the young, affluent, and tech-savvy can keep themselves company. Long-tenured residents? Well, they can move elsewhere, often drab inner-ring suburbs, can't they.

This phenomenon is making American cities more akin to European urban areas, in which the central city is home to the affluent and the suburbs (with certain elite exceptions) are for everyone else. It's an apt symbol of two Americas that does not bode well for the future.