Gentrification might be a figment of your paranoid imagination

Today I read a thought-provoking editorial. Not thought-provoking in the way the author intended — thought-provoking because a single fact he dropped in to bolster his case might have undermined it completely.

First, background: San Francisco, according to a narrative which everyone seems to agree on, is going through tremendous change. Young Twootlebookers, well-paid hipsters in architect glasses, people from New York are flooding the Bay Area. A tide of new money is washing away the artists and activists, the elderly and the poor, and remaking San Francisco into a city for the rich. This is so widely agreed on that people don’t even really discuss it before launching into diatribes about gentrification and displacement.

I had kind of bought into this narrative myself. San Francisco sure does seem ritzy these days! We even have a Barneys and an obnoxious-sounding private club. But then I read an editorial in the San Francisco Examiner which stopped me cold.

Surprisingly, the editorial was written by David Campos, a local politician who represents the Mission District, known for his dislike of Twootlebookers. He recently launched a crusade against building new housing in the Mission. In an attempt to bolster his argument that allowing more market-rate housing will force out working-class families, Campos writes: “In the last 20 years, the Mission District has lost 1,400 Latino families.”

That’s what stopped me. Fourteen hundred families over 20 years? That’s 70 families a year in a neighborhood home to more than 60,000 people. That doesn’t seem terribly high. Don’t people move sometimes just because they want to?

It seems pretty likely that at least some of those families are moving away by choice. Maybe they decided they would rather live in the East Bay, where it’s easier to afford a standalone house with a yard. Maybe they got tired of living in overcrowded tenements with no fire alarms. Or maybe they don’t want to raise their kids someplace that’s still pretty violent.

Then I came across this blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, an editor at the Atlantic who has written about gentrification in Washington, DC. Here’s the money quote:

“Any proponent of the gentrification thesis [that richer white people are forcing poorer black people out of a neighborhood] needs to fully explore and answer the following question: Is white migration into the city forcing black migration back out? Speaking as though this is the case because it ‘feels true’ isn’t evidence. Indeed it’s the flip side of blaming white migration to the suburbs on riotous, criminally inclined blacks.”

We haven’t really seen this proved about the Mission. Yes, finding a place to live in San Francisco is absurdly expensive — but then it always has been. San Francisco has some of the best tenant protections in the country. This makes it unlikely that large enough numbers of low-income renters have been forced out in just the last couple of years to significantly change the neighborhood’s demography.

Some people may truly feel that their city is changing. There’s certainly enough hysterical shrieking to make you think so. But if this is the best evidence supporters of the gentrification hypothesis can present, it may be an imaginary problem.