BAY AREA GENTRIFICATION: WHEN AND WHERE

I’m sure everyone in the world knows what it is like to have something taken from them at some point –whether it is something small like a crayon in kindergarten or eating your room mates food to something with more substance like money or a phone –we all know it doesn’t feel good to have things taken away from us. Throughout the world, homes and cultures of low income families are being taken away and it is an especially prevalent problem in the Bay Area.

For my following posts I will be discussing the effects of gentrification throughout the Bay Area because I think it is important to be informed on not only what gentrification is but also how it effects the people and their communities. I want to focus on the negative such as cultural and physical displacement; however, in order to understand where these middle-class people are coming from I will also be highlighting the possible positive outcomes of gentrification.

For some people it can be difficult to determine what gentrification is. An in-depth but still easy to digest definition of gentrification is given by Benjamin Grant in a PBS article, where he explains it as an urban space being taken over by “rich outsiders”. He explains that gentrification is coined as a negative term because monetarily it results in rent and property value increases and socially it causes character and cultural changes in the areas. He highlights decreased crime rates as a positive but recognizes that older residents feel marginalized.

A map on a KQED article shows the gentrification throughout the Bay Area. Many of the areas affected by it in just the south bay area include The Mission, parts of SOMA, and much of downtown. Looking at the East Bay on the map virtually the entire Marina qualifies as low-income and undergoing advanced gentrification.

After seeing this map, I was reminded of living in the East Bay over the summer near the Marina and seeing so many homeless people throughout the Berkeley area and what to me seems to be the results of displacement. Every time I drove through the underpass of the interstate 80 at Gilman I saw more tents acting as “home” to numerous people. Another aspect of gentrification that caught my attention was the fact that so many music venues through Los Angeles and the Bay Area — my two homes –have been facing gentrification.

In the same KQED article there is a short podcast where interviewer, Mina Kim, speaks with Karen Chapel, a UC Berkeley city and regional planning professor. Chapel studied displacement in the 9 bay area counties and found that over half of the low-income neighborhoods are at risk of displacement. They also discovered that between the years 2000 and 2013 The Bay Area “lost 50 percent of [affordable units] for low-income households [while] the number of low-income [families], region wide increased by 10 percent”.

The information that I have come across makes it clear that low income residents have been and continue to suffer. These all make me question the motives behind the actions of these middle and upper classes. For example, are these groups ignorant to the fact that they are essentially kicking out a lower class? Are they aware and just so self involved that putting numerous families out of a home does not phase them? Or do they really thin they are improving the communities for everyone? I am also curious to know exactly what happens to the cultures that are being displaced.

Benjamin, Grant. “Flag Wars.” PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Brekke, Dan. “A Map of Gentrification in the Bay Area.” KQED News. N.p., 2015. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.