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Comment by lawrence | Hacker News Reader

The area to watch right now if you want central location, access to Bart, and an up coming startup scene is around Civic Center, between 6th and 10th and market / mission. It's still VERY sketchy there, but not for long - Twitter is coming soon, and this should start to gentrify / startupify things. Lots of classic, old SF office buildings there too.

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How do you think it will gentrify?

There is already plenty of "legitimate" foot traffic there in the daytime from all the government and government-affiliated offices. That doesn't seem to have helped.

The homeless and addicts congregate there because of a combination of housing policy and placement of social services. As long as those remain, I'm not sure if all the startups of the Bay could displace them.

Note: I'm not advocating removing housing/services for the homeless, but rather that forcibly moving a bunch of startups there will just mean you'll add a lot of startups into the mix of sketchiness. It won't get rid of the sketchiness.

You might be right. But dropping one giant startup in there will almost certainly mean new coffee shops, restaurants, and more courage for other startups to move in.

I hope you're right, but I think that'd be more likely to happen if Twitter didn't already provide all the coffee and food that their people might want. There really isn't a reason to leave the office during the day.

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