Hacker News Reader

Comment by worstspotgain | Hacker News Reader

The Mission is a variegated place. It's been undergoing gentrification for 4 decades but it never seems to get there - so much so that you could say that that's become its "thing."

The exact location where the phone is placed makes a huge difference. Going from Valencia to Shotwell to the BART plazas to the Latino bars and back to the hills your soundtrack would change quite a few times.

View on HN

The amount of gentrification in the Mission varies a lot based on where you go.

I volunteer on 24th st. weekly, something I've been doing since 2019. The crowd at the volunteering is mostly immigrants. I am white, native English speaker but I speak decent Spanish.

It's mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap. I remember one time I went into a restaurant and they engaged with me in Spanish right off the bat, we never switched to English, I got a table to dine-in and they waited on me and it felt pretty much like dining at a restaurant like in travels I've had in central America... A few months later I brought a friend to the same place and I ended up getting a 100% gringo restaurant experience.

Another place down the street and the cashier is like some very pale upper midwest looking hipstery guy who looks "whiter than me", and it felt like a totally different world, one that didn't overlap at all with description above.

Just offering another point of data, your observation of the "same space with no overlap" and the anecdote about the restaurant hits so true for me! Almost the exactly same thing happened to me, Spanish nearly the whole time. Later, with a coworker, 100% gringo experience. Hilarious! The alternation between places like this as you walk up 24th always struck me as notable.

This couldn't have been later than 2011, at which time the zeitgeist was replete with jabs at the ongoing gentrification. :)

Had to re read that last sentence several times, initially assuming you were talking about the biker/dive bar down on Valencia and Duboce.

That's funny, I was heading uptown the other day, sipping on an elixir and thinking about shaving another kilowatt off my bill, when some casanova got out of a phone booth and asked me for directions to the daytona 500 club or some other make out room. I lolo'd out loud and docs clocked him in the teeth. Pretty sure he had to change his napper tandy after that.

you really clinched the zeitgeist of the mission district, are you a professional writer, part time? I'm just grateful to be in your orbit. that kind of success will cost you a mint. I'd wake up in a fit of delerium. What's the ABV of that drink you just gave me? But okay, let's get down to brass tacks. it's last call, and I've got work to so I'm not going to go on a bender. I'm not a flying pig so let's just sit down where the willows and the sycamore trees meet and hideout there and wait for someone to give us last rites.

> mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap

You may enjoy China Miéville's The City & the City [1]. The less you read about it ex ante, the better. It's one of those books that gives you a mental model and language that proves surprisingly useful in describing what you saw.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City

Where does gentrification begin and end? The mission went from Ohlone to Spanish to German/Irish/Italian immigrants, then Mexican immigrants, then Central American, then LGBT, then wider punks/misfits and other immigrants including Filipinos, before the techies started moving in. I don’t really understand this term because it seems to suggest before a richer class moves into an area it displaces “the true inhabitants,” but those true inhabitants have almost always displaced someone else.

It involves a massive increase in housing prices, primarily brought about by artificial supply restrictions, that results in unintentional displacement. The reason the Mission is still variegated is rent control, along with various forms of affordable housing, housesharing, master tenant slumlords, SROs, extended family arrangements, etc. It's a pretty unique and amazing place really.

Yeah I'm sure handshake politics goes a long way in these neighborhoods often to the detriment of the unsuspecting, unconnected and un-special-interest-group attached renters and owners.

[1]

Protesters Gather at Google Lawyer’s Apartments

https://missionlocal.org/2014/04/protesters-gather-at-google...

Ellis evictions suck particularly hard because they can happen out of the blue for any building, even if you chose one suited for long tenancies. I don't know what percentage results in protests, but it's quite a few. Some of the contested ones fail on technical grounds before they get to the protest stage [1].

[1] https://sftu.org/ellis/

from the example it didn't detect any music between 11:30pm and 9:30am. I don't know what corner of the mission that could possibly be.

>from the example it didn't detect any music between 11:30pm and 9:30am

I thought it might have died because the site mentioned it is solar powered.

Battery only got down to 70% overnight, from another thread here.

I'm not a Bay Area person, but was visiting a few months ago and got a new tattoo at Rose & Thorn right off the 16th BART station. Took a walk around waiting for the appointment and it's crazy how fast the vibe changes from block to block.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com