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El Monstro's avatar

One thing interesting to note is that the population of Latinos in San Francisco increased from 2000 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2020. In fact, it has steadily increased since 1970. So while there was displacement from The Mission there was growth in other census tracts. I have not examined where though.

The White population has remained more or less stable since 1990 (there was some White Flight before that) and the Asian population boomed.

The Black population declined precipitously dropped from 1960 to 2010 but seems to have lessened since then, perhaps due to the building of affordable housing.

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James Wang's avatar

Instead of building more housing, we could instead prevent gentrification and displacement by removing public amenities, making the local schools terrible, ensuring crime is high, and making sure the housing stock is as terrible as possible...! Or at least that seems to be the message from some advocates against gentrification...

Interesting analysis and good case studies of the area—it obviously comports with a lot of the econometrics work (that is agnostic to "Black Flight" and all the other sociological phenomenon, but, in a pretty standard fashion, generally shows that housing is correlated to incomes, and holding down housing stock in areas of rising income will generally create housing inflation).

White/Black/Asian Flight/Following has been a pretty constant thing in the Bay Area (and other places, I'm sure). However, it's odd to me how stratified the Bay Area has always felt. When I was in the Northeast, especially New York, there seemed to be more integration—and, especially, much more of a Black middle-class. Admittedly, I was usually in urban areas out there, but even so (and even comparing to "urban" areas here). Obviously, it's not like there's none here and it's not like the Northeast is a "post-racial utopia" or something, but after coming back to the Bay Area after having lived on the East Coast for about a decade, it's been pretty jarring. I haven't looked deeply in the academic literature on the topic (though it does make some sense in terms of migration patterns and history), and maybe this was all just happenstance, but it is a bit disheartening.

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