The LA Times picked up on the recent gang violence in the Mission and was quick to point out that it is a gentrifying neighborhood. “What a contrast!” they say. Nothing new to you guys if you’ve read any Mission Mission comments, I’m sure. However, if lines like this:
On a recent evening, tattooed youth with yoga mats pushed past lines of workers wiring their day’s wages to relatives in Latin America.
strike you as mind-blowing perspective, then by all means read on.
[via Los Angeles Times; photo via fashioni.st]
The article proves a point though,the more people moving in + bars etc. bridges the gap farther from the local community, not saying that we’re NOT the local community but when a panderia closes and 6 months later a hip bakery is there, people are not happy, most people fail to realize the deep roots in the mission, because it’s a giant adult playground to them. Half of these people would love to go to Delores movie night, but a fraction of those people could give a shit about showing up to the next community housing meeting, it sucks.
MISSION MISSION! This is the second time that this photograph has been used to illustrate gentrification in the Mission. I know this woman personally as a queer person of color activist and it is annoying to me that over a year later she is still the poster child for Mission gentrification. What gives?
That’s too easy. It would require a nuance of thought and an ability to see the world as a more complicated place than any one dichotomy can explain. White liberals need people of color to appear as they do in National Geographic so that they can have something to protect and prove how racist they aren’t.
how does being a person of color, an activist or a queer disqualify anyone from being a part of gentrification? stop thinking your shit doesn’t stink.
i just wish there was a stock photo of someone/thing else that takes their privilege for granted, has never fought for civil rights a day in their life, is not a woman, and that does not understand how important it is to communicate and coexist peacefully and fruitfully with your neighbors.
most articles about the mission fail to say much about it–just that there are ‘hipsters & hispanics’, gun and mini-muffins. violence is another component of the mission commentary, often whose only connection is the contrasting habits of the more recent arrivals.
i’d like to read more about the relationship between the elements of gentrification (white tablecloth restaurants like commonwealth, bars, higher demand on apartments, etc) and the evolving nature of the community. is there some connection between the so called oblivious pleasure seeking hipsters and the forces that create gang violence? or is it just two tangents that we can just point at?
for me anyway (living on the edge of the mission), it’s a strange feeling to think community involvement is my ticket to guilt-free living in the neighborhood. or put another way, that the pleasures, activities etc i pursue are not the right kind of community involvement. seems to me peaceable enjoyment of everywhere you can walk from your apartment is part of the solution.
I agree – I’d like to read more about how these dynamics play out; there’s a conversation to be had, but this article doesn’t contribute anything along those lines. This is an LA Times article that’s informed by LA’s uneasy histories of racial tension rather than any sense of the Mission or SF on the whole.
Did everybody who moved into the Mission from 1998-2001 just up and leave until, what, 2009? Because to hear some people tell it ZOMG the Mission is BEING DESTROYED, which, if that were true, it was destoyed twelve years ago, already?
http://infoshop.org/myep.html
why would you feel guilty for living in any neighborhood in a free society?
Exactly — unless your default attitude includes a crippling ideology which refuses to recognize the possibilities of a free society. There is a huge portion of America which is so ignorant of basic American principles that it will never realize just how lucky it is to be here, and what can be done here.
Community involvement is giving back to and investing in the community, instead of only taking from it.
This means helping deal with it’s ills. Pick up garbage; clean up graffiti; talk to the derelicts and try and humanize them a bit.
It also means calling the cops on the creeps and jerks, relentlessly. Take a stand and communicate constructively about it.
And it also means supporting local business by frequenting it. This includes the fancy restaurants and hipster pop-ups and what not; it also includes the long-standing mom and pops.
Hipster (n): a pejorative term used exclusively by those that really, really, really want to be called one by others, but have not been.
Is that Janebook?
those who think whites should not move in to a Latino community are no different than those who think Latinos should not move into a white community.
rich, poor, white, brown, everyone is allowed to live wherever the hell they want in this country. communities are dynamic by the laws of econimcs, if everyone wants to live in one particular neighborhood, the prices are going to go up. at least we have rent control . . .