Gentrification Creates Middle Class (& Environmental) Woes

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the impact of gentrification on middle class families. Often we see reports on he impact on lower income residents when gentrification takes over a neighborhood, but the paper argues that the middle class is impacted as property prices take homes out of the reach of families and even working class families trying to take the next rung up:

The fact that middle-class families are priced out of the Bay Area’s cities and suburbs creates an unhealthy economic segregation, said Sarah Karlinsky, policy director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, known as SPUR, which advocates for urban economic vitality as a counterweight to suburban sprawl.

“It’s bad for democracy,” Karlinsky said. “When you have concentrations of poverty, people growing up there have less access to other life opportunities. The same is true at the other end, as well. … We don’t want San Francisco to become Carmel, just a city of the most wealthy. Then we’re not a real city any more, we’re a boutique.”

And the problem isn’t exclusive to San Francisco, she emphasized; the region’s suburbs also need to increase the supply and variety of housing.

“When you’ve got a locality that’s zoning for single-family detached housing, you’re pricing a lot of people out,” Karlinsky said. “When they shut the door to housing, people leapfrog further out.”

When middle-income people — be they firefighters, teachers, nurses or corporate office workers — move to Tracy or Stockton, the housing may be cheaper, but those families and society as a whole pay new kinds of costs, said Brad Paul, a former San Francisco deputy mayor for housing and neighborhoods.

“If you’re commuting two hours each way to work, it means you can’t spend time with your kids,” Paul said. “And there are transportation impacts in the amount of gas we burn, in global warming. Don’t you want people to live and work in the same area?”

SF Chronicle