gentrification

suburban areas increased fifteen times faster. 52 The gross numbers are more impressive, however:between 1995 and 1997 alone, 286,675 jobs were created in the Bay Area. 53While traditional views of gentrification suggest that job growth in the central city is a keydriver, the Bay Area displays a more contemporary phenomenon. There, job growth in suburbanareas – Silicon Valley and the Tri-Valley area east of Oakland, for example – has created intensehousing pressures throughout the Bay Area, but particularly in previously overlooked affordabledowntown neighborhoods. The result has been intense gentrification in those communities. Jobgrowth centered in Silicon Valley attracts hundreds of thousands of new workers to the area, but forevery 17 jobs created in Santa Clara County, only one new housing unit is built. 54 And in older citiessuch as San Francisco, “new economy” firms in fields such as multi-media technology areincreasingly locating in mixed residential/industrial neighborhoods such as the South of Market,rather than in the traditional central business district, further increasing the competition for dwellingspaces.Tight Housing Markets Leave Renters Vulnerable. With that extreme job/housingimbalance, lower wage Silicon Valley workers scour the region for affordable housing, often spillinginto the agriculture-rich Central Valley, enduring three-hour commutes each way, contributing to theair quality problem, and creating community conflict over land use and planning. Higher incomeworkers drive an hour north to San Francisco, Oakland, or Berkeley, seeking the urban amenities,night life and unique cultural diversity, but adding to the Bay Area’s tremendous congestion andenvironmental pressures.San Francisco’s housing has long been expensive, and the progressive city government haslong wrestled with affordable housing issues. Some argue that high housing costs are tied directly tothe density reductions included in the city’s 1960 general plan, which roughly halved the allowabledensity compared to the plan prepared in the ‘20s. If the Bay Area’s political culture allowed for morehousing, built up, not out, its housing costs would be more modest. The city instituted rent controlyears ago. A landlord may increase rents to what the market will bear once a tenant leaves. Thisincreases the pressure for tenant turnover.As in most cities across the country, San Francisco’s rental market is very complex, andoften resembles a game of squeezing balloons: Laws protecting tenants are put in place, andloopholes are identified and exploited. Loopholes then are filled and another opportunity pops up.For example, San Francisco has adopted restrictions on the numbers of apartments that can beconverted to condominiums, issued strict guidelines on how owners can move into units they own,and regulated the sale of tenancy-in-common sales of multi-family buildings. Despite theseprotections, in the seven years between 1988 and 1995, 25 buildings containing over 300 units were52 Brennan, John and Edward W. Hill, Where Are the Jobs?: Cities, Suburbs, and the Competition forEmployment. Washington: The Brookings Institution Survey Series, November, 1999, p. 6, Table 3.53 Urban Land Institute, Association of Bay Area Governments, and Bay Area Council, Bay Area Futures:Where Will We Live and Work, November, 1997, as quoted in the endnotes of Urban Habitat Program, p. 28.54 Yee and Quiroz-Martinez, p. 243