November 2005
A City Exclusively For the Wealthy
Robert L. Terrell
The median price of a home in the city of San Francisco recently topped $800,000.
This means that the minimum income required of those who seek to purchase a median priced home, if they can find one, must exceed $170,000 per year.
For those lucky enough to earn such incomes, these are salad days. Housing prices have been increasing handsomely each year during the past half decade of so. And this has produced windfall profits for those who own homes.
Their expanding wealth and prosperity is easily apparent in the city’s elite sectors.
Fine restaurants, glittering malls, high end clothing stores and other places where the comfortably monied classes congregate are overflowing with crowds of beautiful people enjoying the good life.
The seemingly effortless wealth of the throngs who frequent such places are also very much apparent along the city’s crowded thoroughfares.
Expensive foreign automobiles and huge suvs decked out with every conceivable amenity are so common that they rarely attract much more than cursory glances as they glide along the carefully groomed streets in the elite neighborhoods where their owners congregate.
The composite, surface impression conveyed by the vast wealth concentrating in the city is that San Francisco is indeed a golden place dedicated to the high arts of good living and effortless, unbounded joy.
But that is only one aspect of the city’s grim, Darwinian process of relentless gentrification. Another more sober aspect involves local residents who are either working-class and/or poor. They are among the 90 percent of the city's residents who will never be able to afford to purchase housing in this town. And their numbers include hundreds of thousands of renters who are coming to understand that they, too, are being priced out of the market.
For those who fall into these categories, the inexorably rising cost of habitation has dire ramifications. They know, and this is apparent in their insecure eyes and uncertain comments about the future, that their days are numbered.
People with children are already engaged in a massive exodus.
As a result, San Francisco has a lower percentage of children in its population than any other major city in the nation. Moreover, approximately 45 percent of the city’s residents with children under six years of age are likely to move out of the city, according to recent press reports.
African American, who have resided in the city in large relatively large numbers since the end of World War II, are also engaged in an historic exodus.
Hampered by inadequatre education, low incomes and not so passive raced-based resistance to their participation in the high paying sectors of the municipal economy, they are voting with their feet.
Approximately 54 percent of those who remain are likely to leave, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which recently asserted that the city's largest African American neighborhood is on the verge of being subjected to explosive, destabilizing gentrification.
Nonetheless, as indicated, poor African Americans are not the only residents with modest incomes who are faced with virtual extinction. Huge swaths of the traditional working classes are also being inexorably haunted by naked recognition that their long term prospects as San Francisco residents are not good.
Not good at all.
Their ranks typically include school teachers, nurses, firemen, retail sales workers, municipal employees, artists, students and young people trying to get an independent economic start in life.
They also include virtually everyone in town who does not have a secure, high paying professional job.
Hundreds of thousands of people are involved, and all of them are being inexorably harassed and ground down by the same pressures that are driving blacks and families with children out of the city in search of housing that is not so oppressively expensive.
The city’s poorest residents, including the unemployed and the underemployed, suffer the most in response to the city’s prohibitively high cost of housing. Thousands of them are homeless, and there are few indications that are destined to receive assistance sufficient to allay their inability to pay for housing without public assistance.
Far too many of those who do not possess the energy or resources to flee die on the streets.
One wonders how long it will take, and how much unnecessary human suffering will have to occur, before a critical mass of local people come to understand that over time prohibitively expensive housing can destroy the social, economic and political viability of this great city in much the same manner as catastrophes such as earthquakes and criminally neglected levees.