More on San Francisco's "gentrification"

Earlier this month I was recalling my visits to the Bay Area in the 80s and my puzzlement, then, about where the waiters lived in such an expensive city, one famous for its restaurants.

Well, I still don't have an answer to that question, but the "gentrification" (millionairization?) of SF (and other places too) is notorious. Essential California just now directed me to a substantial article in SFGATE.  An excerpt:

San Francisco has also become less welcoming of altruistic professions, as teachers and social workers are priced out of housing.

 The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, decamped to Oakland three years ago after its annual rent was projected to increase by almost $1.5 million. "Nonprofits are fleeing San Francisco. They can no longer afford it, " says Doug Styles of the Huckleberry Youth Program, founded during the Summer of Love to assist runaway teens. Retaining staff is a challenge. "We're missing that middle and lower economic group."

 Everyone has a story about what isn't here anymore. The inability to find a hardware store, a shoe repair, a lesbian bar, a drag-queen bar, an independent music club, the commercial casualties of vertiginous rents.

 Retail operations have resorted to quasi-nonprofit practices to stay afloat. Beatts' Borderlands Books, specializing in science fiction, mystery, fantasy and horror, remains afloat through $100 annual sponsorships from more than 500 customers, akin to a public television station, and $1.9 million in loans from 50 patrons to purchase a building in the Upper Haight. Restaurant owner Guerra launched a GoFundMe campaign to help defray rental costs. She also had to raise prices, which many small businesses have been forced to do.

Residents worry that such businesses will soon disappear, replaced by twee boutiques of artisanal socks, rain-scented candles and so many succulents. "All businesses that are part of the memory and tradition and the lives of San Franciscans are going away so fast, replaced by little hipster groovy shops that also feel transient, preserving some fake memory of the city," [Rebecca] Solnit says.

Artisanal socks!  The humiliation!