alt Hacker NewsThe amount of gentrification in the Mission varies a lot based on where you go.
I volunteer on 24th st. weekly, something I've been doing since 2019. The crowd at the volunteering is mostly immigrants. I am white, native English speaker but I speak decent Spanish.
It's mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap. I remember one time I went into a restaurant and they engaged with me in Spanish right off the bat, we never switched to English, I got a table to dine-in and they waited on me and it felt pretty much like dining at a restaurant like in travels I've had in central America... A few months later I brought a friend to the same place and I ended up getting a 100% gringo restaurant experience.
Another place down the street and the cashier is like some very pale upper midwest looking hipstery guy who looks "whiter than me", and it felt like a totally different world, one that didn't overlap at all with description above.
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Just offering another point of data, your observation of the "same space with no overlap" and the anecdote about the restaurant hits so true for me! Almost the exactly same thing happened to me, Spanish nearly the whole time. Later, with a coworker, 100% gringo experience. Hilarious! The alternation between places like this as you walk up 24th always struck me as notable.
This couldn't have been later than 2011, at which time the zeitgeist was replete with jabs at the ongoing gentrification. :)
> mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don't often overlap
You may enjoy China Miéville's The City & the City [1]. The less you read about it ex ante, the better. It's one of those books that gives you a mental model and language that proves surprisingly useful in describing what you saw.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City