The San Francisco Chronicle recently produced this fascinating documentary that details the personal stories of those embroiled in the gentrification of the hilly city’s iconic Mission District (a mostly flat, working class, traditionally Latino neighbourhood).
If you squint a little (or a lot), the parallels between it and the changes afoot in Vancouver’s DTES/Chinatown are strikingly similar. It has everything from long-time residents nervous about their landlord’s intentions and a “first-adopter” bookstore forced to close because of jacked-up, “second-wave” rents, to Porsche-driving, latte-loving, tech-boom entrepreneurs and an earnest, farm-to-table restaurant that gets repeatedly vandalized by local activists.
It’s all part of an 8 month project that saw the paper collecting the stories and feelings of those who live or work on a single, rapidly-changing block of 24th Street between Shotwell and Folsom in the heart of the Mission.
Explore the project in full here.