My Thoughts on the Old Neighborhood
I stood outside of a new store opening yesterda, Aldea (sp?) on 17th between Valencia and Mission, accompanying a security detail friend.

The neighborhood has not changed in the year I’ve been away! Still everyone looks the same in the artfully casual way of wanting to look different. There is a lack of economic and age difference here that doesn’t exist in North Beach, at least North Beach during weekdays. A few hipster snobs muttered “yuppie scum” as they walked by the new housewares store. I quickly got to know the homeless panhandlers while standing out front. So in that way, I guess, there is economic difference. A woman who is 150th in line for a low-income house, and a fellow who was burned out of his house, and had the Red Cross report to show for it. I really admired his shoes. He had some prison poetry about a lost love. Not a love in prison, I’m assuming, but on the outside.

The building where the housewares boutique is housed used to be really contentious. It had been a regular row of Victorians but was bulldozed in the early dot-com times for new spanky live work loft units. The surrounding singletons got really upset about this and protested it. A friend’s boyfriend moved there, and I think he was even one of the first tenants. He’s since moved out. It has bad juju.

The first article is great, and even has a photo of the Hoff & 17th building as an example. The second is an interesting 1999 climate article, mostly about how Brown was just kind of setting things up for total destruction with lucrative development deals.

• http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/lofts.htm

• Backlash Grows Against S.F. Building Boom, Foes assail mayor over live-work lofts, chain stores

I’m just glad I found rock-star parking across the street.