For Those Who Remain: Gentrification, Cultural Displacement, and Sense of Home

In the Mission District of San Francisco, California, two worlds coexist. On Mission Street, taquerias blast out ranchera music amid the smell of grilled onions and meat, stores display rows of brightly colored piñatas and fragrant fruits in the open air, and elders sit around reading the newspaper and socializing with passersby. One block over on Valencia, you encounter high-end boutiques with lush tropical plants displayed in windows, craft chocolate shops with rustic wood and metal interiors, and new American restaurants with heated patios and parking spaces converted to extended seating. These trendy restaurants and coffee shops are encroaching into Mission Street, replacing long-time, Latinx-owned neighborhood strongholds that surrender in the war of attrition to rising rents. People from these two worlds cross paths at the store or on the BART train but don't quite strike up a conversation or enter into each other's relational worlds.

Gentrification is the process that results in the transformation of a low-income, working-class, urban neighborhood into middle-class residential and commercial use (Loretta, Slater, & Wyly, 2008). The Mission District of San Francisco, a historically Latinx neighborhood, has experienced rapid gentrification following the dot-com boom in the early 2000s due to its central location and access to public transit. Much of the media discourse is about physical displacement and the economic impact on working-class families, but those who can remain in the Mission are also deeply impacted by the cultural change around them. The city they grew up in no longer feels like home.

When I worked as a psychotherapist at a free clinic in the Mission District, many of my patients had lived in the neighborhood their entire lives and had seen their city rapidly change as the technology industry brought in wealth and a shift in demographics. Before I became a therapist,