The Mission looks more like Noe Valley runoff than ever. Sure, some parts are still slightly scary but there are signs of it becoming more bourgeois all over the place.
Only if you stay strictly on/west of Valencia. The rest of the Mission is as fucked as ever. Let's not forget that the murder rate east of Valencia St is, at least in the last couple of months, working out to be 1 every 2 weeks.
The east side is by no means "as fucked as ever". 24th street has totally transformed and become another valencia street. Folsom/Harrison has been changing a lot. There are lots of fancy restaurants, cushy bars, theatres, climbing gym, nice cafes, etc etc. To think that this area is not changing is quite frankly delusional.
I haven't redefined the Mission at all - quite the opposite in fact. Consult a map if you don't believe me.
If you look on a map you will find "the area west of Valencia" is a tiny sliver of the whole neighborhood - coincidentally the only part that is highly gentrified, this is the area GP was referring to.
"The rest of the Mission" as I called out, is in fact the vast majority of the neighborhood, but also one that is routinely ignored by wealthy San Franciscans. It is vastly larger than the gentrified little corner, and is still a crack-ridden hole.
I lived at 24th/Mission for a year, and as a photographer have been all over every nook and cranny of that neighborhood, the good and the bad - I don't think I'm unqualified to say that the area of the Mission west/on Valencia is an entirely separate universe from the rest of the Mission.
I haven't made any claims on the Mission, say, in early 00s, because I obviously wasn't around then. The main thrust here is that the Mission is not the gentrified yuppie paradise that the media (particularly outside of SF) consistently makes it out to be - that would be the Marina. Only the tiniest sliver of it has seen "colonized" by the hipster/dotcom/yuppie contingent.
In any case, my original comment re: gentrification wasn't aimed at the Mission exclusively - I've lived in numerous other rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods (Belltown and Capitol Hill in Seattle in particular) filled with curmudgeony 20-somethings shaking their fists angrily at gentrifiers who followed their own gentrification.
Actually, the anti-gentrification sentiment in the Mission is substantially less intense than it is in Seattle. Up on Capitol Hill in Seattle, if you have money and live in one of the new housing developments you're practically a persona non grata.
Having lived in the Mission a dozen years, I think you are incredibly hasty in your judgments.
The last year has seen a spectacular boom all along Valencia, but the whole Mission has been getting shinier for 15 years at least. And certainly whiter; Latino population is down 22% between 2000 and 2010.
And yes, you did make claims outside your experience. You opened with "rest of the Mission is as fucked as ever". One year, forever: they're practically the same thing, so I can see how you confused them.
And in regards to your claim that "the rest of the Mission" is "still a crack-ridden hole": go fuck yourself. I especially love the "still". Gosh golly, you've waited a whole year! And nobody has gotten around to living up to your imported standards. How dare they!
Stick around for the next anti-gentrification wave. You'll see that, as with the last one, there is a lot of involvement from people with much deeper roots than the 20-somethings you mock.
Huh, I've never felt unsafe walking around east of Valencia in the mission. I travel out to SF from Brooklyn quite regularly and always find myself walking out around York. It's never even occurred to me to think of it as unsafe, but I guess I'm not a local and don't hear the stories.