I feel like San Francisco gentrification is much worse. You could make six figures in SF and be seriously struggling financially.DC isn't cheap either, but it's not as near as expensive as SF. And you can easily get a good federal government job grossing six figures with a degree in African American studies as a black person in DC if you know the right folks. In SF, black folks are pretty much shut out of good paying white collar jobs entirely. The DC area has a huge professional black upper middle class. SF has an extremely marginalized ghettoized black population that solely resides in the projects and hood areas. If DC were as gentrified as SF, the only places you would see black people in DC would be Barry Farm, Sursum Corda, around Howard U on Georgia, Trinidad and no black people working in offices downtown, no upscale black bars on U St or H St or anywhere else, period.
And SF did used to have a much larger black population, albeit not as large as DC ever was. The Hunters Point district in SF had the highest concentration of black owned businesses and real estate in the entire state of California prior to the crack epidemic in the 80's. SF has had the worst case of black flight of any big city. SF is more expensive than Manhattan and almost completely displaced it's black population entirely.
Now I'm a SF native, but I live outside of DC so I'm familiar. Every corner of DC is gentrifying. But black folk still are the biggest demographic in DC by percentage even though it hasn't been over 50% in a few years. Black DC is still the real DC. It kills me when white folks and non-blacks from Montgomery County, MD and Northern VA say "I'm from DC", um... No you're not,you're from non-descript suburban Maryland and have more in common culturally with Catonsville, MD than the District of Columbia.
I see why black folks who are really from the District don't claim the "DMV".
And its the culturally vacant white and whitewashed suburban folks from Maryland and Virginia as well as boring transplants from nondescript suburbia nationwide who are killing the culture of the real DC through gentrification.
