The question everyone keeps asking — has the Mission gone full yuppie? — is actually the wrong question. The better one is: how long has this been happening, and why can't anyone seem to stop it?

The answer to the first part is: a lot longer than most people realize. As one SF resident who grew up in the neighborhood put it, "The Mission has been gentrifying since the 1970s. It's literally the perennial complaint." Before the tech bros, there were the hipsters. Before the hipsters, there were the artists. And before the Latino community that defined the neighborhood's modern identity, the Mission was predominantly Italian. Change isn't new here — but the speed and cost of the current wave is.

Another longtime local captured the shift perfectly: "When I go to my mom's house now, I'm astounded to see BMWs parked on her block. That certainly wasn't the case when I was growing up."

Here's where we'll be blunt: the Mission's affordability crisis isn't some mysterious force of nature. It's the predictable result of decades of San Francisco policy that made it nearly impossible to build new housing. When you artificially constrain supply in a city where demand keeps climbing, prices explode — and the people who get squeezed out first are always the ones with the least economic leverage. That means working-class Latino families who've called the Mission home for generations.

The progressive establishment loves to rail against gentrification while simultaneously blocking the housing development that could actually relieve pressure on neighborhoods like the Mission. You can't have it both ways. You can't restrict building, watch rents skyrocket, and then blame market forces for displacement you helped engineer through zoning restrictions and bureaucratic paralysis.

The Mission deserves better than performative hand-wringing. It deserves actual housing construction, streamlined permitting, and policies that let supply catch up with demand. That's not gentrification — that's common sense.