immigrants in SF? (Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco: neighborhoods, gated, living in)

[violet42]

hello,

I currently live in LA and there are a lot of things I love about it. however, I hate how segregated it is - I always feel like there are large chunks of SoCal that you need to avoid because they have basically turned into Little Tijuana.

I don't know much about the bay area but may have the opportunity to move up there soon. My question is, how bad is the immigrant problem up here compared to in socal? Is the bay area also becoming overrun or is it not as bad?

[18Montclair]

how bad is the immigrant problem up here compared to in socal? Is the bay area also becoming overrun or is it not as bad?

First of all, Ive found that Northern Californians are far less hostile towards immigrants than Southern Californians.

Second of all, San Jose actually has the highest percentage of foreign residents of any US Metro Area. San Francisco-Oakland is 3rd among the largest Metros(behind San Jose, Miami and LA)

Foreign Born Residents as a percentage of the total population, 2007, 20%+
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 37.2%
Miami-Ft Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL 37.0%
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 34.9%
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 29.6%
New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-CT-PA 28.3%

Thirdly, it might interest you to know that our largest immigrant group is actually from Asia, not Latin America.

Fourthly, like Los Angeles, the majority of the Bay Area's population is either a foreign born or their US-born children.

[Mach50]

If you don't like immigrants and little-Mexico, little-Saigon, Chinatown...etc.

Don't live in the California.

However, like 18Montclair said, NorCal is even friendlier to immigrants than SoCal.

[violet42]

I guess I didn't phrase my question correctly. I do not have a problem with immigrants as individuals. What I do have a problem with is how many neighborhoods get devalued and stay that way due to the fact that some immigrant groups move in and try to make the neighborhoods look like their third-world countries. And yes, in SoCal this is primarily Mexicans.

My question is do you see this as much in NorCal?

[Mach50]

Originally Posted by violet42

I guess I didn't phrase my question correctly. I do not have a problem with immigrants as individuals. What I do have a problem with is how many neighborhoods get devalued and stay that way due to the fact that some immigrant groups move in and try to make the neighborhoods look like their third-world countries. And yes, in SoCal this is primarily Mexicans.

My question is do you see this as much in NorCal?

Yes, but I will say it doesn't stand out as bad as it does in SoCal because people are more "let it be" up here. But if you are trying to rid your life of the sight of blight, you will not find that here either.

Poor people are here too, they just tend to not only be Mexicans here. I am Mexican decent btw.

[artemis78]

You also need to be careful about cause and effect here. Many neighborhoods become devalued and *then* become immigrant neighborhoods because they were where people could afford housing. It's not always (or often) an issue of immigrants moving in and driving values down. Oakland is an excellent example---the neighborhoods that are largely latino today plummeted long before the most recent wave of Mexican immigration began for the pretty basic reasons that cities across the U.S. collapsed in the 60s/70s/80s---white flight, the coming of the freeways opening up the suburbs (and being dropped into urban neighborhoods---would you want to live next to a freeway overpass?), shifting economy that did not rely on the central city in the same way, changing baby boomer demographics/preferences that drove suburban development, the economic crisis of the early 80s, the crack epidemic, etc. Lots of factors, but by and large, the neighborhoods were cheap when they became immigrant neighborhoods (in much the same way that tenement areas in cities like NYC and Chicago were immigrant neighborhoods at the turn of the century---it's what people could afford).

I don't debate that there are some very big issues associated with persistent poverty in new immigrant communities, spillover of gang affiliations from Mexican gangs, and the like. But native-born Americans certainly grow plenty of that on our own, too, and I can also say that some of the neighborhoods where I've seen really vibrant change in the last decade (Fruitvale and Eastlake, two Latino and mixed Asian/Latino communities in Oakland, come to mind, where there are still some deep problems but where a lot of progress has been made, largely due to the organizing and advocacy of the new immigrant groups to build new business districts to replace those that failed decades ago, etc.).

Anyway, it's perfectly fair to say you don't enjoy living in neighborhoods with a large Latino (or other immigrant group) presence---to some extent, people cluster because they're more comfortable surrounded by a familiar culture, so immigrants may feel similarly about living in majority white or Black communities, too. It's just important to recognize that there's a reason new immigrants live where they live---it's not, by and large, an issue of immigrants "taking over" neighborhoods, but rather an issue of everybody else abandoning them first.

[Mach50]

Originally Posted by FetidBay

There is a thriving Latino community in Southern California, and some of them are actually pretty affluent.

There is also this place up in NorCal, but it is called "everywhere"...

Affluent Latinos live everywhere up here in Norcal, I am one of them, although I would just call our family upper middle class. We live and work amongst the successful Americans of any race.

Although we need our "masa de maiz" so need to live in Redwood City next to little Mexico...which we enjoy, even though it is urban blight...

[Mach50]

I guess the person got banned who I was responding to...the post kind of lost its context after that.

Deleted by owner.