Mission Action Plan 2020: Neighborhood Stabilization

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Learn community-planning strategies cities are using to stabilize neighborhoods and address displacement and gentrification challenges.
• Understand how community organizations and San Francisco city agencies forged a partnership to deal with gentrification, rapid change, displacement, and growth in the Mission District.
• Identify social-equity challenges of displacement given today’s national realities, California’s severe housing shortage, and the legacy of planning and redevelopment in many low-income communities of color.

MORE SESSION DETAILS

This session discusses gentrification and displacement trends in San Francisco’s Mission District and the Mission Action Plan 2020 (MAP2020) — the innovative city-community partnership to address them. MAP2020’s purpose is to retain low- to moderate-income residents and community-serving businesses, artists, and nonprofits in order to strengthen and preserve the socioeconomic diversity of the dission. Historically, the Mission District has been a working class neighborhood largely composed of low- to moderate-income households. It has had the city’s highest concentration of Latinos and Latino immigrants in recent decades. Rich with nonprofit providers, art institutions, small businesses, and working-class jobs, the district has seen an acceleration of displacement trends — an unintended consequence of a rebounding economy following the Great Recession coupled with California’s severe housing shortage and the national trend of re-urbanization. This community-initiated and collaborative effort between community advocates and city staff, which began in 2015 and was unanimously endorsed by the San Francisco Planning Commission in 2017, identified an extensive list of neighborhood-stabilization strategies in the following categories: tenant protections; affordable housing preservation, production and access; economic development; homelessness; and community planning. Join a discussion of strategies, successes, challenges, and next steps for addressing the city's displacement trends.