Gentrification

My neighborhood in San Francisco is the Excelsior district. It has changed who I am today because of all the elements it had that I grew up with. My elementary school was four blocks from my house, my skateboard park was created seven blocks away from my house, and one of my closest friends lived about eight houses away. My closest friend was Adam, I knew him since elementary but we never went to the same school. We were just neighbors and passed each other one day and talked about skateboarding in 1998.  The same year the skateboarding park was created and this is where I learned underground music, committed to learn new tricks on the skateboard, and connected to teens younger and older than me who were not from my neighborhood. As a matter of fact, the earliest idea of a neighborhood came from my elementary school since my friends lived closed to the school. As I walked around the neighborhood and got to know the neighbors I became subconsciously conditioned to be normal and quiet. I didn’t like because the neighborhood became calm and ordinary, but seeing the neighborhood today, I see new neighbors trying to be the “loud neighbor”. They make all these useless noises for attention. When I was a kid, our family was known as the loud neighbor since my dad, a mechanic, was always in the garage using his loud tools and leaving the music on ultra-loud.  Today the loud people have parties and continue to have loads of people over even when there is no party. However, not too long ago another house like one of the loud houses I mentioned got broken into. The owner got stabbed because he used his house as place to hold rooms filled with Marijuana plants.  Yes, my neighborhood has changed but it changed me significantly when I was young.

I feel “normal neighborhoods” are targeted for people to leave their mark, not knowing that these neighborhoods actually change you.