Gentrification can be a dirty word around here, what with the constant hand-wringing associated with tech shuttles, rising rents and all the cool kids moving to Oakland. Over on The Atlantic Cities, however, the venerable old magazine's data-driven series on class-divided cities has drawn a map from 2010 census data showing us exactly which neighborhoods in San Francisco have the highest percentage of creative class residents vs. service class and working class neighbors.
According to Atlantic Editor and social scientist Richard Florida's definition, the creative class is made up of science and tech workers, business types, and law or healthcare professionals, as well as anyone in the arts, culture, media or entertainment industries. In other words: 99% of the people anyone ever talks about in San Francisco.
Likewise, Florida's own description of a Creative Class neighborhood reads like a New York Times piece about Valencia or Divisadero with their: "teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between participant and observer, or between creativity and its creators." As you might expect, most of the city is overrun with members of the Creative Class. The Marina (surprisingly?) has the highest concentration, but popular neighborhoods like the Mission, the Panhandle, SoMa, the Castro, Noe Valley and the academic hotspots around UCSF and S.F. State are bright with creative folks.
The highest concentrations of service class workers — those in "low-wage, low-skill" service jobs like retail, food service and administrative gigs — can be found in Chinatown and the Tenderloin. In fact, Chinatown and the Tenderloin account for half of the top ten areas for service workers in the entire Bay Area. In San Francisco the neighborhoods tend to be more dramatically skewed towards one class or another, whereas the East Bay and Peninsula are more evenly balanced. Members of the working class — those in transportation, construction and factory jobs, on the other hand, tend to be a rare breed in the Bay Area, with the only discernable working class neighborhood showing up in San Leandro.
For more insights and a fancy, zoomable map, pop over to the Atlantic.