Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco's Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities.

Ethnic and nonconformist communities, despite their frequent proximity, seldom are analyzed as interlocking elements of the metropolitan core. In this comparative study of San Francisco neighborhoods, Brian Godfrey contrasts the formation of ethnic enclaves by European, Asian, Black, and Hispanic groups with the emergence of Bohemian, counter-cultural, and gay communities. He focuses especially closely on Latin American immigration into the Mission District and gentrification in the Haight-Ashbury. To explain the historical geography of such inner-city neighborhoods, the author proposes alternate sequences of community evolution, based on the interplay of social class and subcultural forces. He shows how both ethnic and nontraditional minority communities tend to form initially in declining central neighborhoods, with their divergent successional processes reflecting characteristic differences in social mobility and cultural cohesion.