As we homeboys say, "Born 'n' raised"
I was born in San Francisco in 1950 — yeah, I'm an old fart — and have thus had the privilege of watching multiple transformations of my beloved home town over the years.
The Mission? From Irish to Latino and now to hipster.
The Castro? From working-class Italian to scruffy escaping-Indiana gay guys to upper-middle-class married gay families.
The Fillmore? From a vibrant middle-class black community to a ghetto gulch to an emerging multi-cultural hopeful hotspot.
Mission Bay? Jury still out.
Dogpatch? Still in flux.
Excelsior? Cleaning up, and a happy place for working-class families.
"Skid Row" (4th and Howard)? Once the asshole of the town, now an arts and cultural center. The asshole, by the way, has for the past decade or more moved to 6th and Market/Mission — and with the mid-Market tech influx, it's likely to move again.
Upper Clement? First Russian, then Chinese immigrants entrepeneurilly bustling (if "entrepreneurilly" can fairly be counted as an actual word).
The Sunset? Was boring; is boring; will be boring — unless, of course, some-as-yet-unexpected tectonic trend takes hold.
I would advise commenters who have only a few years of San Francisco experience under their belts to not feel entitled to premature pontification. This is a wonderful city, and as such — think Berlin, Istanbul, Paris, New York, Rio — sometimes the pendulum swings one way, sometimes it swings another, but the fundamenals remain the same: San Francisco is a wonderful town inhabited by a roiling mix of thoughtful problem-solvers and cement-headed ideologues — as it has been for well over 200 years.
The long view is the right view — unless, of course, you're being evicted tomorrow ...
Or, as my ol' dad used to tell me, "Life's tough in the big city."