Gentrification and Soccer Games

This week, we spoke about the gentrification of San Francisco by invading businesses and their employees (namely, folks from Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley businesses.)  I remembered a story I'd seen a few months ago that directly touched The Mission, where dwindling attention to public parks and play areas is allowing tech newcomers to take over.  Every weekend, neighborhood kids would go to the local soccer field, winning the rights to the field by forming teams and playing each other.  During a weekend last October, a group of tech guys from Dropbox tried to take the field without playing for the right to it, saying they "bought the timeslot."  (That article is here.)

For obvious reasons, people were pissed; locals called for a ban on buying the rights to public spaces, and made plans for a big protest against the clear gentrification of the poorer areas of San Francisco at the expensive of locals (that article is here.)  I can't find the outcome of the story, but hopefully the parks department stopped charging money for public space, which is probably illegal. (Update: The video description says the policy of buying timeslots for the public soccer field was ended after the below video went viral.)

The video of the encounter between the local soccer players and the adult techies is posted below.  In the end, I'm left wondering exactly how terrible the adults were at soccer; after all, the opposing team were teens, and the techies could have just…you know…actually played for the field, like everyone else…