Carl Nolte writes about the changes in the Mission by visiting St. Peter’s Catholic School in the Mission that he attended years ago.

I could tell what she was thinking: How could a St. Peter’s kid turn into a somebody with glasses and gray hair? Things change.

Few places have changed more than the Mission, and St. Peter’s has changed with it. There are about 300 students at the school now, about half the enrollment of a few years ago. It’s not hard to understand the reason – poor people, the children of immigrants – can’t afford to live in the Mission anymore. Many have moved out.

There are tech buses on the streets, young and hip white people in the coffee cafes. Rents are going through the roof.

But St. Peter’s seems to be thriving. It was founded in 1878 by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy, eight nuns who came from Ireland to open a school for the children of immigrants. One hundred thirty-six years later, it is the same school. Different immigrants. READ MORE 

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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2 Comments

  1. The narrative isn’t very consistent. One minute he is saying that the children of immigrants can no longer afford to live in the Mission.

    But then he says that 95% of the kids at this school are Hispanic and that, in his day, it was nearly 100% white.

    So which is it? Have the whites left to be displaced by all these Hispanic immigrants? Or can these Hispanic immigrants no longer afford the Mission, and it is being over-run by whites? He seems unable to keep his story straight and his facts aligned.

    In his zeal to make a political point, his otherwise appealing journey into nostalgia has morphed into just another unsubstantiated, generic whine about change, progress and social mobility.

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