Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.

I was sitting under a tree in Precita Park, in my San Francisco neighborhood, when I finished E.M. Forster’s “Howards End.” My mind normally wanders when I read outside; a book tends to be a pretext for me to sit and watch people, who often give me ideas for stories. Yet this novel captured my ever-shifting attention. While I’d long been familiar with the book’s famous exhortation, “Only connect,” I was taken by surprise by another salient idea, this one more radical and less adaptable to literary sound-bite.

I’m talking about Forster’s ideas about the nature of property.

The novel suggests that the ownership of the beloved old house, Howards End, doesn’t depend on who actually owns it, but rather who is most connected to the place in spirit. “We know this is our house,” one character, Helen, says to her sister Margaret in a key scene, “because it feels ours. Oh, they may take the title deeds and the door keys but for this one night we are at home.”

Imagine owning a house solely because it felt like yours. When I read this line, I couldn’t help but think of my neighbors. Call them Josie and Steve. They live two doors down.

They’ve been renting their small one-bedroom, where they live with their two young children, for the past seven years. Their house, though light blue, looks like a western saloon, with a looming facade. It survived the 1906 earthquake. Not long ago, their landlord put it up for sale. Josie is a teacher and Steve works at a small nonprofit, and at first the asking price seemed impossibly out of their range. Yet they scrambled, borrowing from banks, family, friends. They came up short, apparently, by just a few thousand dollars. Soon, Josie, Steve and their kids will leave our block.

Our neighborhood, at the base of Bernal Hill, has been changing for years, becoming more and more upscale. Lately, the realtors have begun calling it “Desirable Precita Park.” We now have all the necessary amenities: a comically overpriced organic convenience store and wine emporium, a new coffee shop with toddler play area, and yes, our very own pop-up restaurant. The playground at the east end of the park, which doesn’t need to be renovated, is being renovated. Celestially fit women march down our sidewalks with yoga mats slung over their shoulders like muskets.

It wasn’t always like this. Precita Park used to be a lot funkier, in a militant hippie sort of way. In 1975, Patty Hearst’s kidnappers were caught a few doors down from my apartment. A longtime resident once told me that the F.B.I. agents staking out the place wore long hair and beads and sat in their car smoking dope, and still everybody on the block knew they were cops.

Wendy MacNaughton

This isn’t to say that Precita Park doesn’t still have character. For instance, there’s the guy who always does an amazing regimen of calisthenics wearing old-school pea-green sweats. He must do 200 laps a day around the park, alternating between running and leaping. Kids call him the Jumping Man. He never speaks. When he’s not in the park, he vanishes. I’m convinced he’s the ghost of a famous bantamweight, endlessly training for his last fight. And then there are mornings at Charlie’s Café, and all of us sharing a single copy of the newspaper. You risk looking stuck-up if you bring your own. If you’re short, Charlie will always spot you a coffee. “Tomorrow, tomorrow,” he’ll say, “Don’t think about it.”

In spite of the changes, we’re close here, which brings me back to Josie and Steve. In their backyard, they grow crazy amounts of vegetables and share them with the neighborhood. A zucchini, no joke, the size of my thigh arrived just yesterday. They also raise chickens. I like to listen to their burbling out my bathroom window in the morning. The tiny house also is a sort of haven for the block. Locked out? Go by Josie and Steve’s. Love trouble? Talk to Josie and Steve. Got a horrific case of the stomach flu and can’t take care of your shrieking 1-year-old? Let’s just say my family has been rescued by Josie and Steve more than once.

You might say these are ordinary things, the kinds of things people do for each other in a community. Josie and Steve aren’t saints; they’re neighbors.

And that’s why it’s so hard to see them go. As the new owner began asserting his family’s right to move in, Josie, who is never one to shy away from saying what she thinks, put handmade signs in the window: “ANOTHER FAMILY PRICED OUT OF SAN FRANCISCO.” “NEW LANDLORD FORCING SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN OUT OF THEIR HOME.” Many on the block expressed solidarity. Josie and Steve not on Precita Park? Impossible. If anybody lives here, you guys live here.

While reading “Howards End,” part of me wished that they hadn’t even tried to buy the place in the first place. Why buy something that’s already yours?

Of course, this is literary pie in the sky. Josie and Steve need a roof, and soon. Eventually, even the novel backs itself away from knocking the system too much. Margaret’s “spiritual ownership” of Howards End merges with legal title following her marriage to the landlord himself. As Helen puts it, “I am less enthusiastic about justice now.”

In Precita Park, the loss of this one family may not be calculable in dollars. But I fear that the more affluent this area becomes, neighbors — people who look out for each other — will become fewer and farther between. Lately in San Francisco, we seem to be comfortable tackling every progressive cause except for the question of where middle-class people like Josie and Steve, and so many others, are supposed to live.

So I come back to it: It’s ours because it feels ours. It may not be concrete or quantifiable, but it’s not nothing. Neighborhoods are built on this sort of feeling. There are other renters here, my family included. It might not be long before our landlords decide to sell, too. Why wouldn’t they? There’s money to be made in Precita Park these days.

In the meantime, the light-blue house two doors down will remain, for as long as we are around to remember, Josie and Steve’s.

Townies welcomes submissions at townies@nytimes.com.

Peter Orner, a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State, is the author of the novel “Love and Shame and Love.”