Devin McCutchen, a UCLA grad student focusing on San Francisco history, recently unearthed a quiz titled “Has your neighborhood become upscale?” clipped from the September 19, 1985, edition of the Chronicle. It’s been making its way around Twitter, and so, with the help of Chron librarian Bill Van Niekerken, we tracked down the original, as well as the accompanying two-part story.

What makes your neighborhood upscale? An influx of croissants and fern bars? Gelato shops and cheese stores selling Argentine (gasp) Parmesan? Substitute “coffee boutiques selling whole beans for $16 a 12-ounce bag” for “coffee boutiques selling whole beans for $5 a pound or more” and, uh, nothing for “designer chocolate shoppes,” and the quiz seems as timely as it was 29 years ago.

Following is the text of the accompanying articles, notable for their disheartening constants as well as their amusing details:

Why Success May Spoil S.F.

By Mark Z. Barabak and Tim Schreiner

Picture the year 2000: A wave of Asians and white- collar professionals has lifted San Francisco to a wealth unprecedented for a major American city.

There would be no poverty or blight, thus none of the associated headaches afflicting most urban centers.

In many ways, it may seem ideal: a pristine city populated by 712,000 well-educated, well- heeled residents savoring a flourishing array of restaurants, theater, opera, symphony and other first-rate amenities.

Already, the city has realized dramatic increases in household income, property values and commercial growth. Although all the signs point to prosperity, an underlying question has emerged: Is success spoiling San Francisco?

The city “may be pricing out its janitors, its teachers, its nurses and its gas-station attendants the way Marin County already has, ” says Richard Le- Gates, head of the urban studies program at San Francisco State University. “Aside from humanitarian concern for people, there’s a tremendous social cost of pricing them out. On the more mundane level, there’s just the texture, quality of life, being made more interesting by a mix of ages and incomes and backgrounds.”

The case of the city’s black community, which lost 10,000 residents between 1970 and 1980, illustrates LeGates’ fear.

Rotea Gilford recalled what it was like to grow up 40 years ago in the Western Addition. Despite crime and poverty, he remembers a tightly knit, thriving neighborhood filled with “good sounds, good food, good talk, good music.”

“That’s all gone now, ” he said. “It has been displaced.”

Gilford, an aide to San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, is troubled by an attitude he senses in the city.

“People who have come here and bought the housing they can afford, or moved into the rental housing they can afford, want to change the neighborhood, ” he said. “All of a sudden my neighborhood, the way it has existed for all these years, isn’t good enough.”

Although Gilford’s old Western Addition is an obvious example of a neighborhood undergoing change, it is not the only one in the city. Old Italian families have been pushed out of North Beach, working-class Germans no longer dominate the streets of Noe Valley and the Richmond District is losing its old Irish tradesmen.

Yet there is no disputing that the city’s transformation has fueled a roaring economic boom.

Since 1970, San Francisco’s median household income has more than doubled, from $10,406 a year to $24,500, a rate more than outpacing inflation and substantially higher than the national figure of $20,885.

That means lots of local buying power and good news for businesses. Retail sales skyrocketed from 1974 to 1984, climbing from $1.7 billion to more than $4 billion annually.

The trend is expected to continue, according to retailers and marketing experts, as more and more people arrive with greater amounts of disposable income – the money left over after food, rent and household bills.

In addition, the amount of downtown office space doubled in the last two decades, and the assessed value of homes in the city’s neighborhoods more than tripled since 1976.

The whopping increase in revenues, which have more than doubled since 1975, has meant good fiscal times for the city government, sparing San Francisco from the budgetary crises that plagued other California cities after the 1978 passage of tax-slashing Proposition 13.

City budget planners predict tax receipts will continue to rise at a 5 percent annual rate over the next five years.

“I personally think it’s a positive sign that San Francisco has no areas of urban decay, ” said Mike McGill, a St. Louis native and executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Research Association.

If anyone fears the city is losing its middle class, he says, take a look at the Asian population, clustered in “suburbs” in the Sunset and Richmond districts, or the city’s vital tourist industry, a major source of unskilled, entry-level jobs.

“Changing of neighborhoods and upgrading of neighborhoods over time is not bad per se, ” said Supervisor Bill Maher. “Think about it: people work, can buy their own home, pay their bills and are financially solvent. So, they’re undesirable? Give me a break.”

Indeed, most major American cities would gladly trade their slums for a place like Bayview-Hunters Point – long considered the closest thing the city has to a ghetto – where the average household income is just under $20,000.

Just about any other American city would also love to grapple, as San Francisco has, with the question of how much downtown growth is too much. The flip side is what Kevin McCarthy, a Rand Corp. demographer, called the “yuppification” of San Francisco: a spread of boutiques, croissant shops and fern bars that have supplanted many small, neighborhood businesses. It is a trend that troubles some people, who fear it may destroy the individual character of the city’s many, varied neighborhoods.

“Even in the four years since I lived in San Francisco, it has changed; almost every corner has been `cute-ified, ‘ ” said John Mollenkopf, whose book on America’s urban evolution used San Francisco as a case study. “How many different types of croissants do you want?”

Not everyone thinks the transformation in taste has been for the worse.

“Tastes change, ” said James Haas, a land-use attorney and fifth-generation San Franciscan who lives in Bernal Heights. “You talk about pasta, chocolate, cookie shops. That’s related to taste. And I don’t see how you can make judgments that those types of shops are bad and a neighborhood cobbler is good.”

Bill Witte, who heads the city Office of Housing and Economic Development, said: “The city is taking a lot of steps to preserve some mix of incomes, particularly in the areas most threatened, the neighborhoods surrounding downtown.

“We can take the pressure off existing areas in many cases by building in areas that aren’t residential now – Van Ness Avenue, South of Market. I do believe we’re already making inroads here in terms of new housing opportunities.”

Such considerations are academic, however, to a person like Peggie Burris, who at 83 finds San Francisco’s transformation to be a frustrating and embittering experience.

In 1945, she and her husband, Henry, started a French laundry on Union Street, then an area of nondescript small neighborhood shops. Their business prospered for 15 years, but in the 1960s the newly widowed Burris had to close the business and vacate her apartment upstairs when the rent tripled as the neighborhood started going upscale.

She moved to an apartment in Cow Hollow, where she lived for 22 years until, 18 months ago, she was priced out a second time.

Unable to drive, she now considers herself a prisoner in the cramped home she shares with a friend near the Cow Palace.

“I lived my whole life in the city, worked every day, did all my civic duties, ” she said, shaking her head. “To think anyone can come along and put you out of your home just because they have more money doesn’t seem right. There has to be another way.”

WHEN COOKIES COME, NEIGHBORHOODS CRUMBLE

With the arrival of young professionals, neighborhood commerce goes to pieces: pieces of chocolate, pieces of sushi and pieces of gourmet kitchen equipment.

You can’t buy a hammer. You won’t find anyone who calls himself a barber. And forget buying a cheeseburger for less than $5.

But on many blocks you can buy slices of Ganache Rhum Torte, tiny cups of Coppa Mista gelato and $2-a-bar hand soap. Plenty of Indonesian Celebes coffee at $8.50 a pound.

“These people are busy, ” said Elliott Medrich of Cocolat dessert shops. “They want to short-cut the process, but they don’t want to short-cut the end result.”

They’re interested in panache instead of bargains. And they will pay dearly for their treats.

At 11 a.m. on a recent day, Chris Coats slipped into his favorite French pastry shop on Fillmore Street and bought an amaretto chocolate truffle.

The heat from his fingers caused the rich lump almost to slip from his grasp before he could step onto the sidewalk and take a bite.

“I eat them all the time, ” the tanned, 33-year-old clothing salesman said between nibbles. “I always buy truffles, usually two.”

Although Coats has lived in the Bay Area for only three months, he already knows the location of several dessert boutiques. Despite regular indulgence, he is Gentlemen’s Quarterly thin, because of golf and meditation, he says.

“My meditation teacher ate lots of chocolate, too, ” he said. “I think meditation burns off the calories. That’s not your standard yoga theory, but I believe it.”

The bywords on streets from Union to 24th are the same: Quality, indulgence, convenience, immediate gratification and gourmet “names.” Anything “Euro” – as in European – is in.

Bruce Carroll, executive vice president of Claritas Corp., watches such neighborhood trends closely to alert his company’s marketing customers, and he is constantly alert to neighborhood gentrifying.

“The real estate offices start getting ferns in them, ” he said. “Suddenly you see a lot of European cars – Volvos, BMWs and Saabs – when you walk down the street.”

Other tipoffs: The divorce rate goes up, the number of unmarried live-in couples increases and magazine subscriptions rise dramatically, particularly for wine-and-dine, urban living and travel magazines; “A magazine is like a heat-seeking missile, ” Carroll said. “We can find the doctors in Harlem” using magazine subscription data.

In San Francisco, the city’s growing affluence is reflected as well in changes that large merchandisers started making in the mid- to late 1970s, said Al Aguiar, former marketing head for Macy’s California and now a retail consultant in Lafayette.

“Macy’s went from being a middle-of-the-road department store to trading up, ” he said. “When that happened, Emporium-Capwell started doing the same thing, then people like Neiman-Marcus saw the marketing opportunities here.”

Eventually, he says, retailers in San Francisco may cater exclusively to an upscale market of single adults and childless couples, making it far easier, for example, to pick up a home gelato maker or cappucino machine than a washer and dryer.

ALONG THIRD STREET, RESIDENTS WOULD WELCOME GENTRIFICATION

You’ll hear none of the sneering talk of “yuppification” in the Bayview-Hunters Point area. Here, gentrification is viewed with unabashed hope, even anticipation.

Take a drive down Third Street past the ramshackle storefronts – the boarded-up Bayview Bar, the shuttered Capitol Plumbing and Heating Supply – and it is easy to see why a fern bar, gelato stand or cookie shop might seem a welcome sight to some residents.

In other San Francisco districts, McDonald’s and other fast-food chains have had to fight to move in. In Bayview, residents fairly glow when they talk about the burger and chicken outlets that have opened in the past two years.

The biggest problem with Bayview-Hunters Point is its image as a crime-infested nest of poverty and blight.

Third Street helps to foster that image.Unfortunately, it is the only part of the area many people see, usually while en route to Candlestick Park. Just a block or two off Third Street in either direction are homes that could easily fit into the city’s more affluent areas.

James Wilson, Hunters Point manager for the city’s Redevelopment Agency, called Third Street “the armpit of the city, the pimple on the face of Baghdad-by-the-Bay.”

“We could be getting a broader range of (homeowners) . . . but it’s difficult as long as Third Street remains the way it is.”

The decline of the thoroughfare – once a beehive of commercial activity that included a variety of speciality shops and a neighborhood theater – began after World War II, when the shipyard jobs that attracted thousands of people dried up.

Many residents moved out to find jobs elsewhere “and the city’s poor people got sucked into the vacuum that was left behind, ” said Wilson. Their poverty led to the decay of Third Street.

Today, there seems to be an abiding faith that gentrification will create a rising economic tide to buoy the community, and finally raise Third Street with it. The city is trying to get the street designated a state enterprise zone to encourage development through favorable tax and environmental laws.

“I like to see all this building going on, ” said Ethel Garlington, who has a street named in her honor to commemorate years of neighborhood involvement. A Bayview resident since 1942, she believes that as wealthier people move in and “raise the area up, they have to bring us up, too.”

Shirley Jones, active in the Bayview community where she has lived since 1966, agrees. Her dream, she said, is to see Third Street become another Clement Street, the crowded – some would say overdeveloped – strip of restaurants and small shops in the inner Richmond District.

“It makes me feel good to think I bought a home eight or 10 years ago for $35,000 and could turn around and sell if for $150,000 if I so choose, ” she said with a broad smile. “I feel it’s a reward for a lifetime investment people have made in the community.”

Asked about the poorer residents forced out as the area grows wealthier, there was a long pause and finally Garlington snapped: “What about them? They just moved out. There’s a whole lot of them still here.”

Garlington and others are confident that they – and the city – have learned a lesson from what happened in the Western Addition, where an aggressive effort at urban renewal helped destroy a vibrant black community and routed thousands of low-income residents from the city.

“We were kind of frightened. We figured if redevelopment came here, it would destroy people, ” Garlington said. “But the community made demands. (The city) could come out here and build in the blighted areas, but they had to guarantee nobody would be moved until they had decent, sanitary replacement housing. They stuck with it, because we demanded it.”

Wilson agreed. The city “handled this project with a hell of a lot more sensitivity than the manner in which the Western Addition was approached, ” he said, citing the community’s voice in planning and oversight.

Still uncertain is whether residents will be able to withstand the economic pressures that an influx of better-heeled residents may bring to Bayview-Hunters Point.

Jones summed up the prevailing philosophy: “I’ll take a cookie shop versus what we have right now.”

A SLIDE TO THE RIGHT FORESEEN FOR S.F.

Political experts say San Francisco is likely to grow increasingly conservative as its population shifts – but conservative here will be unlike conservative anywhere else.

“Political debates will become more concerned with `The City Beautiful’ and less concerned with economic justice, ” said political scientist Richard DeLeon of San Francisco State University.

Whereas issues of gay rights and comparable worth have been liberal rallying points, political consultant Clint Reilly said the motto of San Francisco’s “New Conservatives” might well be: “Let’s hang on to what we’ve got. Let’s keep neighborhoods safe. Let’s keep fast-food out of the neighborhoods.”

Analysts traditionally have divided the city politically between residents who lived east of Twin Peaks and those who lived west. Economic conservatives lived west of the city’s “Mason-Dixon Line” and fiscal liberals to the east.

But DeLeon said this fault line has shifted, dividing the city between those living north of Twin Peaks – who believe in strong environmental protection, public health and individual liberties – and those to the south who disagree or do not care about such issues.

Although in other cities the infusion of wealthy newcomers might make for more conservative politics in general, Reilly said it will not be that sweeping a change here.

“San Francisco holds a certain attraction and projects a certain image, ” he said. “People who come here have to be affluent, because you can’t live in this city without being affluent. But the kind of person attracted to this city also tends to be more liberal, a more ideologically liberal individual.”

Reilly thinks tomorrow’s San Franciscan will tend to be fiscally conservative but will have a liberal value system that does not pass judgment on others’ lifestyles.

“They’re not pro-Russian, ” political consultant Richard Schlackman said of tomorrow’s San Franciscans, “but they definitely don’t want to go fight in El Salvador.”

Kevin McCarthy, a demographer with the Rand Corp., sees a potential for local conflicts as the population shifts, citing the projected need for more school spending as one possible area of dispute.

San Francisco school officials predict student enrollment will increase from the current 68,000 to 74,000 in 1994, mostly as a result of Asian immigration.

McCarthy said it is predictable that a city “whose majority Anglo population consists increasingly of childless adults . . . may be somewhat reluctant to support public schools that increasingly consist of minorities.”