Which came first, the Google bus stop, the two-bedroom apartment for $10,500 a month, or the new place that sells organic fruit juice and nut milk for $12 per serving?

All of the above exist on Valencia Street within blocks of each other, and a freelance journalist living half a world away has shown that they have interesting connections.

Chris Walker, 29, lives in Mumbai, India, with his girlfriend, who works in international development. He recently used San Francisco city government's open data programs to map the bus stops of those controversial private shuttles that carry tech workers to their offices on the Peninsula and in Silicon Valley.

He also mapped the restaurants, cafes and bars that took out business licenses from 2011 to 2013. And he compared the city's property assessment rolls from 2011 and 2013 and mapped where properties appreciated the most in that period. Surprise, surprise - they're all grouped together in what Walker has dubbed "clusters of affluence."

"San Francisco has always been a really expensive place to live, but I wanted to see if these neighborhoods had become even more gentrified and affluent with the arrival of all these tech workers who commute to the South Bay," said Walker. "Broadly, I think the data does show that."

Walker, a Union City native, worked in data visualization for a large tech company before deciding to shift those skills to data journalism to tell, as he described it, "important news stories that I care about." Like the gentrification of some of San Francisco's most beloved neighborhoods.

Feeding upon itself

As Walker sees it, technology companies stationed their bus stops in fun, hip neighborhoods where their young workers were increasingly moving. Those new residents, with plenty of disposable income, prompted more new restaurants, cafes and bars to open - drawing more tech workers, raising housing prices and luring more new businesses.

"It becomes this vicious circle where you see the neighborhoods just keep getting more affluent, and that's where you see an uptick in evictions and people getting forced out," Walker said. "That's where a lot of unrest and anger is coming from."

While many neighborhoods around San Francisco contain Walker's "clusters of affluence" - from the Castro to South of Market to North Beach and more - the Mission is ground zero.

Companies like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook hire private shuttles to pick up their workers in the Mission, and it's there that protesters in recent months have blocked some buses, arguing that tech companies are responsible for the neighborhood's skyrocketing housing prices and rampant evictions.

A recent UC-Berkeley study found the average tech shuttle rider is a single male about 30 years old who pulls down $100,000 or more a year.

Drinking establishment

That's good news for Carla Gutierrez, 34, who opened Silver Stone Coffee at 24th and Mission streets two years ago. She said she gets a lot of foot traffic from tech workers grabbing coffee and bagels on their way to catch their shuttles in the morning. They also scoop up the $4 juice drinks called the Green Machine (think spinach, celery and cucumber) and Jugo Vampiro (carrots, pineapple, beets.)

Her father has owned the property, formerly a bar called the Carlos Club, for 30 years - and Gutierrez likes the new Mission.

"I think any change in this neighborhood is good," she said.

Some managers of older businesses appreciate the new clientele as well. David Rantisi is the 58-year-old manager of the Tropicana convenience store on Mission near 22nd Street. He said he could barely pay his bills during the recession, but now gets a lot of customers who are young and educated and sport laptop bags slung over their shoulders.

Not everyone happy

The loud clangs of construction equipment just outside his door are music to his ears because they signify more buildings and more potential customers.

"I'm happy. I'm excited. It's good!" he said in a thick accent.

Not everybody's convinced. At Cafe La Boheme, a 41-year-old cafe on 24th Street near Mission, some of the regulars are a bit disgruntled. Antony Spencer, 76, lives in the Haight but frequents the neighborhood where his Brazilian bands used to rehearse. He played the agogo bells.

He said the modern-day Mission is marked by a lot more white people, a lot more wealthy people, more "upscale-y" cars and fewer spontaneous gatherings on the street.

"Before, the neighborhood had a lot more community - you had the sense people knew each other," he said. "There used to be a time when everybody sitting around coffee shops was talking or reading. Now look around."

At least half the customers were sitting by themselves staring at their laptops. One woman who overheard Spencer's loud assessment quickly darted her head down behind her screen.

Brock Hanson, 51, has lived in the Mission for 17 years and hopes to hang onto his rent-controlled apartment as long as possible. Wearing a T-shirt reading "I love to get chai" and sporting long blond curls, he said he gets by using about 10 different skills, including photography and restoring antique furniture.

Missing old neighborhood

That was common for Mission residents "before they all did one thing, which is computers." He said the tech workers are "fine," but he misses the old neighborhood.

"It doesn't have the quirky vitality that makes this place interesting," he said. "The artistic underbelly is quickly being obliterated."

That said, he doesn't mind the Google buses. They're better than everybody driving their own cars down Highway 101 - and he thinks it's silly that protesters view the shuttles as "big mastodons they can point their anger at."

Roman Kofman, 27, used to ride one of those big mastodons to YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno. Now he's a Web developer for a San Francisco company that he didn't want to identify. He moved from Chicago to the Mission to live near his brother and for better job prospects in the technology sector. He loves the Mission for its coffee shops, art galleries and diversity.

A thoughtful, soft-spoken man, he said he's deliberated a lot about contributing to gentrification and thinks everybody - the anti-eviction protesters, tech companies, landlords and city officials - needs to stop blaming each other and actually talk.

"It is our responsibility to start engaging more with the community and come up with better solutions," he said of the tech sector. "We should all sit together and discuss it publicly and privately in mixed groups."

For Roberto Hernandez, who was born and raised in the Mission, the problem isn't so much the tech workers themselves but landlords who are evicting longtime tenants to make a quick buck. Or millions of them.

"The greed of speculators is out of control," said Hernandez, 57, an artist and musician who produces the neighborhood's annual Carnaval.

A recent report by the city's budget and legislative analyst showed that Ellis Act evictions, used to clear a building to sell it, jumped by 170 between 2010 and 2013. The Mission, which saw housing prices rise by nearly 30 percent during that time, has borne the brunt of the Ellis Act evictions.

Hernandez, a father of seven and grandfather of 13, said 300 members of his extended family used to live in the Mission. Now, more than half are gone - mostly to the less-expensive East Bay.

"We're losing families, we're losing children - and we're also losing the heart and the soul and the spirit of San Francisco," he said. "If we think it's bad now, it's going to get worse."

Peter Cohen, director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations, said it's not at all surprising to learn about Walker's "clusters of affluence," where tech shuttles, new restaurants and skyrocketing property values are clumped together.

"The gentrification cycle is one that just keeps rolling and rolling," he said.

His organization is calling for increased fees for the tech shuttles, whose operators have agreed to pay $1 each time they use a Muni bus stop after paying nothing to date; for antispeculation legislation; and for building new affordable housing on unused city land.

Asked to predict what the Mission could look like in several years without such interventions, Cohen predicted a fate that would surely strike fear into the hearts of longtime Mission District residents and newcomers alike.

"We'll end up with a Mission that starts to look like the Marina," he said.