My friend’s teenage daughter (who babysits for us once in a while) recently had racial slurs yelled at her and physically threatened on a bus on Sunset Blvd. That was this year. Things like this happened to way too many people I know, even on the west side of the city.

Greater understanding = less hate. I wish that would happen. My niece was jogging in the Richmond district early in the pandemic when she was yelled at with anti-Asian hatred and spit at, and she was terrified.

Is it outside her comfort zone to have a burrito in the Mission or walk around the great meadow at Fort Mason or pick up poultry and spices at Mi Rancho supermarket near the Bayview? No. But it is inconvenient when she has options closer to home.

Same holds true today with my extended family. My mom goes to what is walkable. Would she hang out with me or the grandkids outside of her immediate neighborhood? Sure. My kids hang out in all parts of the city, especially the East side.

Did my grandparents go to the Marina district often? No, because businesses didn’t cater to their needs, and it wasn’t walkable from where they lived. It didn’t have anything to do with their comfort zone.

As a kid that went to school in Chinatown from K-8, I spent a lot of time after school in the Marina district (easy ride from the 30 Stockton) to play baseball at Moscone Rec Center along with other areas of the city. All my friends did.

(Friends wanted to open a restaurant at the food court and were turned away. “We already have too many Asian restaurants” was what they were told.)

(What Stonestown has done is an extension of that, as you note. Brookfield did their market research and their homework, and they decided it makes good business sense for them. And it does. Previous owners of the mall actively tried to avoid an overabundance of Asian stores.)

Both my sets of grandparents went to Chinatown often to buy groceries because it had everything they needed in one place. My parents, too, as well as uncles & aunts. But businesses in the Sunset & Richmond districts sprouted up to address the needs, as you said. So they started to shop more locally.

Clement, Irving and later Noriega, Taraval business districts always, since I was very little, catered to the multigenerational Asian households that lived nearby.

I read that when it was first published. Having grown up in the city, we had different upbringings so we have different perspectives. I don’t necessarily agree with the “self segregate” angle of the opinion piece.