San Francisco's Mission District was, for most of the 1990s, one of the city's most vibrant Latino cultural neighborhoods — murals, community organizations, independent businesses, a dense network of residents who had built something irreplaceable over generations.

Then the first dot-com boom arrived, and with it came something that looked, at the time, like neighborhood investment: new infrastructure, building upgrades, tech company offices moving into renovated industrial spaces.

What followed is now studied as one of the most rapid and complete displacement events in American urban history. The infrastructure investment didn't protect the Mission's existing community. It made the neighborhood more legible and attractive to capital that had no relationship to what was already there.

Within a few years, eviction rates had surged, longtime businesses had closed, and the cultural character that had made the Mission distinctive was concentrated in smaller and smaller pockets.

Seongsu's hydrothermal energy project — a city-led initiative to build smart energy infrastructure into the neighborhood's existing fabric — is being presented as a model of sustainable urban development.

And in important ways, it is different from what happened in the Mission. It is publicly funded rather than privately driven. It is framed around environmental sustainability rather than commercial optimization. The intent, at least, is preservation alongside modernization.

But the Mission District is a reminder that the mechanism of displacement doesn't require bad intentions. Infrastructure investment — even genuinely well-designed, publicly beneficial infrastructure — raises neighborhood profiles, attracts media attention, signals to investors that a district is on an upward trajectory, and ultimately drives the kind of rent pressure that forces out the people who were there before the investment arrived.

The critical variable in Seongsu's case is whether the smart infrastructure investment comes with binding community protection measures, or whether it arrives as an amenity that makes the neighborhood more attractive to the next wave of commercial tenants.

San Francisco learned the difference between those two outcomes at enormous human cost. Seoul has the advantage of being able to study that lesson before writing its own version.

Is your organization ready to invest in a "smart" future that includes the people who gave that future its value? Or are we simply building more efficient versions of the Mission District’s mistakes?