I strongly doubt that. If I moved to Eldora, Iowa and voted for the most progressive, liberal, all-blue policies, up and down the ticket... it's still not going

I strongly doubt that. If I moved to Eldora, Iowa and voted for the most progressive, liberal, all-blue policies, up and down the ticket... it's still not going to turn Eldora into San Fransisco. There's not going to suddenly be a drug problem where there wasn't before. There's not going to be massive traffic problems blocking my commute. There's not going to be people commuting hours to work because they couldn't afford a million-dollar house in town. Even if you doubled the voting population with people specifically chosen so you could enact the most SF-like policies, you still only have... 5,000 people in the entire town. There's just not enough people to encounter those kinds of problems. Cities with poor quality of life and high cost of living are that way because their laws and policies aren't effectively managing the high population. If you move to a low population area, the problems you encounter are wildly different (and yes small towns still have big problems to solve). And if you move to a city that has a large enough population that SF's poor city planning actually matters, you're going to have to move a lot of people to overwhelm the status quo. And if a small number of new people dramatically changes the feel of a city, well that sounds like you had 51% of the people who wanted it one way overriding the 49% who absolutely hate the city they live in. This fear feels like a socially conservative "I don't want them folk coming here and changing things". If new people move in and things start changing, they were always going to change and a lot of people have been waiting for that change for a long time. Embrace it.