3 ms·
It's a valiant effort to defend living in SF, at a time when many others are critical of the idea, and I applaud the effort. I am not convinced, but I admire t
by rossdavidh 3y ago
It's a valiant effort to defend living in SF, at a time when many others are critical of the idea, and I applaud the effort. I am not convinced, but I admire the spirit.
There is even some justification to many of his points. Any essay that makes interesting points and stimulates interesting thoughts, even if by defending a point that I disagree with, is well worth reading.
I can't help noticing, though, that he mostly seems to be contrasting the idea of living in SF with the idea of living in the urban Northeast, or else Miami. It is as if he has never noticed the "flyover country".
I also have the impression that the government in, say, NYC has at least pivoted squarely in the direction of acknowledging and attempting to address the problem(s), whereas SF government has not (or at least if they have it is not apparent from my own, admittedly rather distant, perspective).
Lastly, there have been three office buildings sold in SF recently (the first in years), and they all sold for very steep discounts on previous valuations (>2/3 reduced). As night follows day, every other office building owner in SF is going to go to court to get their property tax valuation reduced. It is not clear to me how SF will cope with the budget cuts that are required.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoFlyover country, by and large, is simply not a comparable good with major metropolitan cities. There are a couple of major cities the author didn't mention (Chicago, for example, is lovely), but if you're used to and enjoy urban living, you're not going to find anything like it throughout most of America. Most American cities are more like San Jose. Sure you've got a big population, but only because what would normally be classified as suburbs have been folded into the municipality, with only relatively small pockets being amenable to the urban life. LA is an interesting case, because it's a lot like the Bay Area as a whole: a cluster of urban spaces, connected by a continuous mass of suburban, single-family homes. IMO, a simple test of the urban characteristic of a city is a bar crawl. How far can I wander through a city on foot, with a sufficient concentration of bars that it doesn't turn into a hike? For SF, you can make some long crawls: China Town to Fisherman's Wharf is probably my favorite, but if it wasn't for that pesky last call you could easily cross the entire city.