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At the risk of going more off-topic, but nevertheless answering your question: I judge most things on how they affect people at large. Not just high-salary empl

by clicks 13y ago

At the risk of going more off-topic, but nevertheless answering your question: I judge most things on how they affect people at large. Not just high-salary employers and employees usually from stable households, but normal people that make up the cities. It is kind of a disgusting, spooky thing that we just cater to the well-doing, but ignore the folks who weren't afforded the same opportunities in their lives as the rest of us. It falls on us to level the playing field as much as we comfortably can, so they too can get good education, affordable homes, affordable food. Instead we're depriving them of that, we're displacing them from the homes they've been living in -- there's something very wrong there isn't there.

tptacek 13y ago
Generally speaking, improving the tax base of a city should improve education and health care. It doesn't in San Francisco because the city is mismanaged: it spends integer multiples per capita compared to other cities. Meanwhile, housing is expensive in San Francisco because San Francisco makes it difficult to build high-density housing, which it badly needs, because unlike Chicago San Francisco can't grow "out". When Wicker Park was gentrified in Chicago, residents got angry, but then they moved to adjoining neighborhoods. It's possible that many of them kept their kids in the same schools; virtually all of them kept their kids in the same school system. Chicago in 2013 could sustain at least 3 more waves of gentrification, waves that would turn Garfield Park into yuppie restaurant districts, without displacing residents outside of the city boundaries. San Francisco can't do that. Where Chicago has Garfield Park, then Lawndale, then Austin, then a border with a suburb, San Francisco has cold brackish water. When a working class resident of San Francisco loses their apartment, there's a good chance they're not going to be able to remain in the city at all! That makes gentrification in San Francisco far more painful than it is in other cities. There's a solution to this problem, which is to sacrifice some of the postcard beauty of Bayview and the Tenderloin to allow high-density housing. But for reasons other people have described on this thread, the residents of San Francisco are unwilling to do that. So they suffer, and then scapegoat.

by clicks 13y ago

tptacek 13y ago

Generally speaking, improving the tax base of a city should improve education and health care. It doesn't in San Francisco because the city is mismanaged: it spends integer multiples per capita compared to other cities. Meanwhile, housing is expensive in San Francisco because San Francisco makes it difficult to build high-density housing, which it badly needs, because unlike Chicago San Francisco can't grow "out". When Wicker Park was gentrified in Chicago, residents got angry, but then they moved to adjoining neighborhoods. It's possible that many of them kept their kids in the same schools; virtually all of them kept their kids in the same school system. Chicago in 2013 could sustain at least 3 more waves of gentrification, waves that would turn Garfield Park into yuppie restaurant districts, without displacing residents outside of the city boundaries. San Francisco can't do that. Where Chicago has Garfield Park, then Lawndale, then Austin, then a border with a suburb, San Francisco has cold brackish water. When a working class resident of San Francisco loses their apartment, there's a good chance they're not going to be able to remain in the city at all! That makes gentrification in San Francisco far more painful than it is in other cities. There's a solution to this problem, which is to sacrifice some of the postcard beauty of Bayview and the Tenderloin to allow high-density housing. But for reasons other people have described on this thread, the residents of San Francisco are unwilling to do that. So they suffer, and then scapegoat.