Originally published at: San Francisco's 'loss of the culture that made the city so great' results in couple buying multimillion-dollar 'suburban' home | Boing Boing
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“Homeless encampments were growing because of the downturn in business.”
I was going to make a snarky comment here but… I can’t even.
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C’mon, San Francisco: make yourself beautiful enough for these beautiful people to consider returning to what they now characterize as a “ghost town.”
Maybe SF could do something like Oceanside, CA. Is this beautiful enough for you?
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“We saw an influx of petty crime, and a loss of the culture that made the city so great,”
Is that the 21st Century way of saying, “There goes the neighbourhood”? I guess it is time to move to somewhere that is white up their alley (71% White in fact).
Indeed, that ain’t the downturn in business, that’s the lack of an effective social security safety net; the result of a society built on greed.
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“Nobody lives in San Francisco anymore, it’s too expensive because of the insanely high demand for housing.”
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I think that Cognitive Dissonance is part of their psychological package.
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If only they had watched…
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And that sound you hear is Henry George stirring uneasily in his resting place…
The Prophet of San Francisco is still unheard.
When cities (read: the people who live and work and vote there) realize that location has value, that people create the value in land that speculators and rentiers siphon in massive windfalls sales and monthly checks that, like our friend in the article says, can be received anywhere, this will get fixed pretty quickly. NYC, Seattle, San Francisco are being hollowed out by speculators. They are not dying, they are very much alive but weakened by parasites: speculators and rentiers.
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Translation: I’m only happy around rich people.
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“This place would be very clean if it weren’t so damn dirty.”
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So then MONEY is not the root of all happiness…
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I’m sure the Doves only noticed the “loss of culture” when they got pregnant and suddenly couldn’t stay out partying until 2AM before Ubering home. The restaurants, nightlife, art scene, and music didn’t vanish just because Mrs. Dove was too tired to go out and enjoy them. And the aggressive panhandlers and the scents of poop and pee were on the streets of San Francisco long before the point that these two yuppies started perceiving them, too.
18 years from now, chances are that the Doves will be featured in another article about how they decided to downsize and buy a condo in the city because of the vibrant restaurant, nightlife, art and music scene. They will not mention the homeless encampments that will still be there, bigger than ever but likely even more outside the bubble they lived in until they had kids.
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Not all, but some, for sure! 
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The magic 30 year olds seem to think SF lost its culture?
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If you’re going to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you’re going to San Francisco
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there
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Similar thing happened to me living in Brooklyn! Just as I was getting into my 30’s the music scene started getting bad. I started getting worried about the increase in petty instagramers.
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That may make more sense than you realize.
Large sections of London and Manhattan have become very expensive ghost towns, full of multimillion dollar residential high-rises that no one lives in (not full time, anyway) owned by a three layers of shell corporation as a way to park/launder wealth and/or evade taxes by billionaires/criminals (as if there’s a functional difference).
IT would not surprise me at all if sections of the city go this route, becoming expensive, empty expanses of immaculately maintained architecture and residential landscaping, along side tons of shit (canine and human) in the gutters.
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Most San Francisco housing isn’t in the high rises, but there definitely have been a lot of non-resident investors buying up the property here. My impression is that it’s not creating vacancies so much as it’s accelerating the trend of more locals being forced to rent rather than buy property.
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this is what it sounds like…
when the Doves cry.
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