Well a different city when you consider municipal boundaries, but really
it’s all part of a larger urban organism, no different to larger cities and
their neighborhoods.
I have to say I found the amount of homeless people in SF absolutely staggering when I visited. I mean, all big US cities seem to have a big homelessness/beggar problem compared to the UK, but SF seems an order of magnitude worse than say, Seattle.
I can’t believe that a major city allows the situation as it is to persist.
I’ve seen gentrification up close and personal, I have intimate experience with the phenomena. It never led me to demonize or dehumanize the people with large wallets who were driving the change. If they are not just “any other people” then what are they? Zombies? People who deserve to be put in special camps? Pure, pharmaceutical grade evil?
The solution here is not going to be to demonize a class of people - it never is. Not ok for Greg Gopman to do it, not ok for the anti gentrification lobby to do it, and you don’t have to be any particular age to see that as the plain truth. No clue on the overall character of this Gopman guy, but at least he admitted he was wrong and began a conversation.
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You might not be from the bay area originally ?
When I was growing up EPA was the murder capital of the world and menlo atherton carved up that place in the 90s . East Palo Alto is now about 5 square blocks , your estimates are about 20 years off , as in late
Literally San Francisco is the hardest city in America to evict a tenant , even when they are clearly squatting illegally and or obtained the space under fraud and YOU HAVE NEVER IN YOUR LIFE WITNESSED AN ILLEGAL EVICTION IN SAN FRANCISCO. That is a total fabrication , when and where did you see an illegal eviction go down in this city
exactly lol I live in SF now even though in the 70s my family moved to the east bay .
They didn’t want to ,because SF was there home but guess what , that house they didnt want for $120,000 today is worth over $730,000 and now I promise you they consider that their home as well. I cant tell you how many friends I have that were born and raised in SF have made $200,000-300,000 in buying homes in areas they were originally disinterested in .
Prove that , I actually have a friend whos job for thats decade has been intaking homeless families in SF and his experience tells me that most of these people are in fact originally from areas where that cost of living is sometimes 80% less than compared to here . literally every story he tells me is of a guy embarrassingly telling my friend how they had no idea that it cost 3500 for a 3 bedroom here . As in they came here for they economic proserity but where failed by the economic demands
another perfect example of how little you know about the communities and city you “live” in. “born here”, huh? “self made”, huh? riiiight. we all know better.
this is my favorite, because here you are either an utter liar, or again completely ignorant of what is happening in the city you “were born in”.
or again, and most likely, willfully ignorant of the facts, because at this point we all know you are actually complicit in this, being a landlord and property developer. perhaps it eases your conscious.
I saw a documentary recently, called The One Percent. It was made by an heir to the Johnson (as in Johnson and Johnson) fortune. he interviewed all sorts of people in the “1%”–the granddaughter of Warren Buffett who was disowned because of her participation, his own family (including his father, who as a young man had made a documentary about income inequality in Africa), Steve Forbes, the guy who founded Kinkos, the grandson of the guy who founded Oscar Meyer (who gave up his claim to his share of the family wealth), Friedman, Robert Reich, Nader, investment bankers, etc and so on. He talked to one guy who was benefiting from the gentrification of the south side of Chicago, but who was completely in the know and honest about how problematic the whole process of gentrification is, yet there he was participating in pushing out the poor. Does that make the guy “evil”? That he is knowingly participating in a process which hurts others? Does his acknowledgement of how problematic it is absolve him? Does he even need to be absolved? I don’t know, to be honest. This is the whole documentary, if you’re interested (it’s also on Netflix):
So, I’ll buy your argument that not all of the upper class are assholes–sure, why not.
However, I do think this guy backed off only because he was called out. I don’t think that constitutes “demonizing” a class of people. I think this guy was being called out for making an incredibly offensive, class war statement. He’s a jackass, not because he’s of particular class, but because of the thing he said. Do you honestly think that he has changed his mind, honestly, rather than just being in damage control mode?
The guy I’m thinking of in the documentary is Karl Muth–he is the heir to an investment banking fortune.
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That’s not actually an example of sprawl.
…wasn’t there an election won this way?
…7.15 million for the whole “bay” area… via Wikipedia
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