Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel/Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail.
It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.
There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
I have never been able to even see SF as a progressive place. It’s progressive in popular rhetoric and that’s it. The goal is to make its rich residents feel good about themselves, not to actually help anyone.
You can’t claim to be progressive if a starter home is a million dollars and if any attempt to change that is opposed at every level. Mostly because of real estate cost, but also other factors, SF has a very wide division between rich and poor. Having a family there on less than $200-$300k is almost unthinkable. I can’t even grasp how working class people live there at all.
In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.
Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities. If nothing is done about housing costs, I don’t think you can call yourself progressive. Anything positive that comes of any of your progressive policies is negated by the poverty and extreme inequality perpetuated by housing. Ultimately you are just running a housing cartel that distributes wealth to property owners.
Edit: it’s a major reason I’m not in Cali anymore. There are numerous reasons our family left but one was realizing that the state is a real estate cartel. Without an “exit event” you will never climb above real estate.
> In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.
Ah the famously progressive Texas where women regularly die because of abortion ban, weed is illegal, and you can’t buy booze on a Sunday, and lawmakers want to overturn Obergefell to ban same sex marriage. Very progressive, much freedom.
> Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities.
Yes, housing costs are often high where people want to live.
Texas is not progressive, which is why it’s such a great way of pointing out the hypocrisy of SF and many other blue cities’ housing policies.
Astronomically high housing costs are a policy choice. They result from high demand coupled with density limits, parking requirements, height limits, zoning, and other things designed to limit supply.
When supply is limited and demand is high prices skyrocket far beyond what a market would normally allow. This is why anti trust and anti collusion laws are important. Housing, at least in many major cities, is effectively a cartel.
It always amazes me when I visit the Bay Area and see how low density it is and how much real estate is wasted for storage lockers, strip malls, ridiculously huge car washes. They’ll let you build anything but housing apparently.
This impoverishes people, especially the working class, and contributes to homelessness and all kinds of other problems, but nobody cares. The residents like seeing their home equity go up. “I’ve got mine, fuck you” is not progressive. A cartel to keep prices high is not progressive.
You're wrong. A lot of what constitutes an "abortion" is taking care of things like stillborn pregnancies and numerous life threatening issues with the woman's uterus. You would learn a lot googling on this topic.
If you want to be anti-abortion, fine, just don't conflate it with the many life-saving procedures currently being swept up in anti-abortion laws and rhetoric.
NYC does not suffer this problem for some reason. Yes, of course there are prohibitively expensive neighborhoods in the trendiest areas. But if your goal is to live and work in the city, or to have a reasonable commute in, it is extremely doable on just about any salary, and you can actually reasonably expect to be able to afford a home in the suburbs some day. A one hour drive out of the city is considered “upstate boondocks” and you can still buy a 300k home. Whereas that is barely into the middle suburbs for SF, where houses still start at $800k+.
NYC has higher density and excellent transit, things California refuses to do.
It’s still expensive but as you say it is possible to find reasonable housing that is commutable. Also not having to own a car frees up money to compensate a bit.
I would never expect hot metros to be as affordable as mid tier cities or rural areas, but when it’s extreme to the point of absurdity and there is no way to get relief something more than just regular market dynamics is happening. Markets like SF are only possible with organized restriction of supply, basically a cartel.
SF is already the second-most dense city in America. It’s dramatically more akin to NYC than Austin, LA, and so on. It’s just a lot smaller geographically.
The problem is that all of that density is delimited within a perfect 7x7 mile square. Outside of which is the worst of the worst when it comes to urban sprawl anywhere in the US. What really kills SF is just the complete inability to reasonably commute. Any form of housing anywhere within a 2 hour drive of the city is the most expensive in the country.
That's actually a fairly important detail. I live in the NYC metro (lived in the city itself for many years) and have visited SF several times. The "city" part of SF is just much, much smaller, and the suburban parts are much less dense.
NYC and its metro are still quite expensive and we have our own problems with NIMBYism driving housing costs up, but I'm always rather shocked at how much more expensive the SF metro is and how under-developed it is.
The evidence that falsifies this idea is the fact that policies considered “progressive” in America are just called “universal status quo” in almost all countries with higher human development indexes and lower inequality. In fact some of the fastest growing cities in America, like Austin and Denver, are also famously progressive (not that they are perfect). Seems doubtful even total hegemony by conservatives would fix SF’s problems in short order. The common sense solutions do not fall exclusively on one end of the spectrum or the other.
Centrists dont have a very good track record of actually accomplishing much more than lifting the foot off the accelerator a little bit. I think our problems are intractable right now under the current way we have our economy setup. But left wing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with the people we aim to please the most, so we see this rightward push instead.
San Francisco’s problems arent much different than the problems of the rest of America (and this can probably be extended to the entire “West”). Money and people with it run the show and are increasing their wealth unsustainably. Any other reasoning about the situation (“DSA” members in city hall) are excuses.
I agree the macroeconomics are important but to say that the architecture of local political power doesn’t matter is silly. Local elections have really direct consequences for social and economic policy in the city.
You linked to an editorial not a peer-reviewed paper. Moreover it’s from 2014-2018 and is therefore missing a more updated understanding of coronary plaque composition in runners. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11012899/
You should probably lace up your running shoes given that obesity and inactivity will for sure kill you.
These cuts are particularly nasty because federal spending on public trail maintenance is already razor thin. A ton of the Pacific Crest Trail and other scenic trails are already primarily maintained by volunteer groups doing work like log clearing, brush removal, and tread work. Trail users ourselves—hikers, mountain bikers, or trail runners—already put in hundreds of volunteer hours every season doing the basic trail work, and that's just regular seasonal maintenance. Significant work rebuilding parts of the Appalachian Trail and PCT after wildfires or hurricanes will likely not happen this year, or for years to come, unless volunteers fill in more gaps.
Let's also pool some money to help the sick pay for health care, the young pay for education and those affected by layoffs tackle the transition. Heck, we could even start our own government.
why not? all the socialists can start "the big socialist fund" and contribute part of their paychecks to this fund while the rest of us libertarians/right-wingers will contribute nothing. win/win right?
Are the libertarians and right wingers going to not use the services they don't want to pay for? Or receive the benefits? Are they going to leave the educated society and start their own somewhere else?
Such a nonprofit exists, it's called the federal government.
Maybe the super-rich can create their own nonprofit to fund commercial space tourism or whatever absurdity they've deemed so important that it needs spending elsewhere to be cut and diverted to them.
The government has proven to be extremely inefficient at managing our money. Look at how little they care about the trails. If we want actual money to go places we care about we have to do it ourselves.
We can hold non profits accountable in ways that we can't with the government. Accountability in government takes 4-6 years when we get an election cycle. If a non profit is mismanaging funds it takes 4-6 minutes for me to give my money to a different non profit.
At this point why don’t we just go back to the Articles of Confederation.
If we accept the federal government can’t do anything what are we paying taxes for?
Get rid of social security too, I’m not going to make it to whatever stupidly high age they raise retirement to.
I used to be a big government liberal, but the problem is eventually people you disagree with start running super government.
The federal government does an amazing number of things despite some inefficiencies. FEMA, FDA, EPA, SEC, FTC, FCC, national defense, interstate highways, border security (for better and worse), social security, Medicaid, Medicare, maintain embassies, foreign diplomacy, etc. As these things are gutted their absence or lack of capacity will be felt for decades.
I’m thinking these responsibilities can be shifted to the states. That’s defacto what’s going to happen as the federal government keeps cutting services.
If I want to live in a high tax state with a social safety net, cool. Others can move to Mississippi pay no taxes and brag about how they have a higher GPD than Spain ignoring the actual quality of life is much worse
Good for them I guess. I prefer a country where I don't have to move as the political winds change, just to maintain rights and benefits my ancestors fought for.
There's no such country. Authoritarianism is always around the corner, because the only thing that really prevents society from slipping into it is broad social consensus that it's undesirable, and you can't guarantee that it will remain long term. Constitutions etc fundamentally are just pieces of paper; they matter only to the extent people choose to believe they do.
I don't disagree with you, but it's the political reality of the situation being foisted upon us with violence by the far right. That was one of the reasons why I left Texas ASAP in late 2022 when I saw the winds changing.
The systems are cracking and breaking and I think the only outcome is going to be balkanization.
Fun fact: Canadian healthcare system, which generally tends to be the envy of US liberals, originated on provincial level and is still run primarily by the provinces.
There are many local, and not-so-local, groups that do this volunteer trail maintenance, and they could definitely use some monetary donations. There is the PCTA, mentioned up-thread ( pcta.org ). I volunteer for Trailkeepers of Oregon, based in Portland, and is active in many parts of the state. trailkeepersoforegon.org . There is also the Washington trails Association, and many more.
This feels like the trend of Americans having to start GoFundMe campaigns for surgeries and health care. (!) I mean, do what you feel you have to do in the urgent moment. But come on. What's the plan? This is not civilized.
You work towards reality tv where you vote on who lives and who dies. Used to be the domain of things like black mirror but the reality is coming far sooner than you think.
What would you suggest? I mean, we have a legitimate government that has been duly elected in what everyone broadly recognizes were free and fair elections. It just happens to be a government of crazies and grifters who our neighbors genuinely believe can save the country (whatever that means to them).
I’ve read some exchanges from an American friend with their other American friends on social media years ago. I noticed that many of the people were very against the idea of people they don’t think are deserving from benefiting from them. Even in abstract ways. For example people getting welfare who are actually scamming the system. Or having an outside benefit, like poor people getting free healthcare even if they can’t pay taxes. Trails would have been a good example for this group, “why am I paying for trails I don’t use?”.
I have a hypothesis that Americans are so scared of others benefitting from themselves that they miss that many, many more people are deserving and it makes for a better society. But they don’t see that and would rather punish the deserving and themselves, if it means the undeserving will hurt more. I think this thinking also bleeds into your social justice movements.
You don’t have to be communist to believe in maintaining public access to publicly-owned lands. Turns out National Parks, national forests, state parks, campgrounds, etc attract millions of people annually, and most of us are very glad that access is for everyone. As taxpayers we in fact pay for that public infrastructure, just like we pay for roads.
It’s really a weird effect. Like, how enjoyable even is a world where you’re rich, but surrounded by poor, uneducated, sick people, and all you can do is stay inside because the outside is caustic and ravaged?
Is it too much mental gymnastics that it’s a lot more interesting to talk to happy, sophisticated, educated people? To enjoy maintained public parks? To learn from the past in museums that present all kinds of viewpoints? To have a strong workforce that is confidently going to the doctor?
I’ll never get what’s so hard about things affecting other things, even if it doesn’t immediately yield a profit.
These people understand this. However they are not willing to have waste in the system. They want to help exactly who needs help and not scammers. If this cannot be done, then help no one.
I’m all for having better checks and stopping fraud. But not at the expense of helping no one. I’d rather keep a system running even if there is waste as long as it mostly works.
The problem is that the people who aren't contributing forget who is actually contributing and start tearing down the system because they have no clue how the world works anymore.
Given how it’s mostly states that take more from the federal government than they give, that are trying to destroy the federal government, my view on keeping the federal government has begun to soften. If Mississippi actively wants to shoot themselves in the foot, at some point, you just have to give up trying to disrupt their plan. Of course not everyone in Mississippi wants that, and many people who don’t will be seriously negatively affected, and won’t have the means to move, so they are why my position hasn’t changed yet.
The difference of course is that almost everyone uses or benefits from the economy of roads. Relatively very few people use trails and they use them for personal enjoyment.
You really can’t think of any ancillary benefits to the presence of accessible nature?
I feel like this sort of comment (from someone with 14k+ “karma” points) is a kind of DoS attack on their self-perceived opponents.
But nonetheless, here’s three benefits for all, regardless of usage:
- reduction in healthcare costs, both physical and mental
- increased tourism
- increased appreciation for environment which in turn loops back into this list from the top
Just focusing on health alone has wide ranging benefits. And if all you care about are tax revenues and GDP, a healthy, happy workforce goes quite a way to improving both.
I’m not going to list anymore because I got other things to do and think about. And this isn’t going to change your mind anyways.
I wonder if the parent to this comment is another "I don't use trails, so no one does!".
If you actually walk along a few trails on a regular cadence, it's clear that there are many different people - it's not just the same people every weekend.
The real difference is that people in cities pay huge amounts of tax to support the roads out to a relatively few houses in the country. Roads are the biggest outlay in every county I’ve lived in.
if we’re going to suggest silly stuff like that, let’s also suggest that cities stop subsidizing suburbs and their expansive infrastructure. sound good?
let’s take it a step further, let’s cut spending to anything that brings people joy! let’s all be crabs in a bucket together. convert public beaches to private beaches, public parks to private parks, make every school in the country a private school.
this will surely increase the well being of our society (sarcasm).
where does this crazy fallacy end? Taxes (and life) is not about min-maxing what benefits YOU personally. It’s about min-maxing your community and society. Kind of like how there is no “I” in team…
The other factor in Costa Rica is political stability and low military spending. After their civil war in 1949, they constitutionally abolished the military (Article 12) which not only prevents military juntas from emerging but also enables spending on healthcare in a low GDP country.
Elite marathon runners are in no way, shape, or form sprinting. It’s just that both are inconceivably fast to the average untrained person. Usain Bolt’s top foot speed was 44.72 km/h in the 100 meters. The fastest marathon was 20 km/h.
Later in the piece he notoriously declares that “welfare beneficiaries” (a well-known racist dog whistle about Black people) and letting women vote are both impediments to his libertarian dreams of dismantling democratic government.
I suspect these people are looking for any rationalization for their emotional desire for Portland to turn back the clock 10-20 years to being a slightly grungy and relatively inexpensive city. Like back in 2009 when I paid <$500 a month for a room in a shared single family home in a slightly dangerous outer NE neighborhood. Probably the most visible change since that period is the explosion of multistory development in SE and NE.
Unfortunately for them, an urban doom loop will not be kind to all the things that made Portland livable to begin with. The budget deficits looming city-wide are grim. On the housing front, our only hope is that the statewide ban on single family zoning plus urban growth boundaries will continue to structurally encourage density via infill.
Except Wikipedia is a non-profit and the content produced is under a free license. The founder of Wikipedia and the few employees are the least wealthy people to run a top 10 website.
Nobody contributes to Wikipedia or Stackoverflow because of license. Most contribute because humans like sharing information with other people. If Wikipedia's eyeballs are low, people wouldn't contribute.
But people knew that the content is easily accessible over internet and the usage would grow. If the content is only available in say one library in a random city, people wouldn't contribute for free.
It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.
There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
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