They fall flat on their face because those who are best placed to counter-act the Bay Area's NIMBYism find it fashionable to market their political laziness as cynicism.
I think there is an additional, confounding element in the transient nature of the population in San Francisco.
Many, many people (rich, successful, young, etc.) are just here for a few years and have no intention of making long term investments in the community or becoming true stakeholders (by, for instance, raising their family here).
This makes it difficult to engage in any way, much less in messy, difficult social problems that are somewhat unique to San Francisco.
If transience is defined as the fraction of the population who moved in or out in 2015, San Francisco is a relatively non-transient city [1]. The five most transient cities in America by this metric are Provo, Ann Arbor, Gainesville, Boulder and Tempe. Transience does not appear, at first glance, to positively correlate with inequality.
[1] https://smartasset.com/mortgage/the-most-transient-cities-in...
And many of the long-term residents like it that way.
That's not to say that other countries aren't following in the same direction - for more classist segregation and isolation.
What they do instead is that they boost their PR image and invest it in the "next big thing" like driverless cars, augmented reality, etc., and these endeavours often fail in a few years time, effectively wasting the capital and disproportionally enriching the selected few.
i don't have access to their balance sheets and P&L statements, but nowadays i assume most of our well-respected thought-leaders, entertainers, politicians and other public figures are fundamentally fakes and frauds, continually perfecting their SJW cover stories.
and i think they do it as much to fool themselves as to fool the rest of us.
But liberalism (both in the modern American sense, and in the classical sense of which both modern American liberalism and mainstream modern American conservatism are subsets) is a system which overtly valorizes greed and the pursuit of personal gain in a facially neutral common market-based environment as both a deontological good and a practical engine of social progress. (Modern American liberalism differs in its expression of this from the modern conservative expression of classical liberalism in favoring modest and limited active correction of the impact of past deviations from the ideal of facial neutrality as a matter of Justice and restoration of the ideal neutral condition whereas the conservative expression of classical liberalism favors studious current facial neutrality.)
It’s pathetic really. Always say what you mean and mean what you say. It’s better to have a strong connection to a small niche of people, than a shallow connection to the general public.
Strong connections to a small group of people is exactly what the article is getting at. It's a members only wealth club effectively, much like what you find in New England. (If I'm being honest, it's EXACTLY like what we've had in New England since our inception.)
At any rate, these people already have extremely strong connections to their small group. What we're trying to do is get them to have some, at lest shallow, connections to the rest of us.
That's a radical notion for almost everyone, not just the rich! Surprisingly difficult in practice too.