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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

I fully expect San Francisco stores to disappear entirely and replaced with 1-hour delivery services. Hopefully we can replace most of this retail space with more housing (unlikely).

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Sounds like exactly the dystopia that the United States has been aiming for. But what’s the end game?

The retail space will become housing, but it won’t be affordable.

Not US but SF and other progressive cities.

What is “progressive” about SF? It’s just another neoliberal port city. There’s nothing even slightly progressive about it.

SF is antithetical to neoliberalism. It’s a NIMBY central.

Neoliberals want unrestricted zoning, land value tax, and freedom of enterprise. SF is all about blocking new housing and punishing corporations.

Replace punishing corporations with rewarding property owners.

My wild guess is City of London. Massive amounts of office space. Like 500 housing spaces, no shops, no kids, quite a few restaurants and bars to cater to the workers.

Sounds like hell to me but to each their own.

Not sure where you got that impression from, London has great shopping districts and tons of huge street markets. Better than most US cities.

London and city of London are different. Agree, London is great. City of London was pretty sparse when I visited. Perhaps things have changed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

Ah, I understand. I do remember that area feeling very off-putting, lots of people in suits and not much else. If the whole of SF turns into that it would be pretty terrible.

At a certain point, if the housing is unaffordable, and there's no retail, why would you want to live there?

I really don’t see why it’s a dystopia. Stores are a means to access logistics services for particular classes of goods. Like that’s their whole purpose, they’re a community cache. If people like the milkman system better for most things I see that at worst a neutral change.

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