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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

Is the SF Bay Area the worst managed "successful" economic urban area in the world ?

It performs pretty badly on public transport, safety, affordability & sanitation. All its pros seem to exist despite the management, and not because of it. (Universities, Jobs, Weather, Nature)

I thought Greater Seattle was badly managed, but it has been funding light rail, missing middle-housing and recently started reversing the crime problem bit-by-bit. Bangalore might get a shoutout, but they did see unprecedented population explosion in a decade and are at least (badly) trying to build their way out of it now.

I'll take a moment to mention one of my favorite comments on HN

    "I call them PINO NOIRs: Progressive In Name Only, NIMBY-Only In Reality"

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Having a wildly successful city economy and becoming poorly managed is a causal relationship I think.

In regular cities you simply can’t afford to be wasteful. But San Francisco and Seattle have endless streams of easy money to burn.

It’s sort of like the oil curse. The governments of gulf states can afford to be uniquely terrible, in ways other governments cannot.

I suspect it's also part and parcel with having a city that is vastly "commuter" in some way - SF has about 800k population and estimates are that 250k commute into it each day; meaning that the "voting residents" make up only about 80% of the "actual city users".

This means there's a steady supply of "tax income" that is not from residents, which I bet exacerbates the problem until such time as companies move to the suburbs.

Some areas have "solved" this by moving much of the actual government to the county level, or by creating intercity agencies to handle things.

SF is a City and a County

I moved from Canada to what I thought was progressive SF bay area, not so much, very conservative on many issues.

The bay area is 'conservative' on issues that actual American conservatives are not very conservative on. For example, bay area people seem to hate building housing, whereas most red states are building like crazy.

I'm definitely a YIMBY but red states are coming from a place of much lower density. They will certainly get these problems as they get more density.

Which red state area is more dense than SF?

Conservatives say they love cars but they hate it when I drive my car*

You have to evaluate the context of the action. "not building stuff" and "building stuff" can both be conservative at different places or times.

* I drive on the sidewalk

That's because conservative areas are rural. When they become dense enough to have urban problems, they inevitably become liberal. So then we get to paint the urban problem as a liberal one, when in reality it is orthogonal.

what about NYC?

Can you give an example?

I think calling them "progressive in name only" is a bit of a "no-true-scotsman"

There is nothing progressive about literally stopping progress on housing affordability.

They could certainly make arguments about "urban beautification", "community involvement", and other "progressive" causes. Unless of course those arent true progressives.

I don't understand what definition of "progressive" you're using here, if you think that putting pretty names on oppressive policies constitutes "progressivism".

I don't think that either of these are examples of progressive politics in San Francisco. The city is not being beautified, it is being kept the same and not allowed to be beautified. All comparisons with the rest of the US would place San Francisco as more conservative on beautification than progressive.

Similarly, it's not the community that's involved in these decisions, it's a veto system where only those with abundant time and resources can be heard and have influence in the system, further cementing economic privilege rather than making it more equitable or democratic. For recent academic investigations of this, check out the book Neighborhood Defenders by Katherine Einstein et al:

https://www.politicsofhousing.com/neighborhood_defenders/

I don't really think any of those are the problem, they're just being used as weapons by people who are against housing affordability.

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