Any progressive quality-focused community will, over time, be infiltrated by people who's only contribution is subvertering and sabotaging what has been built, usually in the name of egalitarianism or some other veil.
Suddenly the utopian vision looks pretty bleak.
Maybe they'll have service entrances and hidden car parks where they let the low-wage workers in and out. Conceal the fact that eco-utopia still relies on a whole lot of road traffic bringing people and goods in and out. Really, it'll be an 'eco-utopia theme park'.
You have to ask yourself whether SF would have been 'let' to devolve if the type of people who support projects like this instead were active in the governance of their own city.
You might also ask yourself whether the devolution of SF is entirely organic; to me, some of the decisions being made there seem rather like deliberate sabotage.
I find the hubris of these people that just want to run off and do their own thing a bit disturbing; it's the 'you're standing on the shoulders of giants yet think you are seeing the answer with your own eyes alone' thing.
By and large I find the type of people that support these projects to be alarmingly lacking in any sort of empathy.
In most cases, you lose lots of money in legal fees that you won't be able to claw back; in virtually all cases, you're slapped with injunctions and other roadblocks to development, which can be fatal and can take years to resolve; in all cases, you lose tremendous amounts of time, which could otherwise have been spent productively.
The utopian planners should have attempted their scheme somewhere on Nevis or a Bahaman island -- where the government would probably be cooperative rather than nakedly adversarial.