The Atlantic has apiece out this week documenting how the most expensive US cities are also the most liberal. Turns out it’s a national problem, and San Francisco is not alone. (We’re just the national champs of progressive unaffordability.)
Leaving aside the question of how you might define or quantify liberalism, the article makes several good points. Liberal cities tend to be extremely regulated, with high costs of doing business, historic districts whose character can’t be altered, and people who think it’s eco-conscious to fight all new development.
One thing that gets left out is the question of density. San Francisco (like New York, Boston, Seattle and other expensive, liberal cities) is also dense, while most affordable cities are not. In fact, the more affordable (and more conservative) places tend to be more like suburbs with city-size populations. The Economistcalled SF America’s most liberal city with more than 250,000 residents, with Oakland at number four – but the most conservative is Mesa, Arizona, which is essentially a big, low-density 'burb of Phoenix.
In fact, geography might play the strongest role in all of this. In spite of being surrounded by water on three sides and built-up suburbs on the fourth, San Francisco has gained more than 30,000 residents since the 2010 census. Yet the similarly populous (and, not coincidentally, rather liberal) Austin, Texas, gained far more, because Austin has five directions to grow: north, south, east, west, and up.
Similarly, if you compare the shape of the urbanized Bay Area to, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, you’ll see that one is a bizarre shape, hemmed in by coastlines and mountains, while the other is roughly circular (and on flat terrain). Both have populations of around seven million, but only Dallas has ample room to keep growing. Meanwhile, SF’s endless housing wars go on. The latest battle? A new building in the Castro that will feature only nine units. Nine.
So you don’t have to be a conservative Republican to detect a bit of rot in San Francisco’s vaunted liberalism. However much we claim to care about inequality, one seemingly ironclad truth seems to govern everything: most people with the money to buy an expensive home also want to keep things exactly the way they are.
[Viathe Atlantic; photo via Thinkstock]