This is a story about the murder of a great American city. It's a tale about how political shortsightedness, naked greed and the loss of civic will is conspiring to destroy what was, until fairly recently, the most delightfully eclectic, iconoclastic city in the lower forty-eight. I refer here to San Francisco. My hometown. Wired | SFGate | Transbay Transit Center
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althought i appreciate his passion for a city that is so much about street scale and urban texture, i find the article a bit heavy handed on its pessimism...
maybe it will be the catalyst for change, but i think what makes san francisco is the culture and the people and how they adapt (or don't); maybe it's because i live in detroit, and don't see a new world class downtown development as a sign of death...
i agree more or less with your first point...but this Wired column is given the title "the Luddite" and uses this sort of voice, for better or worse.
"Manhattan of the West"
Ha, not even another 100 years! San Francisco can add 20 more Empires State replica is still NOT even close to be Manhattan. Not even Shanghai.
C'mon, get Real.
And it is "the greed and self interests" of many San Franciscans themselves, especially the "more native" ones-those who migrated there from other places and displaced the real natives in the 70's and 80's- (not the corporate greed the article seems to infer) such that all the entire city can't expand on their existing housing stock by 1 story.
Corporate greed and globalization may arguably exacerbating Old San Francisco, but self-serving, myopic people like the Luddite have loved that city to death already. Equally guilty, I say.
the luddite should gedout ... one less reactionary, change-phobic, progressive-gone-conservative, lame-ass nimby
though the Transbay towers do leave much to be desired (SOM being the lesser of three evils), especially compared to how cool they could/should have been...
San Francisco prides itself on being at the forefront of the green movement, so I can't say I'm too surprised to see that the "new" SF is scaring away all of the "old" San Franciscans like this guy. There will be a noticable drop in the air temperature once he hits the road.
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