Opinion: America's cities are unlivable. Blame wealthy liberals
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
> Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with ICE and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and NIMBYism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.
California's failure to address the housing crisis isn't an economic failure; it's a moral one. Moving to a high-productivity city has long been the best way for Americans to better their prospects and their childrens' future. That opportunity is still available to the handful of engineers who can move to SF and pull down $150k-200k right out of college, but it's increasingly a thing of the past. It's been dismantled by wealthy homeowners who don't want to share their cities with the wrong sort of people. The fact that many of them are self-described progressives and theoretically in favor of greater equality doesn't make this worse, but it certainly is ironic.
it’s not. opposition to building housing is squarely conservative—an impulse to keep things the same for selfish advantage rather than sharing prosperity with others.
with that said, these labels are merely that—they don’t have to define us in the ways that they seem to do. let’s throw off the labels and work on welcoming people into our neighborhoods. let’s build housing for them and let them enrich our lives.
but it’s hard. i have a neighbor who complains about being priced out of our neighborhood while at the same time complaining about the people coming in. *sigh~
And this issue is less about liberal/left versus conservative/right and more about simple human greed which respects no political label (and which in America is amplified by our culture of wealth and authority worship).
Greed and maintaining privilege are not confined to, or excluded from, any particular spot in the political landscape.
> Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.
But that doesn't really address my point. Also, I disagree with that statement on two counts. First, "Democrat" and "liberal" are not synonyms, and second, it's not a "particular shame of the left". It's a shame of the wealthy and privileged.
(Just to be clear, I'm not a Democrat)