[swalling]

Lumping centrists who want to solve intractable livability problems with rich right-wing libertarians is the road to failure. Not everyone who wants to stop throwing mountains of money at nonprofits and ineffectual, corrupt city officials is a Peter Thiel/Elon Musk fascist. The more that the left continues to force ideological purity tests like this, the more it will fail.

It also seems silly to move to a city internationally known for a specific influential industry and then lament that influence. If you hate entertainment industry people, don’t live in LA. If you hate commercial fishing, don’t live in Dutch Harbor. You’re at least 10-20 years late to fight tech being influential in SF.

There are a lot of places to live in this world. Vote with your feet. Conservatives certainly have, migrating en masse to Texas, Florida, Idaho. If you want to see what a place that has actually swung hard right looks like, it’s not SF where the city government is still captured wholly by Democrats and the Board of Supervisors has anti-development NIMBYs and members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

[api]

I have never been able to even see SF as a progressive place. It’s progressive in popular rhetoric and that’s it. The goal is to make its rich residents feel good about themselves, not to actually help anyone.

You can’t claim to be progressive if a starter home is a million dollars and if any attempt to change that is opposed at every level. Mostly because of real estate cost, but also other factors, SF has a very wide division between rich and poor. Having a family there on less than $200-$300k is almost unthinkable. I can’t even grasp how working class people live there at all.

In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.

Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities. If nothing is done about housing costs, I don’t think you can call yourself progressive. Anything positive that comes of any of your progressive policies is negated by the poverty and extreme inequality perpetuated by housing. Ultimately you are just running a housing cartel that distributes wealth to property owners.

Edit: it’s a major reason I’m not in Cali anymore. There are numerous reasons our family left but one was realizing that the state is a real estate cartel. Without an “exit event” you will never climb above real estate.

[intermerda]

> In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.

Ah the famously progressive Texas where women regularly die because of abortion ban, weed is illegal, and you can’t buy booze on a Sunday, and lawmakers want to overturn Obergefell to ban same sex marriage. Very progressive, much freedom.

> Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities.

Yes, housing costs are often high where people want to live.

[ramesh31]

NYC does not suffer this problem for some reason. Yes, of course there are prohibitively expensive neighborhoods in the trendiest areas. But if your goal is to live and work in the city, or to have a reasonable commute in, it is extremely doable on just about any salary, and you can actually reasonably expect to be able to afford a home in the suburbs some day. A one hour drive out of the city is considered “upstate boondocks” and you can still buy a 300k home. Whereas that is barely into the middle suburbs for SF, where houses still start at $800k+.

[BurningFrog]

Another interpretation is that SF is the empirical test result of what happens when progressives get the power.

[stanleykm]

Centrists dont have a very good track record of actually accomplishing much more than lifting the foot off the accelerator a little bit. I think our problems are intractable right now under the current way we have our economy setup. But left wing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with the people we aim to please the most, so we see this rightward push instead.

[swalling]

It’s unclear from your comment whether you’re talking about things specific to SF or you’re just speaking in generalities. Examples would help.