. The rules have to change. No Painted Lady bay window or Arts and Crafts extended rafter is worth letting people die in the street.
The failures of the Bay Area go deeper than a left-right slap fight or a NIMBY outbreak. What's happening in San Francisco is an apotheosis of a grand, centurylong experiment in American urbanism. City governments have long understood that it makes sense to separate economically valuable but obnoxious things like factories or slaughterhouses from the places where people live.
Trouble was, all that zoning created two new problems. First, it divided the city even more sharply by race and class; planners actually drew lines on maps to separate rich from poor and whites from everyone else. And second, it catered to the needs of the growing number of suburbanites who were commuting back and forth to the city every day. Planners built tons of roads to move everybody around, and the parking for all those cars got in the way of all the other things that make a city good.
Whole Foods, the ultimate sign of gentrification, closed its flagship store in San Francisco in April to"ensure the safety" of its employees.Change happens. You build a city around certain needs and trends, and then a key industrial sector collapses, or a new generation wants to live and work in ways you never imagined. That's why cities have to shrug off the old ways and adapt to the present reality.
Still: People need to be able to move around their neighborhoods easily, without a car, to work and school and maybe a decent cup of coffee. Early research suggests that contrary to