[api]

I was visiting SF for business a while back and while I was going for a walk the following kind of just hit me:

"San Francisco is someone else's house."

I can't explain exactly what prompted it, but I got the sense that there exists in SF a deeply embedded property-owning class that owns the city. The city is theirs. If you are not one of them, you are only visiting. The city will never truly be your home. It's possible to buy into this class, but the cost of doing so is intentionally kept so high that it's unreachable to all but the extremely wealthy.

Has the city always been like this? I don't know, but I wonder if maybe it has... if the various waves of hippies, post-hippies, ravers, hackers, and tech bros weren't just visitors permitted to crash on the couch for a little while.

There are many other cities all over this country where you are permitted to become a true resident, often for a very sane price. I don't get this feeling in most other cities.

[scottlamb]

> Has the city always been like this? I don't know, but I wonder if maybe it has..

It was like this during the gold rush of 1849. [0] Maybe the whole time since.

[0] "mining the miners" https://stlukesexpandingwest.weebly.com/mining-the-miners.ht...

[ashtonkem]

There’s a reason why I call the property owning class in coastal CA neofeudal. The property tax cuts for property passed down in the family doesn’t help.

[ojilles]

Funny, I had the same thought walking through Manhattan.

[api]

The same is probably true there, at least for the central high-priced parts of the New York metro.