[galimaufry]

> you also don’t have the right to tell a community to change its character or compensation.

Sometimes you do though. There are real cases where the acid rain produced by City A falls entirely on City B. Surely in that case City B should be able to tell City A to change its character? Local government alone will never solve a problem like this.

The people who pay the price for SF's character are not people who live in SF, but people who commute a long way from outside the city limits, or who don't live in the Bay Area at all but would if they could. The SF government should care less about them than about current SF citizens, but their interests aren't zero. Which is why you need a higher level polity like the CA government to overrule the local government .