[ktothemc]

Much of SF's urban planning and restrictionist attitude toward change is Jane Jacobs' work taken to its illogical extreme. (That's the book you just cited in [0]).

Jacobs led a reaction toward Modernist top-down planning practices and urban renewal, which eradicated vibrant and lively communities in places like her home neighborhood of West Village. She celebrated the chaos and the street ballet cultivated by a mix of building, business and resident types that organically layers in a complex ecosystem of behaviors over many, many decades. But today, many of the neighborhood she would have been proud to call home are exorbitantly expensive. What is West Village today, if not, another insanely expensive neighborhood gentrified many, many times over? What middle or lower-income family could call it home?

Likewise, the progressive left thought leadership here has taken Jacobs' ideas to such a protectionist extreme that it has exacerbated a pre-existing housing shortage over the past 40 years. Not more than a decade after her book was published, there were the Freeway and urban renewal resistance movements of the mid-1960s. They later evolved into a Skyscraper revolt of the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1970s, the entire city passed strict rezoning laws to preserve existing residential densities and architectural styles.

There's a decent history here: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/san_francisco.htm...

[avn2109]

I have always thought that the West Village is so gentrified today because it's essentially one-of-a-kind. I.e. Jane Jacobs' ideas were (almost) not implemented completely in any other neighborhood in America, so everyone in the country who wants to live like that is forced to compete on price for the half mile square around Christopher street or what have you. But I wouldn't say the vibrance and liveliness has been "eradicated;" it's still pretty peppy all day and most of the night.

And I'm not sure it's fair to characterize SF's current malaise as the endpoint of Jacobs' ideas. IIRC nowhere her oeuvre is there an opposition to new construction---in fact, just the opposite. For instance, near the bottom of page 216 of the 1961 edition [0], she is pretty unequivocal that she is in favor of new construction, just not all at one time and place.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=P_bPTgOoBYkC&lpg=PP1&dq=de...