Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco

[David Morris]

On Tuesday, March 5, 2013, Phillip Greenlief wrote:

> look, it's already too late - SF has been gentrified. the alarm should
> have gone off 20 years ago. i don't care what the buildings look like, the
> majority of art spaces pre-2000 are gone. period. the buildings don't even
> exist anymore. a lot of small, family run businesses have disappeared -
> which includes every kind of retail or food service. there are zoning laws
> that keep certain kinds of businesses out of SF (there is a limit, for
> example, on how many fast food restaurants can operate in SF), but the
> independent shops are disappearing quickly, and have been over the past 15
> years.
>

SF isn't too late, if NIBYs don't rule.

Too late for Bohemia? Yes.  Too late for a populace beyond the 3%?  Yes,
unless government steps in, and not just for the poor.  SF has lots of 2 &
3 story residential areas that could use more density.  And the hills of SF
allow for view corridor over everything.

But remember NYC.  Now mostly for the very right, but politics and old
density keep certain hoods vital.  Old urbanism still rules in the hoods of
NYC.

Montreal might be an ideal City Model, with dense nodes situated along very
good train/transit lines.

Politics rule, and are local. And US urban design is mostly non-existent.
 But Green urbanism is Old-City, plus some towers.

Little known fact: Florence, a small fortressed walled city, very dense
with very wealthy merchant-kings palazzos, enacted a law to eliminate most
of the residential personal watchtowers because they were urban kudzu.
 Moral:  limit tower density.  A simple thing. Many ways to do so.

Real good urbanism has been the rule in Yurrup for centuries.  US urbanism
is OK in the Original Colonies, but the developments to the West were Wild,
even the Near West.  Boomtown, if all goes well.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130305/2bc54347/attachment.html>