likemycurryhot wrote:It has close to a million residents and is the hub of the Bay Area. It’s also, as you mentioned, highly dense and very urban. By population it’s one of the 15 biggest cities in the US.
The biggest factor in the displacement of low-income folks in the US and globally has been the rise of the new urbanism movement which has reversed the trend of white flight to the suburbs. It’s primarily fed by the real estate industry now feasting on urban areas that it sucked value out of and is now inflating. In places like SF the tech industry has been allowed and even incentivized to come and basically take over the town. It’s well compensated employees have displaced a lot of the existing population. The demographics of that industry are disproportionately white and Asian and so you see that reflected in the population changes. SF has always had a large Asian population, BTW.
I’m a big fan of cities but I also believe that local government should manage economic growth so that it benefits existing residents and is sustainable over time.
Sorry to get too political but I do wish large corporations like the Warriors were more responsible and sensitive towards the communities that they operate within. In this case I think making ticket prices more accessible would make for a better product (a more energized arena) and also be a thoughtful PR move.
SF has always had a large asian community, but not 35%. And any city where parking for a day EASILY exceeds $50 everything is going to be expensive. I don't have a problem with corporations going where they can make the most money. I'm sure they will have a lot of promotions that amount to hundreds of cheap tickets a game, they just won't likely be at the gate. The Santa Cruz Warriors are still a cheap ticket.
City leaders are tasked with improving the city, improving the city makes it more desirable to live in, more desirable cities get wealthier people moving in, those wealthy people have more money to spend so the services around them upscale to serve them, that leads to rent getting more expensive and some low end businesses choosing to move on rather than continue in a market that has moved away from them, rinse and repeat. Even cities where there is extreme efforts to "maintain the existing residents" like Berkeley eventually fail. It's just too expensive to live in the bay area and be poor anymore. Heck, gas is a regular measure of where the market in an area really is ... I did a 4500 mile road trip and the DIFFERENCE from the highest gas I saw in the bay to the cheapest gas I saw was $2.91. It was $2.91 PER gallon cheaper to get gas in the middle of the country than the most expensive place I saw in the bay area.
Leadership in CA has made it progressively one of the most expensive and difficult places to live, and that is driving out middle class people too, and they are being replaced by wealthier people.