David Talbot's false choice
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My book club recently read David Talbot’s Season of the Witch which is about the transformation of San Francisco in the 1970s, from the perspective of 2012. Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I couldn’t help noting this passage:
The housing battles of the 1970s were the crucible for an entire generation of new activists in San Francisco. The city was a finite peninsula of competing dreams and ambitions. Was it to become a Manhattan of the West, whose office towers and high-rise apartment buildings over-shadowed everything else, or remain an affordable, human-scale city of light nestled into the hills and hollows?
In the end, San Francisco chose neither. Its “human-scale” masks a terrible auto dependency and inadequate public transportation system, while the failure to build up (even a little – Paris very human-scale but over three times as dense) has turned the city into an unaffordable playground for the wealthy and young.