Cities

The education story of yesterday ("the houses are different") was flippant in regard to middle class attitudes towards public education. These problems are complex and are linked to all kinds of historic socio-economic factors and a current political system that purposefully undermines public education. People run to avoid the underclass, but they depend on them in capitalist societies to do all the dirty little jobs that no one wants to do. View the HBO series Rome for a historical perspective. The great wealth of Rome? Supposedly 70% of Rome consisted of slaves. Yet despite that universal attitude in cities, what makes San Francisco so vibrant (if you have money) and others so stagnant? I tried to figure out what makes San Francisco unique. Why all the hills, when other cities that had hills were leveled-Seattle as an example. Even Manhattan was hilly. I asked a local elder and she said that city codes were more stringent (there were both a city and county overlap in this regard) and this restricted land development. Also, the earthquakes required certain building codes that worked against large scale development. Maybe once you got deeper into the twentieth century and people accumulated sufficient wealth in so many of the beautiful old houses, they could afford to reject offers to sell out to commercial interests. Joel Kotkin the author of "Cities, A Global History," was on Leonard Lopate's show today. He mentioned that San Francisco was unique in that it had one of the largest rentier classes, i.e. people wealthy enough to live off there interest. Therefore, San Francisco doesn't have to depend on local business as a tax base. Here's a slide show consisting of neighborhood descriptions, from the SF Examiner, alternating with Google Map views. "Whatever happened to predictibility?"