If the San Francisco Planning Commission had been in charge of planning for the city of Rome in 753 B.C, Rome today would not be the magnificent city it is, but would be a simple farming village with some Etruscan temples as points of interest. The SFPC seems to think that ‘planning’ means frozen in time. For an example I point to the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, it looks little different today than it looked 50 years ago. Only minutes from downtown San Francisco by an underground subway, in a growing city this neighborhood should have the highest housing density possible, both for the convenience of the people and the conservation of resources. But that would interfere with the plans of the hoity-toity lah-di-dah snooty snoots who inhabit the neighborhood and find it convenient to be so close to downtown and yet be able to live in their palatial sissy boy Victorian mansions. The state of the Castro neighborhood attests to the power of using ‘historic preservation’ as a tool in excluding lower and middle income people from a neighborhood. To defeat the Castro sissy boys in their palatial mansions is going to be a long, hard battle and will probably take the involvement of regional and state authorities. But it is a fight that I am willing to continue.
