As we continue to add new contributors to Cities on a Hill, we're pleased to offer our first dispatch from consultant and blogger Bruce Abramson:

If you’re a regular reader of Cities on a Hill, you might recognize mine as a new voice.  Your Editor-in-Chief invited me to join as an occasional left-coast correspondent, and I was pleased to accept.  My usual blogospheric home is my own site, The Informationist, where most of my musings address technology law, the information economy, politics and foreign affairs.   Nevertheless, as a die-hard urbanite, I’m thrilled to contribute to a forum discussing America’s cities, where free-market theory meets socialist realities.

I hope that you’ll indulge me if my first entry is largely impressionistic, but having just completed my first year as a San Franciscan, I have numerous impressions to share.  Despite the city’s reputation for, shall we say, panache, I thought that I’d arrived prepared to digest whatever flair in urban governance I might find.  After all, I’ve lived through Abe Beame’s fiscal wizardry in NY, Daryl Gates’s community outreach policing in LA, and Marion Barry’s excellent stewardship of our nation’s capitol.  I was wrong.  San Francisco is in a league by itself.
 
No sooner had I arrived than Gerardo Sandoval, one of our Supervisors, made national headlines.  It seems that Diane Feinstein arranged to bring the historic Iowa battleship of WW II fame to San Francisco, and to convert it into a museum.  The Board of Supervisors rejected the plan overwhelmingly.  Sandoval went on Hannity & Colmes to explain the decision:
 

HANNITY: That symbol of war that beat back the forces of fascism in imperial Japan and Nazism, that's really a symbol of peace.  Why would you see it as a symbol of war when it defended liberty and freedom?
SANDOVAL: Well, it did do that. But also, it's a warship and it's got guns on it. It fires things. You know, you can't deny what it is.

 
It’s nice to be able to root for Sean Hannity every now and then.  But it got better.  Colmes joined the decision lobbing softballs (or so he thought):
 

ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: Should we not have military?
SANDOVAL: I don't think we should have a military. Absolutely.
COLMES: We shouldn't have a military? Wait a minute. Hold on. The United States should not have a military?
SANDOVAL: What good has it done for us in the last five years? That's right. What good has it done us...
. . .
COLMES: But to say that we shouldn't have a military is absolutely absurd. It's incredible. That's a ridiculous fringe point of view.
. . .
SANDOVAL: If you're saying that we don't have a right to defend ourselves that's different from we shouldn't have a military.
COLMES: What do you want to defend ourselves — what do you want to defend ourselves with?
SANDOVAL: Well, you got cops. It's called the Coast Guard. There's lots of things different.
COLMES: You want to send cops to defend our shores if we're attacked? You want to send cops overseas if we're attacked? Cops?

 
The SFPD, of course, doesn’t really have the budget to undertake this new challenge.  At the moment, they’ve pretty much got their hands full with, oh, policing.  Perhaps our most recent high-profile unsolved crime involved the New Year’s Eve attack, at a crowded party, of the members of the Yale Glee Club who had recently sung the Star-Spangled Banner. Two former police officers owned the home hosting the party.  Clues, apparently, are still rolling in.
 
Meanwhile, our Board of Supervisors continued its foray into national affairs by passing a resolution last March asking the city’s congressional delegation (which included Nancy Pelosi) to impeach President Bush.  In a rare display of magnanimity, they later decided to share the glory of this bold stance with the citizenry.  They put an impeachment motion on the November ballot; it passed with about 60% of the votes.
 
Gerry Sandoval, it turns out, has a lot of company on the Board of Supervisors.  In the brief time that I have been here, I’ve seen them require developers to allocate fifteen percent of all new housing to below market rate units and require that the Mayor appear before the Board for questioning, along the lines of the PM’s appearances before the British Parliament.  They have also proposed congestion pricing, or tolls to drive downtown.
 
Some of these ideas might not sound entirely wacky—until you begin to tally them up.  We’ve got a city with a housing shortage that deters development—particularly in the parts of town that are so dilapidated that vacant lots actually exist.  The city prohibits big-box stores to protect mom-and-pop-boutiques, then makes it so expensive to park and to drive that no one will frequent these boutiques (which, by the way, don’t exist in the dilapidated parts of town that developers would like to rescue).  I attended a debate between the two primary candidates for an open Assembly seat; both announced that they favored rent control because it had helped them personally when they were students.  (A mathematical absurdity if you understand what rent control means to young renters).
 
I could go on.  In a city whose politics pits the Greens on the left against the Social Democrats on the right, our Mayor’s priorities of housing and feeding the homeless, developing new housing, and extending marital rights to the Gay community make him the darling of the far right.
 
So there are some highlights from my first year in the City by the Bay—which, despite it all, remains beautiful, fun, and sunny in February (at least today).  And there is my postcard from the edge of America—literally, dangling off the end here just waiting for one good tremor.