San Francisco

You Can't Please Everyone

In San Francisco's famously downtrodden Tenderloin district, the Wall Street Journal reports [subscribers only link] that some longtime area activists have responded to a plan for planting 400 trees with a wanted poster aimed at the "brutal gentrification squad" and its "sanitized vision for the future."

These and other equally out-there quotes from the group Gay Shame—

Lower Polk Neighbors is allegedly an organization striving for neighborhood “beautification” and “cleanliness”, but is actually a pro-gentrification attack squad that works with the police to rid neighborhood streets and businesses of “undesirables,” i.e. hookers, hustlers, drug addicts, homeless people, trannies, needle exchange services, working class queers and other social deviants. Lower Polk Neighbors claims to be open to all, but primarily consists of wealthy property and business owners, slumlords, developers, bureaucrats, robber barons, police officers and vigilante social purists.

—would just be filed away under theater of the absurd, if not for Chris Daly, the district's representative on the city's Board of Supervisors, backing up the play: "Yes, people are addicted to drugs and, yes, there's homelessness [but] why shouldn't these people have a place of their own?"

Monday Quick Hits—Proximity for Better or Worse

—Congrats to the Tigers for the win last night, but the World Series won't help Detroit very much, and the Super Bowl back in February didn't either.

—More coming this week on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's purchase of the Chicago Board of Trade to create the world's biggest exchange.

—Old fashioned physical proximity still matters in Silicon Valley, while Wall Street looks to Pennsylvania to back up, spread out and spread risk. (More at WallStreetWest.org).

—Speaking of spread-out New York, Brookings finds exurbia ascendant north of the city.

—On the left coast, Witold Rybczynski looks at San Francisco and when bad architecture happens to good cities.

—Back East, The Boston Globe is on track for its first unprofitable year ever, and Julia Vitullo-Martin compares Philadelphia to Boston and finds Philly's culture wanting. (Of course Boston being THE university town, with a built-in high tech sector as such, also helps).

—And Harry Siegel in the New York Post on how Governor Pataki and his fellow incumbocrats hollowed out New York's GOP.