What was it the wise manicurist Madge said in the old TV ads for Palmolive dish soap? Ah yes: “You’re soaking in it.”
In San Francisco, we’re up to our pierced nipples, not just our knuckles, in everything Richard Florida describes in his new book The New Urban Crisis. Economic inequality. Segregation. NIMBYism. A disappearing middle class. Resentment. Florida calls it “winner-take-all urbanism.”
Among Florida’s so-called superstar cities, San Francisco stands out as having a “crisis of success.” I’m sure there are people out there living the SF dream one blissful yoga class at a time who have not noticed, but most of us either feel it personally or can’t avoid everyone else talking about it. You’re probably familiar with the broad outlines:
- The Bay Area has 11 of the 28 U.S. zip codes where median home prices top $2 million.
- The average San Francisco one-bedroom rents for well above $3,000 a month, by most accounts.
- The Bay Area’s income equality, in the top three among large U.S. metro areas by Florida’s measure, is akin to that of El Salvador.
- In 2016, South of Market and a few other neighborhoods attracted more venture capital than any other nation outside the U.S.
- In more than 25 percent of S.F. neighborhoods, the “least advantaged” are at risk of “substantial” displacement.
I’m cherry-picking a bit, in part because Crisis is packed with data. But suffice to say the myriad charts, maps, tables, and indexes won’t surprise anyone following our civic debates and challenges.
Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto and New York University and co-founder of City Lab. His 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class not only coined an enduring phrase — he’s good at that — but also celebrated what, in turn, has led to backlash on the left, and more significantly the right.
The creative class is not to blame for the rise of Donald Trump. Still, Crisis is a mea culpa of sorts. Florida notes how Creative Class and all the consulting he’s done since then to help cities capture the shiny technocratic future have steered him to a course correction.
“In little more than a decade, the revitalization of our cities and our urban areas that I had predicted was giving rise to rampant gentrification and unaffordability, driving deep wedges between affluent newcomers and struggling longtime residents,” he writes. “I found myself confronting the dark side of the urban revival I had once championed and celebrated.”
Some local progressives might take this as a welcome renunciation: The main celebrator of the urban tech elite is having a come-to-Peskin moment.
Not so fast. Florida’s new book is also a doubling down: “The way out of the New Urban Crisis [it’s surprising the capitalized phrase doesn’t come with a copyright sign] is more, not less, urbanism.”
He also warns against scapegoating the tech class, arguing that we need more startup culture, not less: “Of course, the migration of high-tech startups and tech workers into urban neighborhoods does put pressure on real estate, and this is especially the case in San Francisco,” but the tech sector is a net positive. This is partly because cities can use the higher tax revenues “to address and mitigate the problems that come with them. High tech doesn’t deaden cities; it increases their innovative capability considerably.”
Is the main celebrator of the urban tech elite having a come-to-Peskin moment? Not so fast.
American urban gentrification has mainly taken place since 2000, but San Francisco is among a few cities (including New York and Boston) where it began in the 1980s and continues apace. While gentrification is definitely a problem in Florida’s worldview, he hedges here and there. It is a “more a symptom of urban success” than a driver of it. In other words, when cities do good things, like encourage transit use and discourage sprawl, there are knock-on effects.
He acknowledges the “cultural erasure” that can turn black- and brown-majority neighborhoods into white ones, but cautions against “knee-jerk resistance to change” or hostility toward new urbanites. “The even more pressing problem” for Florida “is the much larger number of neighborhoods that [gentrification] bypasses entirely, those where racially concentrated poverty persists and is deepening.”
Does this general point about American cities miss the specifics of San Francisco? Yes and no. According to the latest census figures, the city’s African-American population has dropped from 13 percent in 1980 to roughly 6 percent today. The Latino population has plateaued at 15 percent after decades of growth.
Florida doesn’t dispute that the danger of displacement is high. For those who can resist displacement, however, the prospects of upward mobility in San Francisco’s metro area are among the best in the country.
The New Urban Crisis avoids focusing on any one city, let alone ours, but from the many mentions and data points Florida offers, we can glean a few things. San Francisco has a more concentrated core of the hyper-urbanism driving the divide Florida rues. In addition, so much of what our city strives for — political liberalism, economic growth, transit-friendly policies, an educated and creative populace — is correlated with economic inequality and income segregation, according to Florida. SF in many ways is farther along the path of the ideals, as well as the nightmares, of what 21st-century American urbanism represents.
So how to fix the cons without blunting the pros? Again, local progressives expecting a U-turn from Florida will be disappointed. He refuses to rail against the super-rich who, it seems, keep gobbling up houses and sky-rise condos as pieds-à-terre. (There aren’t enough to have a big effect, he says.) He doesn’t put much stake in the ground for artists who, as the well-known story goes, can no longer afford the city. (Big cities, he adds, have plenty of creative types.)
The big fix is to fight NIMBYism. Slow-growth or no-growth advocates, he argues, aren’t bravely and progressively fighting the excesses of capitalism; they are, in fact, indulging in offensive (and capitalist) “rent-seeking behavior,” which is econo-speak for making money without actually doing much. “If the housing and land-use restrictions that constrain development were eliminated, so that everyone who wanted to work in San Francisco could afford to live there, the city would see a 500 percent increase in jobs,” Florida writes.
He’s not a pell-mell development advocate. The “high-rise canyons” of Asian cities are soul-crushing. Total development deregulation creates places like Houston — relatively expensive, but also unequal and segregated. Mixed-use and walkable are Florida’s watchwords.
More density has a twin policy prescription: higher taxes and different taxes. Florida openly advocates policies that “redistribute wealth and income … the progressive tax systems and well-developed welfare states of the Nordic countries can actually generate growth.” He also calls for a switch from property taxes to land-value taxes, which encourage owners “to put that land to its most intensive use.” “In today’s cities, property owners who use their land for, say, undeveloped surface parking lots would be taxed at a very high rate,” he writes. “A small apartment building would be taxed at a lower rate, and a larger one at an even lower rate.”
A land-value tax would also serve to funnel revenues back to the cities and communities. Florida has other policy prescriptions as well, such as aggressive infrastructure investment. None is tailored to San Francisco and its particular issues per se, but it’s easier to imagine strong wealth redistribution going down more smoothly in San Francisco than in Houston.
Whether such measures are politically feasible here (and whether they actually would work) is a discussion for another day. But Florida does at least recognize our citizens’ realization that the problems won’t go away easily. He cites a 2014 Bloomberg survey in which two-thirds of respondents in San Francisco said techies were making the city less diverse. But 73 percent said tech companies were good for the city, More than half (56 percent) said the city should continue to nurture and attract them. “Many people, including many San Franciscans, have an intuitive feel for these contradictions,” according to Florida.
Would those survey numbers hold up today, after so many years of Google buses and Mission District rooftop lounges, evictions, and crazy rents? If not, what would San Francisco’s version of reactionary populism look like? Florida doesn’t address that either, but he begins his book with a description of a mayor who took office in one of the world’s most agreeable, cosmopolitan cities — Toronto — with what Florida calls “the most anti-urban” agenda he’s ever seen in a major city. That mayor, Rob Ford, ripped out bike lanes, planned a huge waterfront mall, and railed against the downtown elite. (He also had some substance-abuse problems.)
More than any statistic or piece of data Florida presents in Crisis, it’s this that perhaps resonates here in San Francisco: “If a city as progressive, diverse, and prosperous as Toronto could fall prey to a populist backlash, then it could happen anywhere.”
Alex Lash is editor in chief of The Frisc. His most recent urban crisis involves a misplaced Muni Fast Pass.
