But I don't think anyone has said better what a city could be than Joseph Mitchell in Up in the Old Hotel, his wonderful book of essays on New York City's eccentrics. It suggested that New York had been a version of paradise, in that it accommodated everyone. A city can be an ideal, the place where everybody belongs, where you can become anything, where the resources of culture and ideas are piled up to be raided, where the unknown is always sending you invitations. The changes in San Francisco are undermining all of this. Still, when you tell an ambitious, hardworking Web developer that she's what's wrong with San Francisco, she's naturally defensive.
Gentrification is like air pollution.
It's not any single car, but the cumulative effect of many drivers that makes little kids have asthma attacks and the sky turn brown. But if that dotcommer displaced an artist or a family, she's a part of it. If your arrival destroys what was there before, that's your responsibility. I would never advocate the destruction of private property. Most of all, we need to admit we have a housing crisis in this country that dwarfs the health-care crisis.