It's an....odd article, though given its 1996 byline I suppose it felt like some sort of millenialist manifesto. Some parts of it make perfect sense to me, and some none at all.

I do empathize with his basic point about sprawl - I don't enjoy driving and neither does my wife, so the fact that San Francisco has fairly decent public transit and is generally walkable is a big plus. We'd have to make a lot of adjustments if I moved to a suburb, and Mrs. Browl (who grew up in SF) likes being near a high-density urban environment. It's an awesome city, and the rich architectural and cultural heritage play a big part in that. I also like that there are a lot of skyscrapers, because when I was growing up in Europe they were something I saw only in movies :-)

However, you're quite right that the economics of it don't make sense for most people. We've been looking for a house over the last year and staying inside the SF city limit comes at enormous cost. Besides the up-front expense, another city problem is the relatively poor quality of the available choices. San Francisco buildings are either old (expensive to maintain, quirky) or if new, very expensive and either tiny, badly constructed, or both. Coming from a slightly cooler area in Europe, it astonishes me that such a wealthy city is full of houses with such cheap windows and building materials. When my parents visited us earlier this year the very first thing my mother asked about on the way in from the airport was why so many of the houses looked like they were built out of cheap wood. Every place I've ever lived in Europe feels like a bomb shelter by comparison; indeed, visiting some friends who bought a 5-year old suburban house a couple of hours' drive from SF gives me major house envy. It's not going to win any design awards, but the house is large, well constructed, fairly efficient, and the community it's in is nice. The same money in SF will buy only an undersized firetrap in a chronically dysfunctional neighborhood - on paper it seems like a good investment, in reality anything but.

The sad fact is that land prices dominate all else here, and so most of us live in terrible buildings, which are shockingly bad value for money. I've been in some very, very expensive homes here that are still terrible; the people who built them would probably be shaking their heads at our failure to capitalize on a century of architectural and other knowledge in regard to most of our own dwelling conditions. We have some wonderful, historic civic architecture, and some fantastic commercial buildings (in a few places, both at once), but apart from a few genuinely unique/historical neighborhoods most of the city would be better torn down and rebuilt with a minimum of 6 floors, which might allow sensible use of the space at ground level. Sad to say, I think it's going to take a large earthquake to get everyone back on the same page and recalibrate perceptions about the long-term development of the city.

(It's not all gloom and doom - there's 2 or maybe 3 huge redevelopment projects taking place over the next decade, on Treasure Island, Hunter's Point, and maybe the old Port district. But for smaller development projects, the planning/review process is a nightmare beyond parody.)

It's weird; on the one hand I have a great quality of life, one which epitomizes a great deal of what is cool about a world city like San Francisco: if my 20 or 30 year old self took a time machine into the present, he/I would be amazed at how lucky I am. On the other hand, I keep daydreaming about moving to...Sacramento. It's cheap, it's pleasant, it's small enough to get around on foot or by bicycle. Immediate proximity to the fount/drain of state government also make for a more interesting environment than most people suspect.