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I think they have both become hollow, soulless shells of homogenized garbage catering to yuppies. Gentrification has ruined so much of the culture and creativity that once made them both great, interesting places with unique characteristics not found in other places.
Unfortunately it's not limited to only these two cities, it's happening all over the world.
Welcome to the post-industrial world. It's just going to continue since high density cities don't really make things in the modern First World anymore. Thus you just have a professional class and a service class inhabiting these cities--and often subsidized poverty--liberal guilt results in paying for public housing and homeless shelters right down the street from expensive market rate housing. The post-World War II suburbanization of America made density a marketable novelty to future generations eager to pay top price to be able to walk to a lot of cool bars and restaurants.
The working class/middle class that used to survive off manufacturing and public service jobs now resides in the suburbs for the most part...
Welcome to the post-industrial world. It's just going to continue since high density cities don't really make things in the modern First World anymore. Thus you just have a professional class and a service class inhabiting these cities--and often subsidized poverty--liberal guilt results in paying for public housing and homeless shelters right down the street from expensive market rate housing. The post-World War II suburbanization of America made density a marketable novelty to future generations eager to pay top price to be able to walk to a lot of cool bars and restaurants.
The working class/middle class that used to survive off manufacturing and public service jobs now resides in the suburbs for the most part...
Sell your bodies! There's always a demand for that.
Or we can tax corporations and the wealthy just a bit better and do better funding and management of our social services and education.
I can't see how you can really compare these two cities. San Francisco is less than 1/10th the size of New York in terms of population. It's a silly comparison.
I can't see how you can really compare these two cities. San Francisco is less than 1/10th the size of New York in terms of population. It's a silly comparison.
You can't compare the degree of gentrification in each city?
Aside from the massive scale issue which warps pretty much all other factors in play, NYC also appears to be more development friendly (too friendly, probably) and amenable to out of place mid-rise and high-rise constructions all about. NYC also had a lot of vacant brownfield plots, some of them in fairly expensive parts of the city, due to how hard the city was hit in the 70s and 80s which allowed for a good deal of that new construction.
The vastly different scales makes comparing gentrification, a very much block by block sort of phenomenon, really hard to discuss so I understand having this mentioned. For one thing, the sheer size of NYC means there has to be some huge influxes sometimes to really change the character of a community--the sort of numbers that can change the character of entire smaller cities. NYC is also so large that gentrification sometimes results in people being pushed into another part of the city rather than out of the city entirely. The comparison can be pretty hard to make useful or insightful because of these differences in scale.
And you think the bolded doesn't happen in San Francisco? Ask all the people from the Mission that got pushed into Bayview.
Poverty rates have nothing to do with proportion of working class, IMO. The working class aren't poor.
Here's an example- Staten Island has far lower poverty rates than Manhattan.
Yet would you say that Manhattan is far more working class than Staten Island? That's absurd. Manhattan is far wealthier, with much, much higher mean income, but Staten Island has lower poverty because it doesn't have housing projects and affordable housing complexes.
Staten Island is a working class borough, and Manhattan is a rich borough. This is true even though Manhattan has a much higher proportion of residents under the federal poverty line.
If you look at the overall distribution of incomes in the two boroughs, you see Manhattan incomes weighted towards high wealth, and Staten Island incomes weighted in the middle. Manhattan is a borough of extremes, with the highest concentration of millionaires on earth, yet more housing project units than any other place in the U.S.
I agree with this.
I've never even been to SI and I know the bolded is wrong. The Stapleton Houses are still there and Stapleton's not the only low-income neighborhood in SI.
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