Anyone can move to SF, have their pal put their name on the electricity bill go down to city hall get a card and start leaching.

-marc

Creating residency requirements for services is pretty standard, Hawaii has been doing it for years. Perhaps you mean on the federal end?

The Supreme Court says that such an approach violates the right to free travel and is unconstitutional.

There is a long history involved in battles between downtown and neighborhood alliances that is not best understood using FoxNEWS dualisms.

Instead of challenging people's ideologies or motives, or your perceptions of them, it is more useful to criticize instances of their conduct.

Progressives = bad, blah, blah, blah, just goes out the other year.

We've just endured 30 years of unprecedented transfer of wealth upwards. There is nothing wrong with reversing that.

-marc

Still, I would be all for limiting the services of the SF social state to people who have lived here for some length of time and have contributed somehow to the city.

After 40 years of gentrification social policy? What does that mean? The city offer's more in services than it ever has, the city employ's more people in these fields than it ever has and what we have to show for it is a demand for more, even in "good times." Living in the city of SF isn't an entitlement by the way.

Considering the development fees and the property taxes paid by condos and how the only services they get via utilities only one of which is the SFPUC, I seriously doubt they are a net loss, or even come near breaking even. If they do break even then they are paying for in taxes and what they use, unlike the cities lifestyle bums.

Also the relative wealth argument is just your sense of entitlement, because people who live in the city did something with their lives they should not be punished to serve the agenda of sub market rate condo owners like Chris Daly. "I got over so as to make sure you can't"

Somehow liberalism turned into just giving the loudest shouter the most stuff. Liberalism's anti-statism turned into taking the state over and forcing it onto people, the old liberalism used to have a expectation of personal responsibility from those collecting from the government.

The numbers on condo property taxes funding city services just don't pencil out to a net gain. They don't pay for their own impacts on infrastructure and city services and given their relative wealth, will probably drain services from the "poor and needy."

-marc

It would seem the most anti-development types are also the ones who expect the city to fork over in services to the; "poor and needy"... and bike lanes, neighborhood improvements, high city employee wages and benefits, and everything else the shouting progressives demand.

If the city was really broke I wouldn't mind the tore up streets, but if the DA can run some make work program out of her office and we can re-strip the streets for bike nuts and mayor can order the endless silly department audits for such idiocy as community gardens... well the city isn't broke, its just throwing good money after bad.

Oddly the condo owners like Daly move to the city because of the "live and let live" attitude and then because they have born a again Christian like sense of self awareness, they jamb their authoritarian agenda down our throats.

I agree that progressives are part of the development problem. My guess is that they're shown a political zapruder film of their own by the powers that be and asked afterwards, "any questions?" That, or promised lucrative gigs once termed out. Jake McGoldrick has only five months left in his post-employment restriction period. My guess is that he ends up as a governmental relations person for a residential developer next year.

I bet that Rob hates Mardi Gras too.

-marc

Yes, the sense of entitlement is extraordinary, which is best exemplified by Critical Mass. How did San Francisco get by before the advent of the bike people? And ironically it's our progressive leadership that is accelerating the gentrification of SF, with projects like the luxury highrise condos on Rincon Hill (Daly and Peskin), the Market/Octavia Plan (Mirkarimi), and allowing UC to hijack the old extension property (Mirkarimi again). The anti-car jihad---making it unnecessarily difficult and expensive to drive in the city---has also made it hard for middleclass people to remain in SF, since those who have children in particular need cars for their daily rounds.

On this we agree. The problem is that the people who can afford to move here now are amongst the most entitled brats to walk the surface of the planet, all take, no give.

-marc

You should just stick to mocking the cities bike self righteous self centered intolerant bike loons for their crazy antics.

That post by za, pure mental illness. Those are the people that are a problem in this city of entitled whiners, not the average bike rider who actually believes in sharing the road.

It's remarkable that you bike people are complaining about Newsom, who has given you everything you've asked for, except for his veto of the first move to close the park to autos on Saturdays. But he then engineered the compromise that got it done anyhow, in spite of the already expressed will of the voters. He supported the city's attempt to illegally push the Bicycle Plan through the process. What more could he have possibly done to support your dangerous hobby?

Mr Anderson's analysis is very astute, when the entitled bike riders don't get their way they freak out. Once upon a time my fellow bike riders just wanted to share the road, now riding a bike is a statement of their superior values.

I would guess that the author of this ridiculous freak out gets in a lather over born again Christians who tantrum in the same way.

The bike nuts lost their "healthy Saturday" before the voters twice, TWICE, so they went crying to the board of losers and got their way, while I'm sure complaining about Bush's secret oil deals, or some other crazy right wing scheme.

Carlsson and the bike people preferred the park the way it was before the garage was built---gridlocked with people in cars looking for a place to park---so that they could weave in and out of the perpetual traffic jam on their bikes, thus demonstrating the superiority of their "mode" of transportation.

Once the decisions were made to keep the de Young and the Academy of Sciences in the park, the garage was essential to handle the crowds. And the ballot measure authorizing the garage included an important provision that's never mentioned by the bike people---guaranteeing access to the park for everyone, including families, old people, and handicapped people. The garage does in fact allow easier access to that part of the park to everyone.

Weird that Carlsson even mentions the Healthy Saturdays issue. In fact the SFBC had to compromise---a compromise facilitated by Newsom and his staff---because they understood that if it went to the ballot they would probably lose, as they did on the issue twice on the same ballot in 2000. This is the unpleasant reality behind all the huffing and puffing by the bike people: they really aren't terribly popular in the city, which is why the SFBC backed down on their threat to put the Bicycle Plan on the ballot a few years ago.

So far this year, my luscious tomato garden has suffered 100% crop loss to varmints in my .0001 acre spread in the North Mission. Newsom's Potemkin garden in Civic Center, within spitting distance of the Tenderloin, apparently did not suffer crop losses due to varmints even though the population density is 75K/mi2 and sanitary conditions in the TL are, shall we say, favorable to vermin and varmints.

Sure, I could use poison for the rats or raccoons, but that would probably poison whatever raptors might feast on the varmints, and it would violate San Francisco's integrated pest management program that I read about in a Newsom press release several years ago. Here's a picture of a Cooper's Hawk that lived in our interior courtyard last year, taking a big ole dump while using its talons to squeeze the life out of a pigeon:

http://cybre.net/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=113392&g2_imageViewsIndex=1

Unfortunately, our neighbors cut down the avocado tree where it nested and I've seen no raptors since.

But kicking Newsom is easy. When we raise our own political power through organizing and successfully contesting competitive elections, the ball is now in our court to set our policy agenda. When we fumble, we own that or else we deny it and are condemned to repeat it.

When we misplay our hand in ways that run counter to our own stated policy goals, such as going shortsighted Ahab on "Healthy Saturdays" which neutralized McGoldrick as an ally against gentrifying development in the Mission and which apparently forces automobiles onto the "pedestrian oasis" at the Concourse, or when we sign onto a sliver plaza which bisects a bicycle route and creates dangerous conditions, we're actually one-upping Newsom on the stupidity scale.

I don't not get paid to do that.

"Healthy Saturdays" was more about Ted and Leah saving face after getting whipped by light weight Newsom repeatedly, and responding by irrationally quadrupling down on road closure in GGP (while ignoring most every other bicycle related policy initiative) than it was about thinking through a sustainable, equitable policy.

To recap: Concourse = pedestrian oasis - pedestrians + cars. 17th Street = pedestrian plaza - bike route. And people say that I don't play nice with others.

Hate to quote Jesus, but "physician, heal thyself!"

-marc

Regarding the rich - they will always wield more direct influence, but the rest of us can channel their ambitions to get a better (fair?) share. All the response development of the GGPC is largely the result of failing to adequately engage the rest of the communities that use that space. It's tragic that MUNI never gets enough bus capacity to support anything like the numbers of people who already use GGPark, let alone those who want to. This is exactly the sort of deliberate underinvestment that gives us this half-assed logistics for this real gem in GGPark...to say nothing of the confusing and unrealistic bikelanes in GGPC. I suppose we can only be grateful the error wasn't entirely repeated in the Presidio (yet).

They'll give us a bike lane, one lane for autos, traffic calming, and some greenery. Well, maybe the next mayor might.