Who is San Francisco for, anyway?
Who is “the neighborhood” for?
Everyone that wants to live there.
Not the people who own a home there but live elsewhere.
Not the people who nominally live there, but spend all their time online, traveling, or commuting.
Not haters who don’t live there and never even want to.
The neighborhood, every neighborhood, is for everyone on the planet (or at least, until we make Open Borders a reality, everyone in the country) who wants to live in it.
Most urban neighborhoods in America today are too small. They don’t have enough homes, enough buildings, enough businesses, enough parks, enough schools, enough infrastructure, enough events, enough people compared to the number that want to live there.
That is why most urban neighborhoods in America today are not affordable.
Inconveniently, Matt Yglesias is not the technocrat of America. We haven’t let in One Billion Americans. We haven’t legalised the technology of stacking dwelling units on top of one another, so we have not let the supply of homes meet the demand.
Until every corner of America features rents more affordable than those of Tokyo, there will be uncomfortable questions of political economy regarding how to allocate the (unnecessarily) scare housing. Homes for whomst?
A neighborhood can’t be a commercial enterprise. It’s also not a non-profit, let alone a for-profit. It’s never any legal entity whatever, for the same reason that Soho, Manhattan is a fun place to vibe and the Mall of America simply isn’t:
City Campus dot Org is trying to contribute to a neigborhood between Hayes Valley, Alamo Square, Divisadero St, and Duboce Dog Park. They’ve successfully branded it “the neighborhood.”