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OTOH while city _centers_ tend to be expensive, 'city living' in a sense doesn't have to be. US streetcar suburbs, or modern stuff in Japan and I think Europe: you can have cheap 'suburbs' that are still walkable with decent train service.

Many Americans would probably find that a "best of both worlds" if they ever got to experience it.

Benny was the good guy in rent

"We just have some concerns about whether this project will be TRULY affordable. We need to make sure we aren't putting profit over people"

I think about this a lot. So many people would do with looking at a chart about what happened to the population of all our cities during the 20th century with a little more rigor

Basically every American city has the postwar valley of cheap rent enabled by population loss to sprawl and nobody thinks critically about what was going on there.

It’s funny because SF is by far the least dramatic version of this. Probably the city least impacted by white flight. It’s weird neighborhood activists treat the place like it was ever New York in the 70’s.

*cough* public school districts were being desegregated. *cough*

Long time urban residents likely prefer those times to the "better" alternative of today. A poor person in a poor area doesn't feel out of place and their access to jobs and amenities allowed them far higher material comfort than their income would normally allow.

Yeah there's a reason hip cool people all lived in old warehouses converted into trendy lofts and arts spaces during these decades. It was a entirely temporary void left by the mass-relocation of industry from cities to exurbs that left behind countless cool old brick warehouses and factory.

I mean there was no quicker way to show that a character was a trendy yuppie than showing them living in some sort of luxury loft in a dirty brick industrial building that you need to take an old timey freight elevator to get up to.

Inverse is true with interest rates. Some people have barely any memory of regular rates above 5%. For the 80’s and 90’s today’s rate would be great.

This unquestioned assumption leads people to some very weird conclusions, like the idea that investment in formerly-redlined neighborhoods is bad because it changes the character of the community, or that fair housing efforts to open up the suburbs are harmful because they disperse voters of color.

They also seem to confuse ‘making it easier for people to move into and out of various neighborhoods’ with whatever the housing equivalent of forced busing in the 1970s would be.