April 20, 2016
San Francisco
Source: Bigstock
A more obscure third effect is that the higher the cost of living, the higher the prosperity level of your neighbors. Your slummier neighbors, with their alarming pit bulls, will eventually be driven out of town and replaced by Stanford grads.
In fact, this is a broad pattern. We see exactly the same incentives at work with elite colleges. While Arizona State and Florida International have added capacity for tens of thousands of additional undergraduates, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale have barely added any undergrads, even as demand soars. Stanford, for example, kept its class size virtually unchanged for over three decades despite having a 13-square-mile campus, the majority of it undeveloped open land.
Why? Collegiate NIMBYism drives up the scarcity value of alumni’s degrees, and pushes up the test scores of undergraduates, to the delight of faculty.
One obvious measure of how San Francisco’s restrictive policies have changed the population is how effective the progressive city has been at driving out its blacks. African-Americans made up 13.4 percent of San Francisco’s population in 1970, but only 6.1 percent in 2010.
Think back to what San Francisco was like in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was more than twice as black as today. Tom Wolfe’s hilarious 1970 book about all the ghetto scams subsidized by LBJ’s Great Society, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, depicts a very different San Francisco:
During the riot in Hunters Point, the mayor of San Francisco, John Shelley, went into Hunters Point with the only black member of the Board of Supervisors, and the brothers threw rocks at both of them. They sent in the middle-class black members of the Human Rights Commission, and the brothers laughed at them and called them Toms. Then they figured the leadership of the riot was “the gangs,” so they sent in the “ex-gang leaders” from groups like Youth for Service to make a “liaison with the key gang leaders.” What they didn”t know was that Hunters Point and a lot of ghettos were so disorganized, there weren”t even any “key gangs,” much less “key gang leaders,” in there. That riot finally just burnt itself out after five days, that was all.
There was even an antiwhite Black Muslim mass-murder ring, the Zebra killers, four of whom were convicted in 1976 of murdering at least fifteen. Even though one survivor of this racist rampage was future San Francisco mayor Art Agnos, who was shot twice in the back by a Death Angel, the Zebra horror is much less remembered these days than San Francisco’s less lethal Zodiac killings.
That’s pretty much all ancient history today, because, even if liberal San Franciscans won”t talk about it, their policies have been methodically effective at pushing out poor blacks.
Funny how that works.
