RESCUE Muni listserv - [Fwd: downtown assessment]

Donald F. Robertson (donaldrf@hooked.net)
Sat, 24 Jan 1998 13:26:17 -0800

>
> Hello, David,
>
> I agree with your facts but draw different conclusions. (Sorry for my
> spelling, tonight, it's very late, after a more-than-okay play, and I've
> had a bit to drink. . . .)
>
> David Powers wrote:
>
> > Reality, through my eyes, is that big money holds all the cards,
> > everywhere. We all have to choose how closely we want to ally
> > ourselves with that money.
>
> This is axiomatic. In fact, it can't easily be changed. (I've always
> believed that the achilies heel of democracy is the presence of
> inheritence; through random chance, somebody is going to end up with
> more money than others, they will pass it to their children who will
> have an un-earned advantage, and within a few generations you will have
> an aerostracy. I believe the United States is on the edge of that;
> historically, republican governments have tended to last two or three
> hundred years before becoming commercial empires. The ECONOMIST
> recently put it another way: in a democracy, once the middle class
> becomes more than fifty percent of the population, they vote themselves
> benefits, and it becomes very hard to take care of the poor; they argued
> that the US will never again have a truly liberal elected government.)
>
> Unless we are going for a revolution (and I have far to great a personal
> stake in the current system to support that), our relatively liberal
> city has to work in the political and and economic environment in which
> it exists. Since the wider country is not going to provide the money we
> need to run good mass transit, or to take care of our parks or house the
> homeless, this city needs to raise that money itself. In the real
> world, that means a healthy business environment. Feel free to dream on
> about changing the world, but it won't pay for housing the homeless or
> running MUNI here and now.
>
> For all those reasons, I totally disagree with your next statement:
>
> > But the trials and tribulations of
> > international capital are not something on which you can base local
> > social policy. Even if you're New York City.
>
> Whatever else, you do have to pay for your "local social policy," and
> the money has to come from somehwere. If not from keeping a lot of
> international finance in your city, and taxing it to the degree you can
> without driving it elsewhere, than how?
>
> Finally, I think you grossly overstate the case in San Francisco's
> relative decline vis-a-vis the suburbs. San Francisco is still the
> financial center of the Western United States, and one of the most
> important of the world's second-tier banking cities. (I work in that
> industry.) In this sense, while it was bad for consumers, the fact that
> San Francisco banks have bought most of the Los Angeles-based banks has
> been very good for our city. Los Angeles, for all their industrial
> strength, is no longer a serious contender as a financial center. Since
> financial trade almost defines what a big city has historically been
> for, our city's position is relatively secure, unless one of the
> fast-growing Southern banks buys Wells Fargo.
>
> San Jose, on the other hand, has no financial industry and is
> headquarters to exactly one major company (Adobe) and no international
> ones; San Francisco is headquarters to a dozen major international
> conglomerates. (That may or may not be a good thing; it is a fact.)
> The Paninsula does better, but even today San Francisco alone generates
> approximately half the economic activity of all the South Bay cities put
> together. More importantly, approximately half the multimedia jobs in
> the world are located here, and most of the rest are in New York and
> London. Ziff Davis just moved their entire operation from Foster City
> to be "closer to the action." Bryant Street is being called the Madison
> Avenue of the Internet. For whatever reason, multimedia designers, who
> could live anywhere there's a phone line, like inner cities. If I were
> Mayor of one of the South Bay cities, I'd be real worried about this.
> Computers and software are increasingly low-margin commodoties, and the
> production of basic code is moving to places like India. The high-end
> content jobs are in San Francisco. If the Internet continues to do
> well, over the long term, our city could re-gain some of her regional
> dominance.
>
> It will be interesting to see.
>
> -- Donald
> _________________________
> Donald F. Robertson
> San Francisco
>
> donaldrf@hooked.net
> 76217.2066@CompuServe.com
>
> Donald's Space Exploration page:
> http://www.hooked.net/~donaldrf/index.html
>
> The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually
> we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of
> inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to
> reclaim a little more land. -- Thomas Huxley.

-- 
_________________________
Donald F. Robertson
San Francisco


donaldrf@hooked.net
76217.2066@CompuServe.com


Donald's Space Exploration page: 
     http://www.hooked.net/~donaldrf/index.html


The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually
we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of
inexplicability.  Our business in every generation is to
reclaim a little more land.  -- Thomas Huxley.