A former planning commissioner recalls often being surprised at the passion and anger displayed toward small changes around the city of San Francisco, and attempted to get to the nature of the fear driving the opposition.
David Prowler, a former member of the San Francisco Planning Commission and a former director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, penned a column for the San Francisco Chronicle providing a taxonomy of the fears that sometimes control the debate about development in the city.
So, for example, nostalgia often creates a false sense of the city's history relative to its current issues. Failing to distinguish facts and problems can lead to failures in problem solving ("Problems have solutions, facts don’t," writes Prowler. Xenophobia is a common theme among opposition forces throughout the city's history as well, and Prowler suggests that the "animus" against techies doesn’t feel much different than previous examples from the city's history.
Prowler calls on a long political history in San Francisco for perspective in his argument, acknowledging that the city has real problems, but diagnosing the types of fears like those listed above in the hopes they can be overcome in the name of solutions.
Read the full story: Don’t let fear get in the way of solutions
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