Customer Reviews

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco, Revised and Updated Edition

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After reading _The Power Broker_, I was expecting a similar expose of the power politics that went in to San Francisco's redevelopment. _City for Sale_ did not live up to my expectations. Hartman's style is very dry and he gives us very little insight into the people who were involved in the battles that shaped modern San Francisco. He relies almost exclusively on secondary or tertiary sources and presents too much information without distilling and analyzing it.

Hartman spends little more than a page on San Francisco's public transit woes. He ignores the development of BART - which operates almost exclusively as a conduit for suburban workers to go to and from the financial district and serves virtually none of San Francisco's neighborhoods. He also offers little insight into the city's homeless problem - people are drawn to San Francisco because it is the only city in the area that pash cash to homeless people.

I was most disappointed that after Hartman spent 385 pages outlining how the city's business establishment had virtually controlled urban redevelopment for the last 30 years - he spends the last 15 pages trying to blame San Francisco's gentrification problems on computer programmers in their mid-20s. This book was written so recently and yet Hartman's analysis is already incorrect - silicon valley people in their mid-20s are no longer a threat to San Francisco - but the business interests downtown and in Pacific Heights who obviously created the mess still have the same control over the city's affairs.

SF is my adopted hometown and I love walking around the city, noticing little odds and ends. How come the prime real estate on top of Moscone Center is occupied by a Merry-go-Around and a (mostly deserted) playground? How come BART does not stop anywhere people in SF actually live (except for a lucky few in the Mission). What did SoMa look like 30 years ago?

Hartman covers San Francisco's urban development history from the relocation of the produce market (to make room for Golden Gateway apartments), the development of South-of-Market (and the resistance), Harvey Milk's and George Moscone's assasination, up to the (now completed) redevelopment of the Presidio's Letterman complex into ILM studios.

Reading this book gave me a new perspective on SF. It's possible that the book is not thorough enough for someone who studied urban planning or architecture, but for an interested local resident like me it provided a plenty of detail and insight.