How the Greenwashed Liberal Gentry Keep Out the Rabble | The American Conservative

How the Greenwashed Liberal Gentry Keep Out the Rabble | The American Conservative
"...Wiener’s bill was aimed at addressing a crisis in his city: the lack of affordable housing. 
Today, the median home price in San Francisco is $1.6 million, about eight times the national median.
...Wiener’s bill would have addressed this problem by partially overriding local zoning restrictions on housing density, specifically on height limits, in areas served by mass transit.
It’s hard to think of a bill more friendly to the masses than that.
Yet Wiener ran into a wall of liberal Democratic opposition—the vice mayor of Beverly Hills was a particularly vocal opponent—and thus the bill died on April 17. 
Why the fierce opposition?
Perhaps it’s because the dominant progressive voices in California are, in fact, regressive.
That is, they prefer to protect the privileges of the landed—who benefit, of course, from high land prices—as opposed to the aspirations of the landless.
In history, such behavior is nothing new.
Indeed, with historical continuity in mind, urban analysts Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel back in 2007 coined the term “gentry liberalism” to describe this age-old phenomenon.
Gentry liberalism recalls the aristocratic, even feudal, days of yore when the lords in their estates didn’t wish to be crowded by the bourgeoisie, to say nothing of the peasantry..."
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