Bay Area people have figured a few things out

A dear friend sent me a post about urbanism, friendship, and San Francisco. So, of course, I have thoughts.

The big idea in

Ava

’s interview with Phil Levin is that choosing your neighborhood is more important than choosing your city, even though we think and talk about it oppositely. Phil founded Live Near Friends and Radish — a 10-home, multigenerational compound in Oakland currently home to 20 adults and six children.

It rhymes with my current pet cause (one of them, anyway) that local governance is a far better use of 99.9% of people’s political time, energy, and brain space compared to national or international affairs. Yet 99.9% of people get it backwards, and point most of their resources toward places they have the least impact. We’re all mad about Trump, Gaza, and inflation. But you’re not going to solve those issues. You can fix local housing prices.

The other parts made me think about my experience of living in various cities, and neighborhoods within them.