Sounds like the same thing is going on up here in Bellingham, although on a smaller scale (and I,m sure we are not as hip as SF). The city is driving out industry, they joined in a lawsuit against the cities largest employer a few years ago. That was the last straw and it forced part of the mill to close. And now the city and port have bought the land and plan on turning it into a park after they spend millions to clean it up. They aren't providing the necessary infrastructure to meet the goals of our urban growth plan, causing a seriuos lack of housing and if not lack of housing a lack of affordable housing. They blame the builders for having poor plans, plans that would put housing in the areas the city and county set up as urban growth areas. There are very few working families that can afford a house in our community anymore. Shutting down the mill cost the city a lot in water usage and now the lake the water is drawn from is becoming polluted, due in part to a lack of water being drawn from it, although the city and county would have you believe it is all from growth around the lake. So, they put a moratorium on building in the watershed, I just find it funny that the increase in pollutants conincides exactly with the shutting down of the mill. The city has plans to build a "cultural center" with an un-needed new library, children's museum, theater, and other such things. They spent money on a farmers market no one wanted and then begged us for more money to support a fire dept that according to a recent consultant study is poorly run. When asked about growth county and city officials will tell you they would like to create a retirement communtiy, and some will even say flat out an elitist community similiar to SF. All this and they still keep getting elected by the same middle class families they are trying to drive out of town. Drives me nuts.

I'm not that optimistic about Seattle. I'm sure more people in Seattle would prefer the San Francisco model overlayed on Seattle and this contingent is likely growing over time.

Seattle elites are doing their best to make this happen. To deal with a school funding crisis because children are disappearing, it's abandoning rigorous academic programs in certain schools previously open to children throughout the city. People with children have been abandoning Seattle for decades and this trend is unstopable as housing prices continue to rise helped along by excessive land use regulation.

Seattle will maintain a certain industrial base as a port city. Geography, it's proximity to the growing far east and the deep water port are assets the city was blessed with. It remains to be seen whether over time this traffic will naturally move to Tacoma if hostility to infrastructure imporvements that don't embrace overpriced in-city libraries and apartments for drunks remains unchanged.

The west coast cities abandoment of children with nary a wimper is the canary in the coal mine.

News flash: Cities aren't what they used to be.

Follow-up question: What is?

This rather obvious query popped into my head after reading Joel Kotkin's sniffish dismissal of San Francisco as an "ephemeral city," one that "differs dramatically from traditional urban centers." Instead of smokestacks and stevedores we have tapas and trust-fund liberals.

He's absolutely right, and he totally misses the point. If San Francisco is a far cry from the boisterous Big Cities of yore, that's because Big Cities continue to evolve. The successful ones still draw strength from immigration and a central address, but they're no longer the engines driving the region around them. They're a lifestyle choice.

Simplistic? Yes. But no more simplistic than parachuting pundits who judge the present by their definition of How Things Ought to Be -- ignoring the fact that today's actions and trends are shaped by decades of social and economic history.

For instance.

As Kotkin surveys our "overpriced urban amusement park," he bemoans the loss of "small factories, dockworkers and dives specializing in carved turkey and roast beef," and frets that the new ephemerality "threatens the existence of the middle class urban family."

I echo his regret with regards to all that has passed; the Financial District hofbrau my dad would take me to in the 1970s is long gone. What's absurd is the notion that these shifts are the result of current leftish politics, or somehow unique to San Francisco.

Take the loss of dockworkers: Burly laborers weren't chased from the waterfront by the folks running that silly caviar bar at the Ferry Building; they're the victims of the shipping industry's shift from loose cargo to sealed containers in the 1960s.

In fact, San Franciscans were so attached to the romance of a working waterfront that Mayors Dianne Feinstein and Art Agnos invested $50 million in the 1980s to modernize the city's port facilities, including $8 million that turned Pier 80 near Hunters Point into a multipurpose cargo terminal. But the Port of Oakland has more land and better access to regional transportation -- and the number of containers that pass through San Francisco fell from 116, 000 in 1991 to 13,000 last year.

As for the endangered urban middle class, they weren't driven out en masse by images of gay marriage or medical marijuana. Working families have packed their bags and moved to sunnier climes for 50 years -- certainly since the late '70s, when housing prices in the Bay Area first went crazy and families in the Richmond District starting thinking about calling Concord or Novato their home.

The same trends are true across the country -- I'll assume that Kotkin is familiar with the phrase "suburban flight" - but what saved the local metropolis was its unique strain of openness.

Forty years ago San Francisco was a fairly conventional big city, albeit in a remarkable setting. The other remarkable thing was its willingness to tolerate ways of living that differed from the norm. As society grew more complex, the city became more complex because each new social wave found fertile soil: from the hippies to the gays to the punks to the self-styled "progressives" today.

But while the populations shifted, the physical city stayed much the same. Neighborhoods such as Noe Valley were left behind by middle-class families, then transformed.

Similarly, western districts such as the Outer Sunset don't feel like "amusement parks." They're petri dishes filled by cultures you wouldn't think could blend. Rows of prim single-family homes with minuscule lawns, American suburbia on a compressed scale, are inhabited largely by families from Asia --

but with surfers tucked into apartments near the ocean, and families of Irish descent that have absorbed as many changes as their neighborhood.

All of which is complex and constantly in flux, and why this sort of quick-draw critique so often falls flat.

And when Kotkin surveys the civic scene and bridles at an "adult Disneyland" for tourists and "sojourning youths," or "the preferred residence of those who can choose where they live," his problem seems to be that it's an enticing place. What's the preferred alternative? Boarded-up shells?

Anyone who surveys San Francisco can see that it has formidable problems. Besides the common ills of urban centers -- dirty streets and violent crime and people unable to find homes -- the city has its own peculiar binds. The real-estate boom that started in the late '90s wiped out many nooks where people could still find decent housing at a semi-reasonable price. Politics are defined by symbolic posturing rather than what's needed -- an idealistic but pragmatic balance between market forces and community needs.

And yes, the role of big cities is being redefined.

Downtowns no longer have a monopoly on places to work, or places to shop, or places to see foreign films. Their distinction is urbanity itself, an aura of energy and authenticity that the suburbs supposedly can't offer.

That's what they are. Now. And even as I type these words, they're in the process of becoming something else.