Vacation homes not cathedrals

Cathedrals are built during periods of great prosperity. Grand Central Station in New York is an example so are the many new museums in modern Berlin.

In San Francisco we have several wonderful museums that grew out of the boom times of the 1990s. The city is filled with large buildings and great structures built during earlier boom periods.

Right now San Francisco is in another boom. Not unlike many earlier ones. This one sees the city as the center of the global Internet expansion.

We should be seeing massive amounts of imaginative construction of every sort from new airports to great universities and monumental buildings.

But we are not getting any and we will not get any because all the tax money, the surplus from the high prices of home sales, is going into the salaries, healthcare and retirement benefits of the unionized city employees. These people are swallowing up the prosperity of San Francisco in their own personal lives.

Most of these people are using their bountiful wealth to build country houses scattered throughout the hinterlands of California mountains and lakes. Their taste is zero so their architecture is trivial; domestic and insignificant.

Thanks to government unions this boom era will not be visible nor bring forth any social good.