I also do think bringing up this distinction is important. A conservative, landed gentry has controlled Bay Area cities and their zoning laws for decades now and are ferociously resisting a change to their ideas of normal. The article presents examples with how this gentry specifically casts the pro-urban Bloc, with a hammer and sickle flag, and hippie clothing, not to mention the minorities falling out of the buildings. Folks who made those images seem to explicitly see high density housing as not only an affront to the look of the neighborhood, but an afront on their values. To deny that this is a war between 2 different views of the way a city should behave culturally, and to explicitly ignore the anti-queer and anti-minority imagery, is to be both intellectually dishonest and inaccurate.
> But is this really a liberal vs. conservative issue?
I wish I could provide you something more than this, but in my anecdotal experience as a minority in many ways, yes. I don't have the statistical evidence to agree or disagree though.
> I've heard Berkeley has similar NIMBYism, and that's a very liberal area, right?
Berkeley has less of it (again, in my anecdotal experience as a minority) than most other parts of the Bay. Most of Berkeley's NIMBYism seems to be confined to parts around North Berkeley.
> Is Sunset really that conservative?
From my time in the neighborhood, yes. It was older and more racially segregated than other parts of SF for sure. The neighborhood tended to be split into Chinese (mostly Cantonese) and white sections, and even when neighbors were of different races, most people stuck to a clique. Residents were also much older (older than my parents). Again though, this is just my anecdotal experience.
Well if we take the words "conservative" and "liberal" literally, then a landed gentry trying to keep the status quo that advantages them is conservative almost by definition. While people wishing to permit other things are liberal -- at least on that issue.
But whether that maps onto the American tribal labels of "conservative" and "liberal" is a different matter. As far as I know, Republicans and Democrats are both split on these issues.
Liberal/conservative on civil rights and social issues isn't the right model to use to understand the sides of this issue.
It's more of an intergenerational conflict amplified by differences in wealth and income. In the Bay Area, the NIMBY contingent tends to skew to the older (i.e. baby boomer, early gen-X) generation, especially the more wealthy (in $ and property) among them.
The YIMBY crowd skews to the younger generations (late gen-X to millenials), who sometimes have good incomes, but lack the wealth/capital to afford the local housing market as it is currently configured.
Come on now, let's at least use the right words. These folks are "homeowners", not the wealthy living off of rental properties. Used improperly, that term is exclusionary.
Due to the impossibility of becoming "landed gentry" in the modern United States of America -- in the same way that being knighted is likewise impossible here -- using the phrase to describe a group of people is taken as intentionally misapplying a metaphor to insult, divide, denigrate, and bully the target group.
When folks misuse a term like "landed gentry" that tells me that the argument they want to signal is that "those people" are evil and bad while "our people" are good and honorable. Therefore, those people's homes should be taken away and replaced with high density housing for our people. That's certainly an argument. I personally don't find it particularly compelling, but I'm not an SF voter.
As far as MWOD, that publication might consider reviewing whether or not they should be making such low quality definitions publicly available -- it's a sad day when you're upstaged by Urban Dictionary [1].
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=landed+gentr...
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/landed%20gentry
It's debatable whether MWOD is guilty of playing a dangerous game of propaganda by peddling low quality definitions online with high SEO. They have an ethical obligation to not revise words out from under the population unless, of course, they are a non-neutral party with a particular agenda.
It's not fair to people, like yourself, who want to advance strongly-felt arguments to spoil those arguments with terms based on these weak definitions just because they showed up high in Google Search results.
As the terms our society uses to communicate continue to degrade into group-specific definitions, we will generally lose the ability to communicate effectively across groups; and, in turn, the ability to compromise and negotiate in good faith.
In other words, one's political opponents might interpret a speech differently due to the use of a different dictionary rather than (merely) disagreement with a particular argument.
To glimpse at one dystopian future, consider that the recent phenomenon of declaring one's personal pronouns might soon include identification of one's personal dictionary, one's personal thesaurus, one's personal collection of idioms, and one's personal grammar.
EDIT: Here is an excerpt from the zoning code of Newark, Delaware, a random smallish city I happened to visit five years ago:
"(1) Minimum lot area. Except as specified in Article XVI, Section 32-56.2(a) of this chapter, the minimum lot area for any dwelling or permitted nonresidential use, together with accessory buildings, shall be as follows: a. RH—One-half acre. b. RT—15,000 square feet. c. RS—9,000 square feet. (2) Maximum lot coverage. The maximum lot coverage for any building, exclusive of accessory buildings, shall be 20%, and the total maximum lot coverage, including any building, accessory buildings, and manmade improvements on the ground surface which are more impervious than the natural surface and which are used for parking and driveways, but not including swimming pools, patios, terraces, outdoor grills, and similar facilities not intended for parking, shall be 44%. (3) Minimum lot width. Except as specified in Article XVI, Section 32-56.2(b) of this chapter, the minimum width of a lot shall be as follows: a. RH—100 feet. b. RT—90 feet. c. RS—75 feet."
It goes on like this for hundreds and hundreds of pages.
[0]: There was some of this in NYC when Robert Moses was the central planner, but it's hard to argue it's continued today.
According to this site, rental prices in Houston were less than a third of prices in San Francisco in June 2017 ($1046 vs $3441).
That sort of difference is certainly going to drive away less affluent people.
These regulations appear to deal with things like setbacks, street access, etc. but it sounds like you can do whatever you want on the land. I think these regulations are just to deal with how to divide up a parcel of land, rather than to regulate anything you do with it.
In any case, we are currently working out as a society how to make cities livable as more and more people try to move into the same space, but I don't think bringing up distinctions like straight/gay, liberal/conservative, etc. is very productive.
And developers don't build single family homes in the suburbs and luxury highrises downtown for nefarious reasons. They build them there because you make more money that way.