Jacobs led a reaction toward Modernist top-down planning practices and urban renewal, which eradicated vibrant and lively communities in places like her home neighborhood of West Village. She celebrated the chaos and the street ballet cultivated by a mix of building, business and resident types that organically layers in a complex ecosystem of behaviors over many, many decades. But today, many of the neighborhood she would have been proud to call home are exorbitantly expensive. What is West Village today, if not, another insanely expensive neighborhood gentrified many, many times over? What middle or lower-income family could call it home?
Likewise, the progressive left thought leadership here has taken Jacobs' ideas to such a protectionist extreme that it has exacerbated a pre-existing housing shortage over the past 40 years. Not more than a decade after her book was published, there were the Freeway and urban renewal resistance movements of the mid-1960s. They later evolved into a Skyscraper revolt of the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1970s, the entire city passed strict rezoning laws to preserve existing residential densities and architectural styles.
There's a decent history here: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/san_francisco.htm...
And I'm not sure it's fair to characterize SF's current malaise as the endpoint of Jacobs' ideas. IIRC nowhere her oeuvre is there an opposition to new construction---in fact, just the opposite. For instance, near the bottom of page 216 of the 1961 edition [0], she is pretty unequivocal that she is in favor of new construction, just not all at one time and place.
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=P_bPTgOoBYkC&lpg=PP1&dq=de...
Judging from the people driving up and down 101 with flags flying, the people wearing 49ers jerseys year-round in San Jose, the big BBQs hanging off the big trucks in the parking lot of games, and the truck commercials that litter televised football, the new car-centric location suits the football team nicely.
I'd be much more upset if the SF Giants decided to move out of the city!
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_23414780/49ers-new-stadium-cos... [2] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/03/11/tibco-sel...
Could be worse, the SJ Earthquake's stadium is adjacent to caltrain, but you have to take a crazy bus route to get there. You can see it, but you can't walk to it.
Reading that, I can't help but think that the canonically best methods for how to "build and design cities" have been pretty well understood for decades [0], if not much longer [1]. We in America have just been doing it wrong on purpose for quite a while (perhaps in order to goose suburban construction and automobile sales?) So the problem isn't lack of knowledge-how, but rather one of political organization to wrest control of the built environment from the groups and organizations that presently control it.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Ame... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090190