2018-12-31nytimes.com

In truth, most of these cities have qualities other cities would reasonably desire. Denver has one of the country's fastest-growing tech labor forces, with minorities and women relatively well represented in those jobs. Seattle and Portland have among the fastest all-around job growth. New York has some of the fastest-growing wages. San Francisco has unemployment well below the national average and household incomes among the highest in the country.

But San Francisco-ization and the other -izations don't refer to the process of acquiring any of these good things. Rather, those terms capture the deepening suspicion of many communities that the costs of urban prosperity outweigh the benefits. The tech jobs and the high wages aren't worth having if they come with worsening congestion, more crowded development or soaring housing costs.

...

Embedded in these fears is something slippery, seemingly inevitable. Once you let tech giants in the door, you have a homeless crisis. Once you allow more density, you're surrounded by skyscrapers. Once housing costs begin to rise, the logical conclusion is San Francisco.

...

It's much harder to point to cities that have gotten all of this right -- the growth without the congestion, the tech jobs without the homeless crisis, the affordable housing without the sprawl.

We could use a word for the condition of becoming such a place. Maybe Minneapolisization?



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