WHERE THE CITY RISES, LET THE PEOPLE REMAIN

 WHERE THE CITY RISES, LET THE PEOPLE REMAIN

A city is always becoming something. Buildings rise, transit expands, neighborhoods change, and new generations arrive. Growth itself is not the enemy of community. The deeper question is whether the people who carried a neighborhood through yesterday will still have a place within its tomorrow.

San Francisco makes this question especially urgent. As housing pressures encourage greater density across the city, towers and apartment buildings may rise where parking lots, warehouses, or smaller structures once stood. More housing is desperately needed. Yet construction alone cannot answer the moral question of housing. A city can increase the number of homes while decreasing the number of people who can afford them.

This is the paradox of development.

When public policy allows greater height and density, it creates enormous economic value in the land. That value should not flow only upward into buildings and outward toward investors. Some of it must flow back toward the people through affordable housing, tenant protections, community ownership, public transportation, parks, schools, neighborhood businesses, and other institutions that make remaining possible.

Otherwise, the city may exchange one geometry of exclusion for another.

In earlier generations, exclusion was often horizontal. Redlining, restrictive covenants, discriminatory zoning, redevelopment, and freeway construction divided people across neighborhoods. Race and class could determine which side of a line a family was permitted to inhabit.

The modern city can produce a subtler boundary.
Price can become the new red line.

No ordinance needs to declare that a teacher, restaurant worker, immigrant family, senior citizen, artist, or young household cannot live in a particular neighborhood. The law may say everyone is welcome while the market quietly places the entrance price beyond their reach.

Thus exclusion can become vertical. Rich and poor may technically live within the same neighborhood while inhabiting entirely different economic worlds—market-rate towers beside affordable buildings, luxury apartments beside SROs, extraordinary private wealth overlooking homelessness on the sidewalk.

That is why density must become more than an engineering strategy. Density must become a social promise.

If we build higher because land is scarce, every additional floor should enlarge the possibility of belonging. If government grants greater development capacity, some of the resulting value should help preserve the human community beneath it. If transit makes a neighborhood more desirable, the people who depended upon that transit before the neighborhood became desirable should not be the first people forced away from it.

Development should therefore ask something greater than:
How many units can we build here?

It should also ask:
How many people can we enable to remain?

The success of a city cannot finally be measured by cranes, property values, tax revenues, or the height of its skyline. A prosperous city that continually expels the people who teach its children, prepare its food, clean its buildings, care for its elderly, drive its buses, create its culture, and remember its history is gradually destroying the very community that made prosperity possible.

The goal should not be to stop the city from changing.
It should be to make change large enough to include the people already there.

Build upward.
Build abundantly.
Build beautifully.
But build so that the child whose parents struggled to remain in the neighborhood may someday have the possibility of remaining there too.

For the greatest achievement of urban development is not that the buildings survived the transformation.

It is that the neighbors did.

Where the city rises, let opportunity rise.
Where land appreciates, let security deepen.
Where new people arrive, let old neighbors remain.
And where the skyline reaches toward tomorrow, let it never erase the human beings who carried the city through yesterday.

Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
August 26, 2026