The Heritage Foundation - Leadership for America

What happens when liberals are able to take over an entire city and implement all of their dream policies, many of which they claim will help average Americans from the bottom up? The middle class disappears, that’s what happens.

In the past decade, San Francisco has implemented universal health care, enforced smart growth policies, raised the minimum wage to $8.50, and implemented a carbon tax on businesses. The result:

Many worry it’s increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.

“A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies,” said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. …

The social consequences for a city where moderate- and low-income families can’t get by are manifold. Many believe it’s the primary reason San Francisco has the fewest children per capita of any major metropolitan area in the United States. In 2006, a group of Potrero Hill parents concerned about declining public school ranks surveyed families that had left San Francisco to find out why they had done so. Fifty-three percent cited the schools; 70 percent blamed housing costs.