I couldn't agree more! I'm 100% on board with helping SF move away from district elections and instead adopting proportional approval voting. Districts have got to go.
I agree with your goals, but see a couple of reasons to be skeptical that city consolidation will actually advance them.
1. It's not obvious that NYC is better governed than the Bay Area overall, or that in the areas where it is better, this is due to having a consolidated city government. There is definitely better transit integration, but if anything that seems more the work of statewide and multistate authorities. You might look, for instance, at how the NY/NJ Port Authority manages to be effective and see if MTC-ABAG could be made more like it. And as far as I can tell, the housing supply that keeps NYC less unaffordable than SF is mostly in suburbs-- suburbs which are better commute options than similarly far-out ones in the Bay due to better transit, but which are not under NYC municipal jurisdiction.
2. I don't think it is reliably true that directly elected officials do better than political appointees or that citywide elections give you better officials than per-district ones. The ridiculous SF Board of Education is a recent counterexample. The question is whether the elections will actually attract broad enough turnout and interest that they don't just get captured by a few insiders who everyone else is too uninformed to oppose. Large urban school districts are in general an example of a service where more local control and smaller units of governance are probably better, since they have much less of a spillover effect than transit or housing.
I couldn't agree more! I'm 100% on board with helping SF move away from district elections and instead adopting proportional approval voting. Districts have got to go.
I agree with your goals, but see a couple of reasons to be skeptical that city consolidation will actually advance them.
1. It's not obvious that NYC is better governed than the Bay Area overall, or that in the areas where it is better, this is due to having a consolidated city government. There is definitely better transit integration, but if anything that seems more the work of statewide and multistate authorities. You might look, for instance, at how the NY/NJ Port Authority manages to be effective and see if MTC-ABAG could be made more like it. And as far as I can tell, the housing supply that keeps NYC less unaffordable than SF is mostly in suburbs-- suburbs which are better commute options than similarly far-out ones in the Bay due to better transit, but which are not under NYC municipal jurisdiction.
2. I don't think it is reliably true that directly elected officials do better than political appointees or that citywide elections give you better officials than per-district ones. The ridiculous SF Board of Education is a recent counterexample. The question is whether the elections will actually attract broad enough turnout and interest that they don't just get captured by a few insiders who everyone else is too uninformed to oppose. Large urban school districts are in general an example of a service where more local control and smaller units of governance are probably better, since they have much less of a spillover effect than transit or housing.