The Sierra Club and the city of San Francisco—it seems like a match made in heaven. The Sierra Club, at national level anyway, is dedicated to preserving nature and promoting urban infill development, to lessen the environmental impacts caused by suburban sprawl and automobile use. San Francisco, meanwhile, is the real-life embodiment of this goal realized; it is one of America’s densest, most transit-oriented cities, and is primed to become more like this in coming decades because of the high demand for living there. Yet the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay Chapter, in apparent defiance of these goals, routinely opposes dense development. In the process, it has become a local—and increasingly national—symbol for nimbyism, hypocrisy, and faux environmentalism….[read more]