People often ask why today's tech wealth doesn't go towards more public works, like libraries, universities, and museums during the late 1800s. As far as I can tell the answer is that they would literally not be allowed to be built. In 2014, George Lucas, a long-time Bay Area resident who built Lucasfilm in the Bay, wanted to build a museum in the Presidio as a gift to the people of San Francisco, to be personally funded to the tune of ~$700 million. The Presidio Trust rejected it. He then tried to build it in his wife's hometown of Chicago, but local nonprofit Friends of the Parks sued and held the project up for two years, long enough for Lucas to give up on the city. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will finally open in Los Angeles next month after more than a decade of planning, eight years of construction, and over $1 billion personally spent by Lucas. Meanwhile, San Francisco has built no major museum projects since the 2016 expansion of SFMOMA, and no new libraries since the North Beach Branch in 2014. Public works, like so many other things, are bottlenecked not by donor will or available funding but by vetocracy