grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
Housing Poster. Series index here.
User ID: 197
I don't understand; do you think that the existence of people with bad ideas who voted blue means that we shouldn't point out when someone is reasoning badly? Do you think that I'm backing that particular conspiracy theory? (I'm not; I only faintly remember hearing it years ago.) Aren't we supposed to sharpen each other, as iron sharpens iron?
"Someone who you remind me of reasoned badly, so you shouldn't complain about me reasoning badly" is a poor approach.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
11mo ago
Deregulation to increase housing development feels like the biggest bang for your buck pro growth policy out there.
This is literally true. See Hsieh and Moretti (2019) and Caplan's addendum; the fact that people can't move to opportunity is a horrible drag on the economy as a whole.
Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.
Parking issues are down to economic illiteracy. Parking is scarce because the price is too low (zero almost everywhere), though the cost is distributed elsewhere. We value the time of people seeking parking at zero, so rather than charging enough for parking that there's a space or two free on every block, we mandate ever-larger parking craters in cities. Here's a summary of Donald Shoup's work on parking economics.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Okay, but why do you think that "poll watchers were removed", since the only claims to that effect came from incompetent Trump followers who then recanted?
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Even in 2020 we can see how the election became very close at one point during the night, until Biden's mysterious surge.
This is not, and was not, mysterious. It was heavily predicted before the election (Reuters, CNN, NBC, Fox), the explanation (Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, mail-in ballots are counted later) was straightforward, and the only reason this is even a thing is that it was one in a series of Trump's attempts to avoid facing up to his loss.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1mo ago
We already do that; around half of California's construction workers are foreign-born, and of those, about half are undocumented. But the cost of living here is so high that you still have to pay a lot for workers, even if they're under-the-table.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
11mo ago
It's doubtful that most environmentalists want to help the environment at all.
There are two different things called "environmentalism" I've seen described as 'Green' and 'Gray'.
Green environmentalism is fighting development to save the forest or save the stream or save the neighborhood. It's judging how much harmony you have with the environment by counting the trees you can see from your front porch. It's "we tread lightly on the earth here". It's this tweet showing an aerial picture of Manhattan with the caption, "reminder that the people lecturing you about Earth Day today live here". It's a conviction that we will only be saved by not doing things.
Gray environmentalism is shutting up and multiplying, and is primarily concerned with climate change. It's judging your environmental impact by calculating your carbon footprint. It might be getting an electric car, but it's even more so moving to a city and getting an electric bike instead. It's heat pumps and rooftop solar and nuclear power if we can ever manage to get costs down. It's living near a park instead of having a huge backyard. It's this tweet, dunking on the above by pointing out that Manhattanites have some of the lowest per-capita carbon emissions in the country. It's a conviction that we will only be saved by doing things.
It would be nice if these groups could get along, but they really don't have that much in common.
Thank you for providing context; I really should have included the depth of housing problems at Berkeley (see page 10 and following). About a tenth of students were homeless at some point, though this mostly took the form of couchsurfing. (This matches up with how homelessness works; it's mostly temporary, and people only wind up on the street when they've exhausted their social networks.)
I'd also point out that the University predates the city; the city is there because of the University, which makes claims that the University is ruining the City, in a way, confused.
On another topic, I'm really skeptical about the university's plan to put a homeless shelter right next to a student dorm in the proposed People's Park development.
On the one hand, the homeless people are there in the area around the University already; they're just outdoors. On the other, I absolutely see what you mean. This is a hell of a compromise; more than half of the space will still be a park (an actual park, this time), and there will be more homeless/formerly-homeless people living on the site after the project is complete. It's a testament to just how ideologically committed the left-NIMBYs are that none of these concessions even registered. The maximalist position, I think, would have been an enormous mega-dorm covering the entire footprint of the site, and that's nowhere on the radar.
Perhaps the university is simply planning to build the dorm first and then drop the homeless shelter idea once the dorm is already fait accompli.
I don't think they're insincere, but ironically, the level of protesting has made this outcome considerably more likely. Supportive housing development, like any publicly-funded housing, involves a "layer cake" of various overlapping funding sources and deadlines, a byzantine array of mutually near-contradictory requirements, and so on. (Previously discussed here.) Any disruption or delay can trash the whole process.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Seriously, how did we get a system that is so self defeating?
Remember that feeling. Hold on to it. One thing I've learned from working in this space is that the systems are always stupider and more vile than you think.
One thing that helps is to remember that at this point, a society that builds is not in living memory for any but the very oldest of Americans.
"And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half generations, the builder's mindset passed out of all knowledge.”
The YIMBYs are envisioning a wonderfully abundant future, and at the same time, doing a lot of Slow Boring of Hard Boards. In practice, the tip of the spear involves showing up at community meetings to politely ask your local officials to knock it off, or calling your legislator to politely ask them to take your local officials' toys away, or to pore over your city's state-mandated reports and politely tell the state that the city is lying. Roughly none of it looks like Punching The Bad People. (There's an excellent, unfortunately Patreon-only, episode of "The War on Cars" interviewing Matthew Lewis that covers a lot of this.)
Sometimes there are wins, and they're worth celebrating. My city's downtown is replacing a closed donut shop with a small apartment building with ground-floor retail. It's only a few stories tall, but it has a cool roof deck, and it'll make our downtown a little nicer. It's only possible because AB 2097 says the city can't require fifteen parking spaces, which would make the project unconstructible. It's not loud, it's not huge, but it's something. And piling up more and more of those will eventually matter.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Doesn't this prove too much? Attempting to destroy gay or lesbian communities seems bad in the same way; aren't they also "(largely) voluntarily sterile"?
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Generally speaking, it would be a strange coincidence if the Biden campaign's malfeasance matched up so impressively well with the media's red-mirage predictions, and had the opposite effect you'd expect on the eventual results, which were much better for Trump than pre-election polling would indicate.
More specifically, this doesn't appear to have happened; the Trump campaign fundraised on that idea, but didn't appear willing to make the same bold claims in actual court.
Vague swipes at "liberal judges" aside (it's more of a cyclical thing), I think the reason the federal courts wind up legislating from the bench so much is that Congress is so useless.
On the other hand, the California legislature, while sometimes frustrating, actually does things (see here, here, here, here, and here, for example), so you don't in practice see the thing where the courts say "well, Congress could gainsay us if they wanted to", and the court's ruling stands no matter how politically-charged, because Congress generally has enough veto points to prevent it from doing anything controversial.
You can see a worked example of the California process in this very story, where the courts held that "people talking" is an environmental impact, and the legislature passed an urgency measure near-unanimously to gainsay them. (An urgency measure requires a two-thirds majority and takes effect immediately instead of at the beginning of the following year.)
Had this happened in federal court, I assume we'd just be dealing with the ruling and all of its ridiculous consequences.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
It rhymes, doesn't it? Hopefully there's no semi-coherent greater meme infrastructure that this all hooks into, but who knows?
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
There is a classic industrial accident involving a storage tank.
You may appreciate USCSB's "Hazards of Nitrogen Asphyxiation" video as well.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
I think this proves too much.
Consider bariatric surgery on an obese patient. It's elective, and it has risks and benefits. It's shown to cut the risk of cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes in half. If your doctors tells you, look, we can't tell you that you will die of a heart attack, but people who don't get this surgery die of heart attacks all the time, so no pressure, it's your decision whether you want to have a heart attack, we have no idea if that'll happen, at least we can't tell you whether it'll happen or not because the regulators won't let us, so you can choose anything you like, and please sign here that we totally didn't pressure you about anything like telling you that you'd have a heart attack.
If you think that puberty blockers don't actually reduce the risk of suicide, then that's a real objection, a matter of fact, and someone is right and someone is wrong.
But in the world where puberty blockers do significantly reduce the risk of suicide in teenagers with gender dysphoria, what's the right thing to do? Not tell their parents about it? Informed consent is complicated, but communicating the risks and benefits of an elective procedure has to be part of it.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
I think it's worth trying to empathize with these people. Consider this previous discussion on some comments by Matthew Cortland, where he vociferously argues against the concept of QALYs, because as a disabled person, QALYs value his life less than that of someone who isn't disabled.
On the one hand, it is devastating to be told that you're not an entire person, even in an accounting sense.
On the other, when you're doing a utilitarianism, either you're going to count disabled people less than non-disabled ones, or you're going to see nothing wrong with deafening someone, or blinding them, and so on.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
The dirty secret is one of the ways France, Spain, Germany, etc. can cheaply build trains, metros, and even housing at times is simple - the federal government has immense powers to step in and say, "sorry, we're doing this, giving you market value for your land, and you have no recourse in the law at all to stop us."
"Moses tore down America's great old cities, Jacobs ensured you could never build great new ones."
I want to emphasize that this is indeed how things used to work in the United States, most notably in postwar New York City, where Robert Moses legendarily used eminent domain to raze neighborhoods to build his projects. (If you have plenty of time, the Henry George Program had an excellent discussion about Moses.) The environmental movement of the sixties and seventies was in large part a backlash to Moses; the edifice of law and regulation they erected made it harder to build bad things by making it harder to build anything.
The tradition that separates us from better-functioning countries dates back seventy years at most.
You see this in our transit projects, where things simply get bogged down because it's much easier to say no or be cautious or add requirements than it is to say yes. You see this in our environmental laws like CEQA and NEPA (the federal version of CEQA), where they're used to delay obviously environmentally-friendly projects (congestion pricing, solar panels, offshore wind) in favor of an environmentally-unfriendly status quo. You see it in the way that these processes provide a foothold, so, for example, labor unions fight against CEQA reform because their process involves threatening obstruction to get labor benefits. And you see it in the infuriating "precautionary principle" which acts as a fully-general excuse for inaction, because you're comparing the worst case of "Life Continues" if you don't do something and "Extreme Catastrophe" if you do.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
In a sense, this is sad, but in another sense, it's probably good for me.
If I had to predict which service was going to become a walled garden, I wouldn't have picked Twitter. Is this enshittification?
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
According to this veto message:
In March, I announced the state's partnership with Civica to create our own line of CalRx biosimilar insulins that will cost no more than $30 per 10ml vial or $55 for five 3ml cartridges. This is a fraction of the current price for most insulins, and CalRx biosimilar insulins will be available to insured and uninsured patients nationwide. With CalRx, we are getting at the underlying cost, which is the true sustainable solution to high-cost pharmaceuticals. With copay caps however, the long-term costs are still passed down to consumers through higher premiums from health plans. As a state, we have led the nation in our efforts and investments to address the true underlying costs of insulin prescription affordability.
Here's the site on CalRx. They plan to start manufacturing next year.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Great question! The movement in California has tended to focus on more immediate reforms, which is one of the things that sets them apart from the After the Revolution types. But Prop 13 produces a sort of anti-Georgism, where more valuable land is cheaper to sit on. The YIMBYs were very keen on enacting "split roll", which would have repealed Prop 13 for large commercial (non-agricultural) landowners. (Prop 13 itself benefits from stunningly durable popularity.)
You can see Laura Foote (Executive Director for YIMBY Action) regularly mentioning LVT; there's a Stanford-based podcast/radio show not exactly aligned with the YIMBY movement called The Henry George Program; they've interviewed Lars Doucet (author of this ACX review-contest entry) as well as Sonja Trauss (Executive Director of YIMBY Law).
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Hey, cool! I'm flattered; thanks, everyone. A few updates on this year's housing bills, as a thank-you.
-
AB 2097 (Parking reform) was signed by the Governor, and will take effect at the beginning of 2023. Governor's statement here.
- I attended some developer conferences, and was surprised that financiers will now be requiring parking, though at a considerably lower ratio than cities have been. (0.75-1.2 stalls per unit for market-rate developers; 0.5-0.75 for subsidized; contrast with 2.5-4.5 for cities' requirements.)
-
AB 2011 (Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act), SB 6 (Middle Class Housing Act), SB 886 (CEQA exemption for student housing) were all signed on Housing Bill Day; around forty bills in total. Every California YIMBY priority bill that made it through policy committees was signed by the Governor.
- SB 922 (CEQA exemptions for non-car transportation), on the subject of CEQA reform, extended and expanded CEQA exemptions for pedestrian, bike, and transit infrastructure.
Here's Alfred Twu's annual infographic. It's definitely the biggest year so far for the YIMBYs in California.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
See also, previous discussion about more/better police. (This was mid-2020, when the issue was particularly salient.) Another thing that came up was Jill Leovy's Ghettoside (review/summary here), which argues that black Americans are particularly subject to simultaneous over- and under-policing, where the cops hassle and intimidate them for minor infractions but allow murders to go unsolved.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1d ago
I'm pretty optimistic; at least these things are happening out in the open in some way, at least these debates are being had. See also some exciting arguments happening in the field of education. So, of course I'm going to write about what could go wrong, as well as what I think has gone wrong.
The downside to politics being so thermostatic is that it seems like no matter how bad your policies are, voters will flip power back to you in a few years regardless, and you can go back to believing that the other guys are so awful that you don't have to bother learning how to actually accomplish things because that would be hard.
The center-left has been here before! After the last time the Democrats lost the popular vote, Dan Savage wrote "The Urban Archipelago", some of which seems charmingly dated ("If coal is to be burned, it has to be burned as cleanly as possible so as not to foul the air we all have to breathe") or sadly dated ("Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We're for opposition."), but at its core, it's a marvelously audacious vision: liberals win when cities grow, so we should grow cities and make them amazing, and the only reason red states are red is because their cities aren't big and amazing enough.
This vision failed, and there's an excellent interview that David Roberts did on Volts, "Dan Savage on blue America in the age of Trump". Savage describes what the YIMBYs call "the unholy alliance":
The problem in cities is these twin pinchers between which our political "leaders" have been captured, which are these NIMBYs who tend to be white, tend to be wealthier homeowners who don't want anything to change, who want to pull up the ladder behind them, who want to benefit from living in the city but never pay the price of living in a city, which is living with a certain amount of change and ferment and dynamism. Sorry, it's so early where I am right now. But also the left, which misidentified development as the driver of gentrification and displacement, when it's actually scarcity that is the driver of gentrification and displacement, that you can have density and development without gentrification and displacement if you don't have scarcity. We have scarcity because that's what the NIMBYs want, because it drives up their property values and it locks their neighborhoods in as these unchanging, frozen in amber Mayberry blocks like we have in Seattle, like the one I live on.
Five years ago, I wrote about what I think is the most likely path forward, and what is the ideal path forward. I think my idea of that is a lot more detailed now, and ties in well with the idea of the Urban Archipelago. Here's my idea of what the blue team has failed to provide, and if they want to regain power and credibility, they have to solve that.
The Four Failures
Safety and Order
Josh Barro, "Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose":
Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system — the other day, I was on an M34 bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot” — and even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep these people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets.
Noah Smith, "The Blue Cities Must Be Fixed":
Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.
Matt Yglesias, "A Common Sense Democrat Manifesto":
The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.
To be clear, the problem is not violence, so far as I can tell. Murder is back down to its pre-COVID numbers, and never reached the bloody peaks of the 1990s. It's petty disorder. It's visible homelessness, which makes people sick and drives people who can afford alternatives from the public square.
Inclusion
This is vibes, and I am not good at vibes, but I do appreciate that there's something wrong with white people insulting other white people by calling them white, with pushing language like "Latinx" despite it being really unpopular with the people it's supposed to be helping, and with gleefully signing off on microaggressions against men (and against women if you include the adjective "white").
I don't have much to say about this, as it's really not my area of expertise, but the perception is absolutely that the blue team cares more about how many marginalized identities you can tick off than about your material circumstances.
This is kind of an outlier, as you can't just fix this by fixing local governance. But it's a real thing that people are upset about.
There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.
[...]
I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.
Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side.
Sarah McBride, being interviewed by Ezra Klein (archive):
I think that we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain. Where the left says to the right: What do you know about pain, white, straight, cis man? My pain is real as a queer, transgender person.
And then the right says to the left: What do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan elite? My pain is real in a postindustrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis.
We are in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around. And every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated. While it requires intentionality and effort sometimes, I think we would all be better off if we recognized that we don’t have to believe that someone is right for what they’re facing to be wrong.
Public Goods
This is definitely more to do with city governance. tl;dr, La Sombrita, but in more detail...
Barro:
I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because it costs four times as much per mile to build a subway line here as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs.
Smith:
The habit of having cities overpay for everything is another form of highly inefficient redistribution. A bunch of people do get paid out — nonprofits, overstaffed contractors, expensive consultants — but at the end of the day the ballooning costs that result from all these payouts mean that cities don’t actually have the infrastructure or services they need. All too often, progressive cities are operated for the benefit of the people who get the money instead of the people who get the stuff.
Jennifer Pahlka, "Curiosity and Conflict":
I’m no expert in polling or voter sentiment or messaging or even how poor people feel, but I do know a thing about why it’s taken two years to get half the CHIPS Act money awarded, why the green energy infrastructure the IRA promised is stuck in years- or decades-long permitting processes and will probably come too late to avoid climate collapse, why so much promised Covid relief went to criminals instead of the needy, why so many kids applying for college couldn’t get financial aid last year.
And it's not just this stuff! It's the San Francisco public school system failing to teach their kids to read, and then banning eighth-grade algebra for "equity" reasons. It's a focus on process over outcomes.
Fundamentally, it's a decision to retreat to the idea that "we followed the correct process" rather than testing whether or not the outcome was successful. The results are shameful and devastating, and they are a key reason why we see so much poverty amongst so much plenty.
This all has a lot to do with nuts-and-bolts stuff, mostly insane permitting issues (Texas doesn't install more solar power than California because Texans love the environment more; it's because California makes everything more difficult), coalition politics that mean everyone gets a slice of the salami (and sometimes there's no salami left), and an insistent disinterest in trying to see if you're actually doing something that will help, as opposed to visibly trying to help.
Concretely, I think the best examples here are public schools ("Government: At long last, we have created Harrison Bergeron from classic sci-fi story (Don't Create) Harrison Begeron"), safe public spaces (kinda overlaps with point one), and public transit.
Affordability
The two biggest expenses for most people are housing and transportation, which are inexorably linked. Blue cities in blue states have self-inflicted housing shortages, which are well-known and well-understood, and yet remain seemingly intractable, even as they exacerbate every other problem.
Barro:
Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything [...] And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population — we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.
Smith:
Fundamentally, cities are places that people live — if people do not have houses to live in, you don’t actually have a city. Housing is what allows businesses to function, because most people live near to where they work. Housing is what allows retail to function, because it creates a sufficient density of customers. Housing sustains knowledge-industry network effects, by allowing more knowledge workers to live close to each other and exchange ideas. In most states, housing generates more tax revenue for the city as well. And of course, housing reduces homelessness.
Jerusalem Demsas, "Blue States Gave Trump and Vance an Opening" (archive):
The mismatch between job and housing creation across the wealthiest blue states caused prices to skyrocket, led some people to forgo good jobs because housing was too expensive, and strained entire communities, turning neighbor against neighbor. Unwittingly, liberals have seeded the conditions for illiberal politics to take root in some of the most progressive jurisdictions in the country.
Ezra Klein, on The Weeds in late August/early September 2020 (lost the link, my apologies):
I want to say, as clearly as I can, this is an extraordinary failure of governance that should make progressives in California, and Democrats in California, embarrassed and ashamed. We have a disastrous situation in terms of housing here, we have known this for years, it is making our environmental problems worse, it is making our climate problems worse, it is making economic inequality worse, it is making people's lives worse , and year after year after year, the politicians who do nothing... Gavin Newsom, the Governor, did his big speech on housing, I think it was the State of the State last year, nothing really happened after that. They've made some changes; I don't want to literally say nothing, but this was an extraordinarily depressing year in the California legislature on this.
And to a very great extent, it exposes a certain level of--one, progressive misgovernance, we also don't have high speed rail in this state; I think one should ask themselves, and it should be something the left grapples with, and Democrats grapple with, which is: if Democratic governance is so great, how come in California where they own everything and run everything, it isn't better? And then, two, a lot of the progressivism in California is phony. It's just... you hate Donald Trump, and you put a thing in your front yard, about how in this house we believe science is real and refugees are welcome and Black Lives Matter and da-da-da-da, and everybody's a person, and trans people are people, and the whole thing... but you can't build a house. And so people can't live there. It's exclusionary progressivism. It kinda makes me sick--I am very mad at California. You can't tell people progressive governance works when it doesn't work. And here, it is not working.
And that sums up exactly what has now come home to roost.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1mo ago
You're being too charitable; consider Sam Seder, who isn't that far to the left, being constitutionally incapable of blaming anything other than corporations and billionaires for high housing costs. This is how you get left-NIMBYs tying themselves into weird knots, like blaming Blackrock (which owns something like 0.1% of single-family homes) or asserting that we don't need more supply, because there are fewer homeless people than vacancies, or because all of those houses are secretly being kept empty by "speculators".
Vaheesan:
Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers—in short, more oligarchy.
This is the kind of equivocation I was talking about. ("Public power" in this case doesn't mean elected officials doing things, but rather the power of individuals to block the entire process.) When the only tools you have are taxing the rich and breaking up big companies, every problem looks like oligarchs and monopolies.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1mo ago
The Discourse around Abundance has truly been something to behold. It's hard not to nutpick about this stuff. On the plus side, some politicians really are taking it seriously, not by saying "Abundance!" really loudly, but by trying to refocus on outcomes over process; see Buffy Wicks' permitting reform report; among other things, it's behind some of the CEQA streamlining that's been taken up by the governor.
I agree that running on permitting reform and streamlining and bottlenecks isn't a political winner; voters aren't nerds, if anything, they're the opposite. But voters notice when nothing works, when CAHSR doesn't ever happen, when housing just gets more expensive, when medical costs keep rising, when college is stupidly expensive and even if you don't want to go now everyone's whining that they want you to pay back their loans.
So, the left is very happy to point out that populist red meat sells better than wonkish problem-fixing. But as that essay I linked at the bottom of the original post says, "Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something." My theory of the 2024 election is (a) everyone hated high prices and blamed the incumbent parties for them, and (b) the Democrats tried to tack to the center, but the disengaged voters who decided the election didn't believe them. Demonstratively yelling about taxing the rich and guillotining the oligarchs isn't going to fix that.
If I may indulge, I note that a "suggested article" linked to from the above is "A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions", from Robert Jensen, previously famous for other far-left things.
If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
The text of the article is detailed about "less", but is coyly silent about "fewer". Like many critics, he seems not to have read the book beyond the title, but he does propose an alternative.
Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.
A cheap shot suggests itself. ("You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.") Horseshoe Theory is real.
But on a serious note, when I see this kind of thing, I hear my ancestors screaming from beneath pails of water and bales of hay and endless subsistence-farming toil, and I wonder to what degree the women of the Hill Country, pre-electrification, would agree with Jensen.
Sometimes these women told me something that was so sad I never forgot it. I heard it many times, but I’ll never forget the first woman who said it to me. She was a very old woman who lived on a very remote and isolated ranch—I had to drive hours just to get out there—up in the Hill Country near Burnet. She said, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am?” Well, indeed, I had noticed, without really seeing the significance, that many of these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, were much more stooped and bent than women, even elderly women, in New York. And she said: “I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.” Another woman said to me, “You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.”
Thanks! I'm glad folks are interested.
Now I'm going to be a humorless scold about this; the problems that California has are due to a combination of its policies and its luck. The housing crisis that came to California was a slow burn caused by gradually-applied restrictions on growth which made it so when boom times came, the market couldn't respond. The boom time, in scale and duration, is unique to California, but the policies aren't, which is why Austin is going through the same thing that various California cities do where the rent rises, homelessness surges, and the main response of the city is to obey the very angry citizens and chase homeless people from place to place, trashing their belongings as they go.
The policies are already there. To the extent that California is responsible, it's by displacing people out of the state. Just as in California, the homeless are demonized as outsiders, when they're mostly just people who used to be housed there, but can no longer afford the rent.
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