grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
Housing Poster. Series index here.
User ID: 197
I pointed to congressional votes.
This doesn't indicate what you think it does. Again, the started reason is that government involvement doesn't help and stated exceptions don't actually work. Which looks to be the case!
I don't think anyone out there with clout is stating that they want women to be able to abort at forty weeks on a whim the same way major organizations on the right say they want rape victims to be forced to carry to term.
Is this some sort of gish gallop of cases that maybe actually happened (almost certainly exaggerated in some area)?
These are the cases that I linked above; did you follow the links? I think I've described them pretty reasonably.
OTOH, we have the case of Kermit Gosnell, who is not even a 1 of 1.
The position here, which makes sense to me, was that if you make abortion hard to access, women will go to less reputable providers, not that Kermit Gosnell was a great guy doing a good job.
Many of the things that abortion activists feel are "onerous" regulations are simply reaction to his practice
These rules, which are somewhat obsolete in the wake of Dobbs since the point was to make abortion less accessible, date to well before Gosnell's crimes were discovered, and they go well beyond what would be required for safety.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Thanks! I'm glad folks are interested.
(even if only to keep more Californians in California and not dragging their policies to me)
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.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
7mo ago
And that Shirley exception post is [...] a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.
I saw this this week, and I thought of you.
Rather than stay at the hospital to wait for infection to set in, Farmer went home to wait, monitoring her temperature and her pain. On Aug. 4, she called her state senator, Bill White, and explained her situation to an aide.
He told her, "That’s not what the law was designed for. It’s designed to protect the woman’s life."
"It’s not protecting me. We have to wait for the heartbeat (to stop). There’s no chance for a baby; she’s not going to make it. It’s putting my life in danger. We have to wait for more complications. I’m 41, it’s not something I can recover from quickly. I could lose my uterus, there’s a lot of things that could happen," Farmer said she remembers telling him. "We just want to move on, we just want to grieve."
The aide told her he would reach out to Attorney General Eric Schmitt, and also connected her with Choices Medical Services, "which is basically an anti-abortion clinic" in Joplin, Farmer said. She never heard back about what Schmitt said.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
Perhaps I've been unclear. I also dislike vandalism. Not as much as I dislike violent extremism, but I find it distasteful and I don't endorse it. I'm providing some context for why people feel so strongly, but I'm not endorsing vandalism. I hope that clears things up.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
There is no way to bring a person back on their original development trajectory after they have been affected by blockers.
Well, yes, in a very literal sense, there's no such thing as an action without consequences in the most general sense, but the drugs do not appear to be horribly dangerous in the general sense, which is why they're used for kids who are going through puberty at the wrong time.
For scale, I'd point out that we regularly perform surgery on healthy adolescents, as well as on infants, sometimes in ways that make them very definitely infertile, but despite considerable activism, this hasn't become nearly as much of a major issue, likely because these things are done to make children more gender-conforming, as opposed to less.
The level of concern about potential bone-density impacts, for example, seems disproportionate compared to the way we disregard much more serious issues when no one involved is gender-nonconforming.
Keep in mind that the reports that these reports are untrustworthy, are themselves untrustworthy.
Reed's claims are pretty straightforward: the standards of care that the clinic was supposedly following were flagrantly violated. This should be, in theory, simple to resolve, modulo medical privacy issues. The fact that people who were at the clinic says that their experience doesn't match what she reported seems at least somewhat relevant.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Are folks here familiar with Scary Pockets? They do a lot of funkified covers, e.g., "Crazy", "I Want It That Way", "Toxic", and many, many others.
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.
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
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
1mo ago
Ideally, it would work like that. And with the Carpenters' union, it has; back in 2023, they broke off from the Building Trades and cut a deal where they'd settle for "prevailing wage" (pay union rates, whether you hire union workers or not) rather than "skilled and trained" (hire only union workers). It raises costs significantly, but it doesn't essentially make the bill a dead letter, which is what the Trades consistently push for.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
Thank you for the heads-up; fixed!
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
7d ago
Lauren Rosenhall, Soumya Karlamanga, and Adam Nagourney for the New York Times, "California Rolls Back Its Landmark Environmental Law" (archive) (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at theschism.) Other coverage is available from Eric Levitz at Vox, Henry Grabar at Slate, Ben Christopher at CalMatters, and Taryn Luna and Liam Dillon at the Los Angeles Times. Some of this work draws from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks' Select Committee on Permitting Reform, which issued its final report earlier this year.
In our last episode, there were three major reforms in play for this year's legislative season: zoning reform (SB 79), improving the CEQA exemption for infill housing (AB 609), and broad CEQA reform (SB 607). SB 79 is currently in the Assembly (it passed Assembly Housing 9-2, and now goes to Assembly Local Government, then the floor, then Senate concurrence, then the Governor's desk), but in a surprise move, Newsom, whose inaction I've previously complained about, pulled CEQA reform into this year's budget process, which essentially makes it a must-pass piece of legislation. There's some room for short negotiation, but it's fast-paced, and if the budget isn't passed, the legislators don't get paid until it is. (There is, as I understand it, no back pay, so it's a real penalty.)
CEQA is arguably the most significant non-zoning barrier to housing production (here's a short selection of shenaniganry, and I've covered it here and here); the CA YIMBY legislative director described this as "probably the most important thing California has done on housing in the present YIMBY moment" and explained how we got here.
The main opponents here were the usual Livable California NIMBYs, but also the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California (the "Trades"). On first glance, environmental review doesn't seem connected to labor, but because CEQA provides an all-purpose method of delay (and delay costs money), it's used to extract concessions, like the use of union labor, in exchange for not delaying the project. Note that nearly 90% of the construction workforce is non-union; the Trades are, in effect, taking work away from a lot of construction workers in order to ensure much higher pay for the few union construction workers, who mostly work on government projects or subsidized housing which mandates union labor.
There was, during this process, an intense argument, occurring mostly behind-the-scenes, about what labor standards should look like. The expected proposal was that projects skipping environmental review would have to pay higher, but nowhere near union rate, wages; this would probably not have had a significant effect on the bill's usefulness, since the required wages were close to the median wage for construction workers. This did not mollify the Trades, who claimed that it "will compel our workers to be shackled and start singing chain gang songs"; their official opposition letter described it as "a bill that masquerades as housing reform while launching an all-out assault on the livelihoods, health, and dignity of California construction workers".
But a few days later, the wage stuff was completely removed; the expanded CEQA infill exemption simply exempts most infill projects from environmental review, period. (Projects above eighty-five feet, which do require union labor, generally use more-expensive Type I construction anyway.)
In a bit more detail, one of the components of the originally proposed reform was removing a lowered standard for demanding a full environmental impact statement. Under existing law, if an agency makes a negative declaration (i.e., "there isn't a meaningful environmental impact here"), they can be forced to reconsider that under a "fair argument" standard, which is much lower than a "reasonable person" standard; this incentivizes agencies to do unnecessary EIRs to avoid the chance that some crank will force them to do one anyway. This reform has been removed; the "fair argument" standard remains.
For more deep dives, see Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and Senator Scott Wiener (the original authors of these reforms) being interviewed by David Roberts for Volts, "The fight to build faster in California", which is slightly outdated, as it was recorded before the final bill was passed; see also the same two legislators being interviewed by Derek Thompson for Plain English, "How Abundance Won in California". (For a contrast, see Roberts' 2023 interview with Johanna Bozuwa from the Climate and Community Project, "The progressive take on the permitting debate", which is a defense of complex, discretionary permitting.)
Thompson is, of course, Ezra Klein's coauthor on Abundance, as covered in the last installment, and Newsom, in the press conference announcing the signing, specifically gave a shout-out to the concept and to Klein (though not Thompson). (Note Senator Aisha Wahab, the Housing chair, at left wearing black, pulling some faces at that.) Newsom, understandably, made a meal of this; the full press conference is here.
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
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
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.
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
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.
It's Morning in California. Rather, it's Morning in the legislative season, a time when big ideas seem possible, before they disappear into a swamp of obscure pitfalls and shenaniganry. Here's my understanding of the current roster of big housing bills this year, and the threats and potential involved. See also Alfred Twu's very detailed writeup (PDF).
(Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California, also at theschism.)
Some common themes:
- CEQA, the California version of NEPA, is a problem, and though it's right up there with Prop 13 as a Third Rail in California politics, many of the housing bills this year center around exempting projects from CEQA, especially after a particularly egregious use to block student housing because the students themselves would constitute an environmental impact. (I'm reminded of SourceWatch's very cursed Precautionary Principle chart.)
- Last year's AB 2011 was a particularly big deal, not because of its contents, but because Assemblymember Wicks (previously seen here) managed to get the carpenters' union on board. The Building Trades have been adamant in their demands (basically, require that workers on streamlined projects attended a particular union training program), which the YIMBYs consider a dealbreaker. The compromise in AB 2011 was to provide various benefits to any worker on those projects, and to give preferences to graduates of union apprenticeship programs. There's a huge difference in California politics between "the unions oppose" and "the unions are divided". This mainly applies to SB 423, but the model will likely be tried in plenty of other bills.
The major bills:
- AB 68 (CA YIMBY), the Housing and Climate Solutions Act. (Not to be confused with 2019's AB 68, part of the push to legalize ADUs). This will likely be a two-year bill, but it's a mass upzoning in the vein of SB 827 and SB 50. Those bills failed, so the YIMBYs are taking a different tack: this is a collaboration between California YIMBY and the Nature Conservancy, as it would not only make it easier to build in cities, it would make it harder to build in the wilderness, under the Gain/Maintain/Sustain rubric outlined here. Details are still in flux, but Livable California is furious. Much of how this goes will depend on how labor gets on board.
- SB 423 (CA YIMBY), an extension of 2017's SB 35 (previously seen here). The original SB 35 streamlined approvals (including CEQA exemptions) for general plan-compliant projects in cities behind on their housing goals. It was a compromise, which got the Building Trades on board: all-subsidized projects could pay prevailing wage, but market-rate projects had to use "Skilled and Trained" labor, which is extremely scarce. As a result, the only SB 35 projects completed as of this point are subsidized. SB 423 would apply AB 2011-style labor standards to all projects and indefinitely extend the streamlining. The intra-labor fight has been intense. The carpenters are supporting in droves; the remaining trades are stopping just shy of calling them scabs.
- SB 4, a revival of 2020's SB 899, which would allow churches and nonprofit schools to build housing on their land. This is enormously popular, and was killed for unclear reasons last time. There's been some remarkable cross-pollination with SB 423 at the Capitol, with religious leaders supporting SB 423 and the carpenters supporting SB 4.
- AB 309 (CA YIMBY), a revival of AB 2053, which would take the first steps in establishing a statewide social housing agency.
- AB 1630 would exempt student housing within a thousand feet of a school from CEQA, as well as from a variety of building standards such as floor-area ratios, parking minimums, density limits, and height limits under forty feet. This is a direct response to the Berkeley ruling earlier this year.
These bills will of course change going forward, and some will certainly fail to advance, but this is the state of things at the top of the year.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
7d 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
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
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link