grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
Housing Poster. Series index here.
User ID: 197
As real life continues to contain a lot of stuff, my posting continues to be more occasional, so this is a twofer.
First, Ben Christopher for Calmatters, "Los Angeles’ one weird trick to build affordable housing at no public cost". (Part of an itinerant series on housing, mostly in California. Also at TheSchism.)
"Affordable housing" in California generally means deed-restricted subsidized housing, discussed in depth here. It involves specialized nonprofit developers, a "layer cake" of various granting agencies, a web of everything-bagel requirements from union-only labor to LEED Platinum that really add up.
In December of 2022, the Mayor of LA, Karen Bass, signed Executive Directive 1, which put a sixty-day approval timeline on 100% below-market rate project and skip the discretionary and environmental review processes, but without adding the usual everything-bagel requirements. These projects also get so-called "density bonus" concessions, which allow them to ignore or soften a variety of local restrictions on setbacks, density, height, and so on.
As a result, no public subsidy is needed, and the market just... produces these things.
Though publicly available data on financing is sparse, an early analysis of the program by the pro-housing advocacy group Abundant Housing LA estimated that roughly three-fourths of affordable units proposed through the policy are doing so without any public money.
More details from Benjamin Schrader here and from Luca Gattoni-Celli here. It's especially important because the Bay Area is planning on shoveling enormous amounts of public money at the problem (meme form here), and maybe there's another way.
The key thing here is to Voltron together "ministerial approval and sixty-day timeline" with "unlimited waivers and super density bonus", without sandbagging it somehow. As one of the developers in the article puts it: “To go from acquiring a lot to putting a shovel in the ground in less than a year is kind of unheard of.”
However, nothing good can last; this was accidental, kind of like the time Rhode Island legalized prostitution. David Zahniser for the Los Angeles Times, "Faced with community complaints, Mayor Karen Bass retools her affordable housing strategy".
But ED1 also sparked a backlash from some community groups. Tenant advocates said too many ED1 projects are triggering the demolition of rent-controlled apartments, upending the lives of renters. Homeowner groups complained that ED1 projects have been proposed in historic preservation districts, raising the specter of six-story apartment buildings sprouting up next to stately Victorians and rows of Arts and Crafts bungalows.
The changes would exclude sites with twelve or more rent-controlled properties (regardless of residents' incomes), historic districts, and very high fire hazard severity zones (which might make sense, but you can still build everything else there). Everyone wants to dip their beak.
Pete Rodriguez, Western District vice president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, said any permanent ED1 ordinance should include provisions that create “more middle-class jobs,” such as requirements for a prevailing wage.
Cindy Chvatal, co-founder of the group United Neighbors, which has pushed back against proposals to rezone lower-density neighborhoods, was far more upbeat. She credited Bass for working with an array of community groups over several months to address concerns about ED1, including the encroachment into historic districts.
(United Neighbors is closely related to Livable California, one of the state's preeminent NIMBY organizations.)
It's unclear how much of an actual effect this will have. Much will depend on whether the policy is expanded or curtailed, going forward.
It’s still far from clear how much of an effect the latest changes will have. Of the more than 200 project applications filed so far, 10 were proposed in historic districts, according to the mayor’s team. Fewer than 10 were proposed on sites with 12 or more rent-controlled apartments, they said.
Also, this week in Berkeley, land of the historic homeless encampment, remember the sacred parking lot, last seen in 2021 where the developer won a ruling?
Ally Markovich for Berkeleyside, "Berkeley will buy Ohlone shellmound site, return it to Indigenous land trust". In March, the city bought the property (mostly with money from one of the indigenous-activist groups) and gave it to the tribe.
The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance today authorizing the purchase, making Berkeley among the first in the country to outright return land to Indigenous people. The city will purchase the property with $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and $1.5 million from the city’s general fund.
How, might you ask, did the Sogorea Te' get twenty-five million dollars, which seems like a lot for a local band of busybodies?
The money for the purchase comes primarily from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Bolstered by a $20 million contribution from the Kataly Foundation, a family foundation funded by Regan Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel chain and her husband Chris Olin, Sogorea Te’ appears to be the best-funded organization in the nationwide land-back movement, based on tax records reviewed by Berkeleyside.
The city has, in total, spent five and a half million dollars on this.
Berkeley is still on the hook for $4 million for mishandling the application to build housing on the site. In February, an Alameda County Superior Court judge fined Berkeley $2.6 million for violating the Housing Accountability Act when it denied Ruegg & Ellsworth’s application for a housing project on the site. Berkeley was also ordered to pay $1.4 million for attorney fees.
(This may seem like a lot, but Berkeley's annual city budget is over half a billion dollars, or about five thousand dollars per resident.)
The people who now have the land are celebrating.
“We set down a prayer here when we danced just now,” said Gould. “We are using our bodies to put down those prayers because underneath this asphalt our ancestors still hear us and they are calling on us to continue. This is not the end of it. This is the beginning of a new chapter.”
As noted in the 2018 EIR, this is not actually a shellmound or burial ground, but the Ohlone believe that it is, and everyone here is respecting their beliefs. (This is not noted in the article. I've requested a correction.) I remember, but cannot find, some initiative to use "indigenous ways of knowing" or the like in public policy. This is what this looks like in practice.
NBC Bay Area, "Protests continue as large walls surround People's Park in Berkeley". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Also at theschism.)
(Notes on browsing: some of these links are soft-paywalled; prepend archive.today or 12ft.io to circumvent if you run into trouble. Nitter is dead and Twitter doesn't allow logged-out browsing; replace twitter.com with twiiit.com and try repeatedly to see entire threads, but anonymous browsing of Twitter is gradually going away, alas.)
I've covered historic laundromats and sacred parking lots, but what about a historic homeless encampment?
In 1969, some Berkeley locals attempted to make a vacant University-owned lot into a "power to the people" park. The University decided to make it into a soccer field and evicted them a month later. Later that day, at a rally on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Berkeley student President suggested that the thousands of people there either "take the park" or "go down to the park" (accounts differ), later saying that he'd never intended to precipitate a riot. The crowd grew to about six thousand people and fought police, who killed one student and blinded another.
The park has stayed as it was since then. UC Berkeley has attempted to develop it, first into a soccer field, then in the 1990s into a volleyball court (made unusable by protests), then in the 2010s in an unclear way which involved a protester falling out of a tree they were sleeping in, and most recently starting in 2018, into student housing with a historical monument and permanent supportive housing for currently homeless people.
The status quo involves police being called to the park roughly every six hours on average as of 2018, colorful incidents like a woman force-feeding meth to a two year old, and three people dying there within a six-month span. (There are forty to fifty residents at a given time.) The general vibe from students matches up.
The 2018 plan started having public meetings in 2020; when construction fencing was built in 2021, protesters tore it down; a group calling itself "Defend People's Park" occupied it and posted letters about how an attempt to develop the site is "gentrification", the university could develop "other existing properties", the proposed nonprofit developer for the supportive housing has donors which include "the Home Depot Foundation, a company that profits off construction", and so on.
Legal struggles are related to the 2022 lawsuit to use CEQA to cap enrollment at Berkeley and a lawsuit using CEQA to claim that student noise is an environmental impact. In the summer of 2022, SB 886 exempted student housing (with caveats and tradeoffs) from CEQA, and AB 1307 explicitly exempted unamplified voices from CEQA consideration. The site has been one of about 350 locally-designated "Berkeley Landmarks" (one for every three hundred and forty Berkeleyans) since 1984, but was added to the National Register of Historic Places that summer as well in an effort to dissuade development. (The National Trust sent a letter in support of that student-noise lawsuit.) Amid all this, RCD, the nonprofit developer attached for the supportive housing, left the project, citing delays and uncertainty. The State Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in the summer of 2023, but the case may be moot in light of AB 1307. The university says yes, and "Make UC a Good Neighbor" says no. Search here for S279242 for updates.
And that brings us to this January. On the night of the fourth, police cleared the park in preparation for construction, putting up a wall of shipping containers which they covered in barbed wire the next week to prevent people from climbing them.
Local opponents of the project take the position that "Building housing should not require a militarized police state", which seems to indicate support for a kind of heckler's veto. And, of course, it should be built "somewhere else". (This meme, basically.) Kian Goh, professor of urban planning at UCLA: "So, do places of historical and present political struggle not matter at all to yimbys? Or do they just not matter as much as new housing?".
Construction appears to be proceeding, after more than fifty years of stasis. Noah Smith attempts to steelman the NIMBYs, but I don't find it convincing. I'm sure the people who cheered burning down subsidized housing in Minneapolis saw themselves as heroes, but that doesn't make them any less wrong.
As a postscript, the City Council member representing the district of Berkeley including People's Park is Rigel Robinson, who entered office at 22 as the youngest ever councilmember, and was generally expected to be the next mayor. He abruptly resigned on the ninth, ending what had been a promising political career, likely due to death threats stuck to his front door. The Mayor of Berkeley wrote a supportive opinion piece; a fellow councilmember wrote a similar letter. On the other hand, a sitting councilmember in neighboring Emeryville retweeted "Sure sounds like going YIMBY ruined it for him. Here's to running more real estate vultures out in 2024 🥂". People are polarized about this. It's made the news.
I'm going to nutpick one of the comments from an article on his resignation, as a treat.
The Park People could care less about council members, the next one will be equally clueless about the Park's existence; the Park is beyond municipal dictatorship, it is a world-level political symbol that has now been "awakened" again. The Big Surprise will be the decision by the State Supreme Court to find AB 1307 unconstitutional.
If only people could live inside a world-level political symbol. Current plans for construction at the site are here.
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
Okay, that's fair! So, to be clear, this is a question of fact, and if the best estimate we currently have says that puberty blockers are, in particular circumstances, linked to a lower risk of suicide, then you wouldn't have an objection?
they have no evidence that it reduces the risk
I'm aware of Turban et al. (2020) and Tordoff et al. (2022). Note that as of 2018, a literature review concluded that "the psychosocial effects of gender-affirming hormones in transgender youth have not yet been adequately assessed". So at that point, the right thing to tell patients and parents would be different. But it looks like you can reasonably say that puberty blockers are indicated in certain circumstances, and not using them carries an increased risk.
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.
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
1yr ago
Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either.
Maybe the folks here do, because we're all policy wonks ignorant of politics. But I've run into people in the wake of the 2016 election who didn't know what Clinton's position was on opioids, or on Appalachian economic development, or on climate policy, or on Net Neutrality.
This is enough of a problem that if you explain Republican policies in a reasonably objective way to people, they'll frequently think that you're making things up, because of course no one would do something that evil. (Example, example, example.)
The modal voter isn't nearly as well-informed as you seem to think they are. I don't know to what extent the debates would inform them on policy (I've written elsewhere on the potential value of the format), but the starting place isn't where you're describing it.
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.
Yes, but the contents also matter, and this is just lazy of you. Who do you think is going to write about this sort of thing? The right?
Yglesias is pointing out that the stated positions of conservative interest groups (e.g., no abortion even in cases of rape our incest) are sometimes really unpopular (per Gallup polls quoted by the FRC), and conservative politicians have become quite good at tiptoeing around this.
DFP did some surveys that discovered that Republicans specifically had some weird ideas about the party's platform; a majority thought they had a healthcare plan that would protect people with pre-existing conditions and opposes the rollback of certain environmental protection rules, nearly half thinks they want to expand Medicaid. These are all wrong. People don't know the party's platform.
The Vox article involved Sarah Kliff interviewing a lot of people who had lost their healthcare under Republican policies, who said things like:
“We all need it,” Oller told me when I asked about the fact that Trump and congressional Republicans had promised Obamacare repeal. “You can’t get rid of it.”
Or:
“I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives,” says Debbie Mills, an Obamacare enrollee who supported Trump. “I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?”
What part of this do you think is fake or misleading? A significant portion of voters don't know their party's platform, and won't believe it if you tell them because it sounds bad.
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
1yr ago
I don't think there's the symmetry you think there is. Institutions on the right are specifically very keen on women in those circumstances carrying to term.
On the left, it's not so much the idea that women in the 40th week can and should and would just change their minds like that, but rather that in situations like, say, this one, having the heavy hand of the government involved will just make things worse. And that narrowly written exceptions don't actually help, given situations like this.
The idea is, if I understand correctly, that the heavy hand of the law will just make things worse, because the Shirley exception is not an actual usable piece of law.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
I agree that Tordoff et al.'s work is of lesser quality, and that there simply doesn't exist gold-standard evidence on this issue. I find Turban et al.'s work more convincing.
This is the quality of the evidence base on which doctors are sterilizing children and making lifelong medical patients out of them.
To be clear, we're talking about puberty blockers, which "are falsely claimed to cause infertility and to be irreversible, despite no substantiated evidence".
The WPATH standards, which are on the radical side of global medical opinion (Scandinavian rules, as @arjin_ferman points out, are much more restrictive) emphasize social transition, then possibly puberty blockers, then possibly cross-sex hormones, then possibly surgery. To the extent that it looks like this standard of care isn't being followed, those reports are themselves untrustworthy.
If you're upset about something going on in the world, it behooves you to make sure you're clear on what's actually going on.
an unverified twitter account claiming to be the child in question is saying, despite all the facts in the article being correct, that they don't place the same emotional valence or cause and effect on it that the mother in the story does
First, there are no verified accounts on Twitter any more. The legacy policy required that accounts be "authentic"; the new policy requires that accounts be "non-deceptive", but in no way actually checks that.
Second, they don't claim that "all the facts in the article [are] correct". From the article:
Within a semester, Casey went from all As and Bs to a report card dotted with Ds and Fs.
From the thread:
The article mentions that my grades dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s in a semester. This is a completely exaggerated statement. My grades were on a steady decline since 2020 due to unrelated mental health concerns.
From the article:
Caroline assumed counseling at the center would help Casey sort things out. But in retrospect, she says, what the psychologist at the center did was solidify the idea that Casey needed medical intervention for his gender distress.
From the thread:
I was in counseling with the Washington University transgender care center in which I was treated amazingly by my counselor. She was a friend to me and offered a great amount of support. This was taken away when my mom revoked consent for the Supprelin.
The article doesn't make any effort to determine that the effect of counseling was, if the counselor recommended or encouraged medical intervention, just repeats Caroline's opinion. It leaves an unchallenged implication; the kid denying it is meaningful.
They especially and annoyingly split hairs in that they admit the doctors said trans teens kill themselves without treatment, but the doctors never said they would specifically. See, totally no longer pressuring the parent!
Is there a way to give informed consent here that isn't pressure under this rubric? Hey, if you don't get this shot, you're much more likely to die of COVID, but we're not pressuring you, right? Doctors are supposed to explain risks and benefits to the patient for any procedure; how can they provide information without "pressuring" someone?
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.
Darrell Owens in The Discourse Lounge, "YIMBYs Triumph In California". (Part of a migratory series on housing, mostly in California, also at theschism.)
This wasn't supposed to be a big year in the Legislature. It's an election year, which means excuses and cowardice and small-c conservatism. It's why there was no SB 827 or SB 50, no mass-upzoning bill. But it was a surprisingly successful year in the Legislature for the YIMBYs, maybe even more so than last year. The governor has yet to sign these, but he's expected to. California has no pocket veto, so if he takes no action, they become law at the end of September.
First, the bills that didn't make it.
-
AB 2053 (California Social Housing Act) would have established a state agency to "produce and preserve mixed-income homes that are union built, sustainable, collectively owned, affordable for all income levels, and are financially self-sustaining". It would also have provided a mechanism for the state to engage in counter-cyclical construction when it's cheap and jobs are scarce. It made it through the Assembly, but failed to advance from Senate Governance and Finance by one vote. More here from Alex Lee, the author.
-
AB 2656, which isn't exactly major, but would have outlawed CEQA shenanigans as seen in the 469 Stevenson case in San Francisco by interpreting them as a denial under the Housing Accountability Act. It passed its committees and the Assembly, but disappeared in the Senate Appropriations black hole. This indicates just how much of a third-rail any sort of CEQA reform is.
-
SB 917 (Seamless Transit Transformation Act) passed its votes with near unanimity, but Assembly Appropriations spiked it for unclear reasons. It would have placed a timeline on the harmonization of the more than twenty transit agencies in the Bay Area, covering wayfinding and real-time transit data, establishing free transfers, multi-agency passes, and planning a unified regional network. Streetsblog opines that it will still have a significant impact.
And the major bills that did.
-
AB 2011 (Affordable Housing and High Road Jobs Act) allows residential development on commercial sites; as a compromise, it doesn't require union labor, but it does require preference be given to apprenticeship programs. This got the Carpenters' Union on board, though not the broader Trades Union. It requires a certain proportion of subsidized units, and comes with minsterial approval, which means its projects are exempt from CEQA. It could make 1.6-2.4 million more units feasible statewide.
-
SB 6 (Middle Class Housing Act), similar to AB 2011, also allows housing in commercial zones without specific subsidized percentages, but requires union labor and does not provide ministerial approval. Here's a comparison of the two bills.
-
AB 2097 (Parking reform), a reboot of last year's AB 1401, which was lost in Appropriations. There have been some amendments; cities can argue (using a "preponderance of evidence") that they really need parking, unless twenty percent of the housing is set aside for low-income, elderly, or disabled people, or students, or the project is twenty units or smaller.
-
SB 886 (CEQA exemption for student housing) is a CEQA reform that actually did pass; it exempts (certain) student housing projects. This doesn't directly address the UC Berkeley enrollment mess, but it does address one of the underlying causes, which was the city of Berkeley's blocking of student housing.
Matt Yglesias is very excited:
I think it’s possible that California is going to substantially improve its housing situation over the next decade / The key isn’t any one of the bills that’s passed or any specific action taken by the governor or the AG, it’s that they now seem to have a durable political coalition in place that wants to see more homes built and keeps taking new swings at it.
This is something that Owens covers as well. Until now, the Trades have blocked any housing reform which didn't require union labor. But AB 2011 passed without the Trades' approval; the Carpenters' unions (along with public employee unions, teacher unions, and the SEIU) showed up and advocated for the bill. There is now a path to major reform that doesn't require the Trades. Much is possible that previously wasn't.
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
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
1yr ago
Sorry, can you be clearer about what you think is "false for the majority"?
I understand that you may not have seen that precise argument... but it's in the quotes upthread. “You can’t get rid of it.” “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives." Surely this bad thing can't actually happen.
As it's written:
Once upon a time, I believed that the extinction of humanity was not allowed. And others who call themselves rationalists, may yet have things they trust. They might be called "positive-sum games", or "democracy", or "technology", but they are sacred. The mark of this sacredness is that the trustworthy thing can't lead to anything really bad; or they can't be permanently defaced, at least not without a compensatory silver lining. In that sense they can be trusted, even if a few bad things happen here and there.
There absolutely is disbelief that awful things could actually happen; you see it everywhere. Surely it won't be that bad. Surely people will be reasonable. Surely it will work out for the best.
I think you're being overly narrow in what you think of as The Shirley Exception.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
"I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide." Or at least, the turn of the legislative season. Some life changes have led to Less Posting, as I've had to focus on more meatspace matters. But the legislative roundup is worth doing. Here's my understanding and my take on the 2022-2023 California legislative season as it relates to housing. (See also Alfred Twu's very detailed writeup (PDF).)
(Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Also at /r/theschism.)
This has largely been a successful year. While the YIMBYs didn't get everything they wanted, they got a lot of it, and they are very happy. The major wins:
- SB 423 (CA YIMBY), an extension of 2017's SB 35 (previously seen here). It also adds a special timeline just for San Francisco, which means that most development there will be by-right by spring of 2024. (That piece is from Annie Fryman, former legislative aide to Senator Scott Wiener and the author of the original SB 35.) The AB 2011-style labor provisions were a success. Expect to see more in this vein going forward.
- SB 4 (CA YIMBY), a revival of 2020's SB 899, which would allow churches and nonprofit schools to build housing on their land.
- AB 1633 (CA YIMBY), very mild CEQA reform which nevertheless faced stiff opposition from everyone from environmental to trade groups, because it meant less leverage. Chris Elmendorf has a good thread noting that most bills trade one set of constraints for another. For example, SB 423 trades local discretion for union labor and subsidized housing requirements. (Shades of pretextual planning, here.) This just gets rid of something bad, period, close to how AB 2097, which got rid of parking requirements, did. I've been asked how close we are to actually solving the problem; to the extent that it's solved, it will be because of bills like this.
- AB 835 (CA YIMBY), which would direct the State Fire Marshal to develop standards for single-stairway buildings. This is one of those technical reforms that is showing up in a variety of places; here's a policy brief.
The major losses:
- AB 68 (CA YIMBY), the Housing and Climate Solutions Act. As predicted, it's a two-year bill, so expect to see it in next year's roundup. It's a mass upzoning in the vein of SB 827 and SB 50, but the details are yet to be hashed out.
- AB 309 (CA YIMBY), a revival of AB 2053, which would take the first steps in establishing a statewide social housing agency. It was vetoed by the Governor, citing costs.
Note that while the Governor's veto can theoretically be overriden by a two-thirds vote, that hasn't happened since 1980. Also vetoed despite passing the Legislature: SB 58, psychedelics decriminalization (veto message) and SB 403, banning caste discrimination (veto message).
There's some speculation that Governor Newsom is trying to avoid signing anything that would look bad during a Presidential run. Hot take: "Californians suffering so their governor can finish 4th in New Hampshire, they have more in common with Florida than they think".
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2yr ago
Thanks! I'd previously seen the difference between the Swedish model and WPATH recommendations, and kinda dead-ended there, because I'm not a researcher, just a layman trying to do my homework. (For example, I don't know how you could ethically do an RCT on puberty blockers in children and adolescents.)
I do notice that the NICE report excludes Turban et al. (the strongest evidence I'm aware of that puberty blockers reduce the risk of suicide) with the explanation "Intervention – data for GnRH analogues not reported separately from other interventions". (I don't understand why the criteria were set to exclude nearly every study.) On page 19 and following, it relies entirely on de Vries et al. (2011), which is a prospective study of seventy people, to conclude that "This study provides very low certainty evidence that treatment with GnRH analogues, before starting gender-affirming hormones, may reduce depression." So, in plain terms, it looks promising, but we don't have enough information to have a strong opinion.
It looks like the state of evidence is different now than it was in 2018. These questions are, generally speaking, answerable, and it looks like the best information we have indicates that puberty blockers reduce the risk of suicide in adolescents with gender dysphoria. Perhaps a good use of time would be to develop better diagnostic tools so that dysphoric adolescents who will likely not pursue transition aren't offered puberty blockers, and those who likely will, are.
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
11mo ago
I think they just really like abortion and the idea that a woman can change her mind about child rearing at any time.
Okay, but why do you think that? Yglesias is pointing to the stated positions of mainstream conservative interest groups. You're pointing to what, exactly?
This is just a weaponization of womans tears argument.
You're referring to Richard Hanania's idea that women get what they want by pitifully crying so that men will look or feel like monsters by not acceding to their demands?
I understand that you're citing your own lived experience here, but maybe we can do better than that? "Woman's tears" didn't help the 13 year old who's now raising a baby. "Woman's tears" didn't make it so the woman carrying a corpse didn't have to fly halfway across the country and pay twenty-five thousand dollars to save her own life. But the people putting these policies in place were very clear that Shirley these things would not be allowed to happen. Or that Shirley, it would happen to someone else. (If you can stomach reading an advocate's view, here's Jill Filipovic explaining why abortion policy is so hard for precisely that reason.)
The world you're describing, where women can easily just cry to get whatever they want, does not appear to be the world in which we live, certainly not in terms of abortion policy.
Medical care for the indigent and elderly is an extraordinarily popular policy. While I'm curious about why you think it's "destructive", either way, I don't think you need an extra explanation about "women's tears" to explain why very popular policies are hard to dismantle.
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
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?
Jeanne Kuang for CalMatters, "Abundance meets resistance: Are Democrats finally ready to go all in on building housing?". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)
Those of you who have followed this series may remember the sad history of attempting to upzone around transit in California. It's a straightforward idea: transit infrastructure is expensive to build, more people will ride it if more people live near the stations, and it's a bad idea for cities to enforce apartment bans in those areas. California has made two major attempts in the last decade to fix this, and is embarking on a third.
First, 2018's SB 827, which didn't even make it out of committee. Then, 2019's SB 50, which was delayed until 2020 and then failed to pass the Senate. Since then, there have been some significant reforms; see 2021, 2022, and 2023. But the YIMBYs haven't taken another big swing since 2020, and they're doing that and more this year.
The latter two bills have been absorbed into the budget process, which is the Governor's way of pushing them forward. The former has not.
The politics are interesting. The SB 79 Housing committee hearing is worth watching; the chair, Aisha Wahab, was opposed to the bill, but it passed by a single vote. (This is called "rolling the chair", and it's a big lift.) And then it happened again, in the Local Government committee, the chair, Maria Elena Durazo, opposed the bill, and it again passed by a single vote; it's headed to the Senate floor for a likely vote in early June.
The stunning thing here is that, despite the years that have passed since 2018, the discourse among the bill's opponents hasn't changed. Because this is California, and most of them are Democrats, they oppose it from the left, and seemingly sincerely; Wahab talks about how "affordable" (i.e., subsidized) housing would be preferable, but there's no mention of how to pay for that, so in practice, the alternative is what we've been doing for the last couple decades, i.e., nothing. The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe. And there's generally an idea that market rate housing is bad, but affordable housing is good, and somehow if we outlaw the former, the latter will prosper. This has clearly not happened.
This rhymes with the current Abundance discourse, which has been extensive. (I can't do it full justice, but the basic idea is that we've regulated the government into an inability to accomplish anything, and we should stop doing that. It's most dire in housing, but the same idea applies elsewhere.) Reactions on a national scale oddly mirror the left-NIMBY discourse in California, ranging from Zephyr Teachout describing zoning reform as "relatively small-bore" to Robert Jensen suggesting that maybe poverty and death would be better for the environment instead. (As a treat, enjoy Sam Seder beclowning himself in front of Ezra Klein.)
My theory of this, developed over a series of infuriatingly circular conversations, is that there's a faction which is very attached to the idea that every problem is caused by a failure to write big enough checks or a failure to sufficiently tax (or if you're edgy, guillotine) the wealthy. So, if housing is unaffordable, it must be because we haven't sufficiently subsidized below-market-rate housing, or down payment assistance, or because rich people are hoarding homes and leaving them empty, and if you think otherwise, you must be simping for billionaires. This view is incompatible with understanding the details; for example, in that Sam Seder interview, Seder would talk about the corrupting power of money, Klein would talk about cartels of homeowners, Seder would say that that's just more corrupting power of money, but Seder's approach is very specifically to target oligarchs and corporations, not homeowners.
And this is the kind of equivocation I see in the best-regarded left critique of Abundance I could find, from Sandeep Vaheesan at The Boston Review. He gets the details wrong--he points to the government's support of nuclear power via liability limitation and ignores ALARA; he claims that upzoning doesn't actually produce more housing (so why do the NIMBYs fight so hard?); he defends the exorbitant rents in San Francisco by saying that it's a "superstar" city unlike Houston (is San Jose?)--but at its core, he wishes the book had clear villains like Thomas Piketty's "clear portrait of patrimonial capitalists and lavishly compensated executives thriving at the expense of everyone else". His proposed solutions are, naturally, to break up large corporations and to write bigger checks to bureaucrats so they can do more paperwork.
At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).
"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." This sounds like a promise, but in California's case, it's a warning. The problems, contradictions, and failures of blue governance are at their sharpest here, and if there's a way forward, it'll be here as well.
More options
Context Copy link