grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
Housing Poster. Series index here.
User ID: 197
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2mo 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?
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
2mo 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
2mo ago
Thank you for the heads-up; fixed!
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
2mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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".
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 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.
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.
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