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
9mo ago
While I think "civil war" isn't the right lens through which to examine most divisions (can you imagine all the boomers fighting all the millennials, somehow?), I think you might be interested in Ilforte's two-by-two matrix of left/right, build/retreat, as a lens.
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
9mo 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.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
9mo ago
Deregulation to increase housing development feels like the biggest bang for your buck pro growth policy out there.
This is literally true. See Hsieh and Moretti (2019) and Caplan's addendum; the fact that people can't move to opportunity is a horrible drag on the economy as a whole.
Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.
Parking issues are down to economic illiteracy. Parking is scarce because the price is too low (zero almost everywhere), though the cost is distributed elsewhere. We value the time of people seeking parking at zero, so rather than charging enough for parking that there's a space or two free on every block, we mandate ever-larger parking craters in cities. Here's a summary of Donald Shoup's work on parking economics.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
9mo 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.
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.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
9mo 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
9mo 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.
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
9mo 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.
I saw this this week, and I thought of you.
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