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
10mo ago
I don't read the fora or the director's commentary, but that doesn't even make sense. Tarquin is the only white male in his party (I don't think Malack, an albino snake, counts); Laurin is female, and she and Miron and Shoulder Pads Guy are all drawn various shades of gray and brown.
Would you mind directly quoting the things which upset you? I'm curious what exactly happened there.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
For what it's worth, I read it as noticing when you say you're optimizing for one thing, and you coincidentally optimized for another, uncorrelated, thing, but maybe you didn't notice because of the halo effect.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
Do we do quotes here? I have some goodies from my commonplace; I'm skipping the Culture War stuff.
Never believe in a meritocracy in which no one is funny-looking.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, comment #209 on "Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege", in Making Light (2010-11-16)
BELKAR: People don’t just change who they are in an instant. It doesn’t work like that. It takes time, so you don’t even know you’re changing. Until one day, you’re just a bit different than you used to be and you can’t even tell what the hell happened.
Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick #957, "Takes One to Know One" (wiki) (2014-07-04)
It’s easy to mistakenly believe that you have learned something well enough to reason and solve problems when you are not actually made to attempt those things.
For the same reason, many people mistakenly believe that they can outrun a bear.
Justin Skycak on Twitter (xcancel) (2025-04-27)
Mulan, because even the originals work as capsules of the times they were written, so the historical inaccuracies and presentism in Disney's version was, in its own way, quite authentic!
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
Stuff can always go wrong. Nothing is certain until the occupancy permits are issued, and even then, who knows? Condo defect reform might be the next big fight, or single-stairway rules.
But the compromises were mainly horizontal, not vertical, in that they made the law apply in fewer places rather than making it less useful where it does apply; it's going to mean the most exactly where it needs to.
Of course it's possible that we could see a backlash, but the mechanism would have to be something like a ballot proposition, and the organized forces of stasis weren't even able to get enough signatures for that last time.
And more to the point, the legislature that passed SB 79 is way more YIMBY than the legislature that didn't let SB 827 make it out of committee. I'd like to think that five years from now, this will seem like an obvious good idea that everyone was, in retrospect, in favor of, and now we're arguing about the thing where all apartment buildings have to buy a useless million-dollar thing because "fire safety".
So, put the revolver down, if not away. This isn't the end, but it sure is a big step forward. There remains the implementation, of course, which is a lot more in-the-weeds stuff. Enjoy!
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
Is that actually happening? Do you have any reason at all to believe that we're not going to lose that functionality? The budget request says:
CSB duplicates substantial capabilities in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to investigate chemical-related mishaps. CSB generates unprompted studies of the chemical industry and recommends policies that they have no authority to create or enforce. This function should reside within agencies that have authorities to issue regulations in accordance with applicable legal standards.
But those agencies don't do that. Their recommendations are well-regarded by the industry (see also the quote from the American Chemistry Council here).
I note that EPA's budget is being halved, and OSHA's is being cut as well; they're also eliminating EPA's Office of Research and Development entirely.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
That's the thing; they're not just an extension of OSHA. Their primary focus isn't labor safety, or environmental quality, or industry standards, it's process safety, which touches all of those. Their role is inherently cross-functional, as you can see from the variety of organizations they make recommendations to.
Anyway, it's not being moved, it's just being destroyed. Whatever the talk there is about it being redundant, it's not being consolidated with something else, and its function will go unfulfilled.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
It would be really cool if the USCSB wasn't being shut down; if you haven't seen their investigation videos about industrial disasters, they really are wonderful.
Soft skills aren't my strong suit, but I spent far too much time gargling rage-slop from Facebook until I turned off the spigot, and the upshot of all of that is that I'm confident that there's a very straightforward model on the vague-left, as follows.
Everything is some kind of class conflict, in that there are rich people exploiting working people in some way. In order to solve a problem, you need to figure out who the rich exploiters are, and, depending on how brave and/or edgy you want to be, regulate/tax or eat/behead them.
In this case, possibly due to the influence of the evil developer trope, developers are evil business owners who want to bulldoze virtuous, affordable working-class homes and replace them with empty glass high-rises. Because developers are evil, it's never considered that the existing homes were once newly built by some other developer. Because developers cannot do good, it's never considered that people will live in these new buildings, so there's a persistent idea that developers intentionally construct buildings, intending that they stay empty, and profit from this by "writing it off" or something like that.
Example here: "No matter how many houses you build, if they are not affordable, then you will not solve the housing crisis."; "we need to take on the profiteers and the corporate giants to win homes for people." (This is an organization which is, as far as I can tell, not keen on letting developers build homes because they're "profiteers" and "corporate giants" and, presumably, the homes they build are somehow not "for people".)
Left-NIMBYism is, from what I can tell, frequently the result of getting negatively polarized against YIMBYs, who are, unfortunately, kinda smug nerds sometimes. For example, YIMBY poster Sam Deutsch made fun of comedian Kate Willett for being a gentrifier complaining about gentrification, and she is still, four years later, writing red-string-on-a-board articles like this and constantly tweeting about how YIMBYs are funded by "billionaires".
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
So, this is exactly the sort of thing that can get brushed off as being simple bigotry; you just seem to prefer a level of segregation which cities don't provide. But I think it's worth thinking about.
When I wrote out my theory of The Four Failures of blue governance, the first thing I listed was Safety and Order, and I think there's a real tendency for people to talk past each other here; urbanists are particularly fond of saucy memes on that front, but you're literally half as likely to meet an untimely end in New York City as you are in rural America; the murder rate is comparably low, but car crashes make the big difference.
But that's unsatisfying in the same way that someone pointing out complete apathy in the face of brazen and repeated theft being given a lecture about wage theft; it's just whataboutism.
I came across this thread recapping Left Behind in Rosedale, which details how white people violently resisted the integration of their neighborhoods because they feared they would be the victims of violent crime, and then their neighborhoods were integrated, and the people who couldn't leave were violently victimized by the black people who moved in, and below that, the social capital, the ability to know your neighbors and go outside at night and feel safe, all of that just vanished. And it's left some kind of scar that the official narrative here is that white people resisted integration for absolutely no reason, and then we had integration, and the good guys won. Because that's not what people experienced. Just like the official narrative is that there was no reason for purity taboos either.
There are plenty of ideas about how to make things better well outside the right (The Atlantic ran this; Jennifer Doleac writes extensively on the topic; Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias do as well), and as far as we can tell, crime really is way down from the 90s. But how can there be any credibility without reckoning with the past?
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
That's interesting. I thought it had a lot to say about how shame can fester and turn into something worse, about how you don't really accept someone if you try and cover up the unsavory parts of them, about how when you lie to your friends because you're afraid of what they might think, the LIE is much more important than what you originally were afraid of them judging you for.
Maybe these seem really straightforward or trite, but it's a kids movie, and those are pretty good kids movie morals.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
First they took my em-dashes, and now this‽
This is indeed me attempting to be more consciously agreeable. I have a history of being aggressively negative and downright disagreeable in my comments, and I'm trying to go in the opposite direction. It's also influenced by seeing people who supposedly agree with me being incredibly unpleasant on the internet, and wanting to do the opposite of that.
Which is, I think, similar to what's happening with LLMs, in that they are designed to be extremely agreeable so people continue to engage with them.
Which is to say, that's a really great point, and you are a special and insightful person for making it! It's not just an insight—it's a whole new perspective that you've uncovered!
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
California's constitution, Article IV, Section 9:
A statute shall embrace but one subject, which shall be expressed in its title. If a statute embraces a subject not expressed in its title, only the part not expressed is void.
(More details here.) And even still, this is, unfortunately, the way the sausage is made, because bagel toppings are baked into the progressive mindset, it seems. But ADU laws, for example, have been successful precisely because they were straightforward simplifications or liberalizations of the law, with few or no compensating tradeoffs. Chris Elmendorf has a good law review article about this.
I think to the extent that something is a big change or faces stiff opposition, this kind of nonsense will creep in. Here, it's not because apartments near transit are anathema per se, but because "local governments know best" is an article of faith here, despite where it's led us, and more importantly for progressives, a lot of new construction means a lot of business for builders, and it's very important ideologically that the benefit the legislature produces be appropriately socialized rather than captured by developers. The mistake being made here is that the benefit is homes for people to live in, and the benefits are already going to incumbent homeowners.
On the gripping hand, much as with ADU law, there will be simplifications and cleanups in future sessions.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
To be clear, the construction union situation in California is not what you might expect; about an eighth of workers are unionized (the builder organization refers to "merit shops" rather than "non-union shops"), and are concentrated in cities. Requirements for union labor can sometimes make it simply impossible to get workers to build the project if it's not in a central location.
Great question! There's still uncertainty here, and it varies by city. Despite all the state laws, there's a lot of local control, and cities will, to various degrees, fight the state. Consider the history of ADUs; despite being essentially legalized in 2017, the legislature continues to adjust rules and close loopholes. (This year: SB 9 (different from the other SB 9; authorizes the state housing department to void bad ADU ordinances) and AB 1154 (clarify rules around Junior ADUs).)
Tariffs and the resultant high commodity prices are a problem, as is a tight labor market. Local governments still absolutely love inclusionary zoning, which is essentially taxing new housing to provide subsidized housing to poor people; see the graph on page 9 here. And the construction industry is remarkably cyclical, so real changes won't happen until the next boom cycle.
A lot of things have to go right for a project to happen, and only a few need to go wrong. It took us decades to get into this mess, and there's still reluctance to let go of all of the bagel toppings (union set-asides, inclusionary zoning, various extra review nonsense) that have accumulated over the years. And yet the two biggest impediments, CEQA and base zoning, have been swept away. Note also that these reforms are cumulative; density bonus law means that cities have lost pretty much all discretion over the aesthetics of projects, and the Housing Accountability Act provides impressive fines if they manage to block a valid-zoned project, and there's a department enforcing that.
I think it'll have a significant effect, especially in San Francisco and the Bay Area; in Los Angeles, it'll depend on how dysfunctional their city government remains, though AB 253 should help there. But that effect will be delayed until commodities become cheaper and labor becomes more available, and at that point, there will be the usual temptation to make it so projects just barely pencil out, and to "capture" the "developer profits". I think the state of the law makes that very difficult at this point.
I wish I had numbers, and I know this isn't very specific. Hopefully there will be some clear analysis out soon from groups like the Terner Center.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
10mo ago
California YIMBY, "Governor Newsom Signs Historic Housing Legislation: SB 79 Culminates Eight-Year Fight to Legalize Homes Near Transit" Also covered in Politico, LA Times, CalMatters, SF Chronicle, SF Standard, Berkeleyside, Streetsblog SF... this is a big deal. (Part of a long-running series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)
To quote the Governor's press office, "HUGE NEWS!! YIMBY'S REJOICE !!". Signing statement here, press release from Scott Wiener here. Bill text here.
For more details about how we got here, see this recap from Jeremy Linden, the vote lists from CalMatters, and my previous recap from when SB 79 first made it out of committee. This was the last of ten veto points this bill had to pass, and it changed markedly over the process: most counties were exempted, ferries and high-frequency bus routes without dedicated lanes no longer count, projects over 85 feet must now use union labor, there are now below-market-rate set-asides, and other such bagel toppings. It only applies to "urban transit counties", those with more than fifteen rail stations; that's only eight of California's fifty-eight counties: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Mateo, but those counties contain sixty percent of the state's population.
But of those ten veto points, it passed five of them by a single vote. (It depends exactly how you count.) Every compromise, every amendment, every watering-down was necessary to get this across the finish line. Aisha Wahab, Senate Housing chair and villain of the previous post, switched her vote to support SB 79 in the final concurrence in the Legislature, as did Elena Durazo, Senate Local Government chair, who had also opposed it originally. This has, as noted above, been eight years in the making. It will largely go into effect next July 1.
Newsom also signed a variety of other housing bills, though none were specifically as important as SB 79: AB 253 allows for third-party permit approvals if the city drags their feet, for example.
This completes a remarkably victorious legislative cycle for the YIMBYs. Along with surprise CEQA reform, Jeremy White of Politico called it: "from upzoning to streamlining to CEQA exempting, the biggest housing year I've seen in 10+ years covering Sacramento".
Thank you for doing the legwork. I agree; that's a completely outside-the-text read, reminiscent of JKR retconning Dumbledore as gay, and I'd be annoyed by it as well. The comic itself is telling a good yarn about Tarquin's inflexibility and ego and being in a different story than he thinks he's in, and that's just... superfluous.
I do think it's entirely possible to talk about meaningful issues in a fun strip (here or here or here or "Colonel Xykon's secret recipe for winning" from Start of Darkness), but it has to be in service to the story, not stapled on there.
More options
Context Copy link