grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
Housing Poster. Series index here.
User ID: 197
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
19d 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
19d 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
19d 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
19d 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
20d 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
22d 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
22d 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
23d 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
23d 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
23d 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".
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
2mo ago
Have you seen "Foundations", from Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman? Also available in podcast form with Sam Bowman at Quillette.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
3mo ago
I'm pretty optimistic; at least these things are happening out in the open in some way, at least these debates are being had. See also some exciting arguments happening in the field of education. So, of course I'm going to write about what could go wrong, as well as what I think has gone wrong.
The downside to politics being so thermostatic is that it seems like no matter how bad your policies are, voters will flip power back to you in a few years regardless, and you can go back to believing that the other guys are so awful that you don't have to bother learning how to actually accomplish things because that would be hard.
The center-left has been here before! After the last time the Democrats lost the popular vote, Dan Savage wrote "The Urban Archipelago", some of which seems charmingly dated ("If coal is to be burned, it has to be burned as cleanly as possible so as not to foul the air we all have to breathe") or sadly dated ("Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We're for opposition."), but at its core, it's a marvelously audacious vision: liberals win when cities grow, so we should grow cities and make them amazing, and the only reason red states are red is because their cities aren't big and amazing enough.
This vision failed, and there's an excellent interview that David Roberts did on Volts, "Dan Savage on blue America in the age of Trump". Savage describes what the YIMBYs call "the unholy alliance":
The problem in cities is these twin pinchers between which our political "leaders" have been captured, which are these NIMBYs who tend to be white, tend to be wealthier homeowners who don't want anything to change, who want to pull up the ladder behind them, who want to benefit from living in the city but never pay the price of living in a city, which is living with a certain amount of change and ferment and dynamism. Sorry, it's so early where I am right now. But also the left, which misidentified development as the driver of gentrification and displacement, when it's actually scarcity that is the driver of gentrification and displacement, that you can have density and development without gentrification and displacement if you don't have scarcity. We have scarcity because that's what the NIMBYs want, because it drives up their property values and it locks their neighborhoods in as these unchanging, frozen in amber Mayberry blocks like we have in Seattle, like the one I live on.
Five years ago, I wrote about what I think is the most likely path forward, and what is the ideal path forward. I think my idea of that is a lot more detailed now, and ties in well with the idea of the Urban Archipelago. Here's my idea of what the blue team has failed to provide, and if they want to regain power and credibility, they have to solve that.
The Four Failures
Safety and Order
Josh Barro, "Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose":
Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system — the other day, I was on an M34 bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot” — and even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep these people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets.
Noah Smith, "The Blue Cities Must Be Fixed":
Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.
Matt Yglesias, "A Common Sense Democrat Manifesto":
The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.
To be clear, the problem is not violence, so far as I can tell. Murder is back down to its pre-COVID numbers, and never reached the bloody peaks of the 1990s. It's petty disorder. It's visible homelessness, which makes people sick and drives people who can afford alternatives from the public square.
Inclusion
This is vibes, and I am not good at vibes, but I do appreciate that there's something wrong with white people insulting other white people by calling them white, with pushing language like "Latinx" despite it being really unpopular with the people it's supposed to be helping, and with gleefully signing off on microaggressions against men (and against women if you include the adjective "white").
I don't have much to say about this, as it's really not my area of expertise, but the perception is absolutely that the blue team cares more about how many marginalized identities you can tick off than about your material circumstances.
This is kind of an outlier, as you can't just fix this by fixing local governance. But it's a real thing that people are upset about.
There is not a single moment this election that I felt heard or represented by Kamala Harris. Not one.
[...]
I'm on the fringes of that group, right-wing by young, educated professional standards, dead center by the standards of the country. And it's frustrating, alienating on a deep level, to go to law school and watch prison abolitionists and Hamas supporters and people who want to tear gifted education down treated as sane and normal and Respectable while knowing that if I don't voice perspectives sympathetic to the majority of the country, nobody will voice them at all.
Kamala Harris never represented me. The Democrats never signaled to me that they heard and understood my voice and voices like mine, only that they wanted to pull the right levers and press the right buttons and twist the right knobs to convince that mystical creature, the Centrist, that they were on their side.
Sarah McBride, being interviewed by Ezra Klein (archive):
I think that we are in this place where we are in this fierce competition for pain. Where the left says to the right: What do you know about pain, white, straight, cis man? My pain is real as a queer, transgender person.
And then the right says to the left: What do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan elite? My pain is real in a postindustrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis.
We are in this competition for pain when there is plenty of pain to go around. And every therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated. While it requires intentionality and effort sometimes, I think we would all be better off if we recognized that we don’t have to believe that someone is right for what they’re facing to be wrong.
Public Goods
This is definitely more to do with city governance. tl;dr, La Sombrita, but in more detail...
Barro:
I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because it costs four times as much per mile to build a subway line here as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs.
Smith:
The habit of having cities overpay for everything is another form of highly inefficient redistribution. A bunch of people do get paid out — nonprofits, overstaffed contractors, expensive consultants — but at the end of the day the ballooning costs that result from all these payouts mean that cities don’t actually have the infrastructure or services they need. All too often, progressive cities are operated for the benefit of the people who get the money instead of the people who get the stuff.
Jennifer Pahlka, "Curiosity and Conflict":
I’m no expert in polling or voter sentiment or messaging or even how poor people feel, but I do know a thing about why it’s taken two years to get half the CHIPS Act money awarded, why the green energy infrastructure the IRA promised is stuck in years- or decades-long permitting processes and will probably come too late to avoid climate collapse, why so much promised Covid relief went to criminals instead of the needy, why so many kids applying for college couldn’t get financial aid last year.
And it's not just this stuff! It's the San Francisco public school system failing to teach their kids to read, and then banning eighth-grade algebra for "equity" reasons. It's a focus on process over outcomes.
Fundamentally, it's a decision to retreat to the idea that "we followed the correct process" rather than testing whether or not the outcome was successful. The results are shameful and devastating, and they are a key reason why we see so much poverty amongst so much plenty.
This all has a lot to do with nuts-and-bolts stuff, mostly insane permitting issues (Texas doesn't install more solar power than California because Texans love the environment more; it's because California makes everything more difficult), coalition politics that mean everyone gets a slice of the salami (and sometimes there's no salami left), and an insistent disinterest in trying to see if you're actually doing something that will help, as opposed to visibly trying to help.
Concretely, I think the best examples here are public schools ("Government: At long last, we have created Harrison Bergeron from classic sci-fi story (Don't Create) Harrison Begeron"), safe public spaces (kinda overlaps with point one), and public transit.
Affordability
The two biggest expenses for most people are housing and transportation, which are inexorably linked. Blue cities in blue states have self-inflicted housing shortages, which are well-known and well-understood, and yet remain seemingly intractable, even as they exacerbate every other problem.
Barro:
Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything [...] And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population — we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.
Smith:
Fundamentally, cities are places that people live — if people do not have houses to live in, you don’t actually have a city. Housing is what allows businesses to function, because most people live near to where they work. Housing is what allows retail to function, because it creates a sufficient density of customers. Housing sustains knowledge-industry network effects, by allowing more knowledge workers to live close to each other and exchange ideas. In most states, housing generates more tax revenue for the city as well. And of course, housing reduces homelessness.
Jerusalem Demsas, "Blue States Gave Trump and Vance an Opening" (archive):
The mismatch between job and housing creation across the wealthiest blue states caused prices to skyrocket, led some people to forgo good jobs because housing was too expensive, and strained entire communities, turning neighbor against neighbor. Unwittingly, liberals have seeded the conditions for illiberal politics to take root in some of the most progressive jurisdictions in the country.
Ezra Klein, on The Weeds in late August/early September 2020 (lost the link, my apologies):
I want to say, as clearly as I can, this is an extraordinary failure of governance that should make progressives in California, and Democrats in California, embarrassed and ashamed. We have a disastrous situation in terms of housing here, we have known this for years, it is making our environmental problems worse, it is making our climate problems worse, it is making economic inequality worse, it is making people's lives worse , and year after year after year, the politicians who do nothing... Gavin Newsom, the Governor, did his big speech on housing, I think it was the State of the State last year, nothing really happened after that. They've made some changes; I don't want to literally say nothing, but this was an extraordinarily depressing year in the California legislature on this.
And to a very great extent, it exposes a certain level of--one, progressive misgovernance, we also don't have high speed rail in this state; I think one should ask themselves, and it should be something the left grapples with, and Democrats grapple with, which is: if Democratic governance is so great, how come in California where they own everything and run everything, it isn't better? And then, two, a lot of the progressivism in California is phony. It's just... you hate Donald Trump, and you put a thing in your front yard, about how in this house we believe science is real and refugees are welcome and Black Lives Matter and da-da-da-da, and everybody's a person, and trans people are people, and the whole thing... but you can't build a house. And so people can't live there. It's exclusionary progressivism. It kinda makes me sick--I am very mad at California. You can't tell people progressive governance works when it doesn't work. And here, it is not working.
And that sums up exactly what has now come home to roost.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
3mo ago
Lauren Rosenhall, Soumya Karlamanga, and Adam Nagourney for the New York Times, "California Rolls Back Its Landmark Environmental Law" (archive) (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at theschism.) Other coverage is available from Eric Levitz at Vox, Henry Grabar at Slate, Ben Christopher at CalMatters, and Taryn Luna and Liam Dillon at the Los Angeles Times. Some of this work draws from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks' Select Committee on Permitting Reform, which issued its final report earlier this year.
In our last episode, there were three major reforms in play for this year's legislative season: zoning reform (SB 79), improving the CEQA exemption for infill housing (AB 609), and broad CEQA reform (SB 607). SB 79 is currently in the Assembly (it passed Assembly Housing 9-2, and now goes to Assembly Local Government, then the floor, then Senate concurrence, then the Governor's desk), but in a surprise move, Newsom, whose inaction I've previously complained about, pulled CEQA reform into this year's budget process, which essentially makes it a must-pass piece of legislation. There's some room for short negotiation, but it's fast-paced, and if the budget isn't passed, the legislators don't get paid until it is. (There is, as I understand it, no back pay, so it's a real penalty.)
CEQA is arguably the most significant non-zoning barrier to housing production (here's a short selection of shenaniganry, and I've covered it here and here); the CA YIMBY legislative director described this as "probably the most important thing California has done on housing in the present YIMBY moment" and explained how we got here.
The main opponents here were the usual Livable California NIMBYs, but also the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California (the "Trades"). On first glance, environmental review doesn't seem connected to labor, but because CEQA provides an all-purpose method of delay (and delay costs money), it's used to extract concessions, like the use of union labor, in exchange for not delaying the project. Note that nearly 90% of the construction workforce is non-union; the Trades are, in effect, taking work away from a lot of construction workers in order to ensure much higher pay for the few union construction workers, who mostly work on government projects or subsidized housing which mandates union labor.
There was, during this process, an intense argument, occurring mostly behind-the-scenes, about what labor standards should look like. The expected proposal was that projects skipping environmental review would have to pay higher, but nowhere near union rate, wages; this would probably not have had a significant effect on the bill's usefulness, since the required wages were close to the median wage for construction workers. This did not mollify the Trades, who claimed that it "will compel our workers to be shackled and start singing chain gang songs"; their official opposition letter described it as "a bill that masquerades as housing reform while launching an all-out assault on the livelihoods, health, and dignity of California construction workers".
But a few days later, the wage stuff was completely removed; the expanded CEQA infill exemption simply exempts most infill projects from environmental review, period. (Projects above eighty-five feet, which do require union labor, generally use more-expensive Type I construction anyway.)
In a bit more detail, one of the components of the originally proposed reform was removing a lowered standard for demanding a full environmental impact statement. Under existing law, if an agency makes a negative declaration (i.e., "there isn't a meaningful environmental impact here"), they can be forced to reconsider that under a "fair argument" standard, which is much lower than a "reasonable person" standard; this incentivizes agencies to do unnecessary EIRs to avoid the chance that some crank will force them to do one anyway. This reform has been removed; the "fair argument" standard remains.
For more deep dives, see Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and Senator Scott Wiener (the original authors of these reforms) being interviewed by David Roberts for Volts, "The fight to build faster in California", which is slightly outdated, as it was recorded before the final bill was passed; see also the same two legislators being interviewed by Derek Thompson for Plain English, "How Abundance Won in California". (For a contrast, see Roberts' 2023 interview with Johanna Bozuwa from the Climate and Community Project, "The progressive take on the permitting debate", which is a defense of complex, discretionary permitting.)
Thompson is, of course, Ezra Klein's coauthor on Abundance, as covered in the last installment, and Newsom, in the press conference announcing the signing, specifically gave a shout-out to the concept and to Klein (though not Thompson). (Note Senator Aisha Wahab, the Housing chair, at left wearing black, pulling some faces at that.) Newsom, understandably, made a meal of this; the full press conference is here.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5mo ago
The Discourse around Abundance has truly been something to behold. It's hard not to nutpick about this stuff. On the plus side, some politicians really are taking it seriously, not by saying "Abundance!" really loudly, but by trying to refocus on outcomes over process; see Buffy Wicks' permitting reform report; among other things, it's behind some of the CEQA streamlining that's been taken up by the governor.
I agree that running on permitting reform and streamlining and bottlenecks isn't a political winner; voters aren't nerds, if anything, they're the opposite. But voters notice when nothing works, when CAHSR doesn't ever happen, when housing just gets more expensive, when medical costs keep rising, when college is stupidly expensive and even if you don't want to go now everyone's whining that they want you to pay back their loans.
So, the left is very happy to point out that populist red meat sells better than wonkish problem-fixing. But as that essay I linked at the bottom of the original post says, "Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something." My theory of the 2024 election is (a) everyone hated high prices and blamed the incumbent parties for them, and (b) the Democrats tried to tack to the center, but the disengaged voters who decided the election didn't believe them. Demonstratively yelling about taxing the rich and guillotining the oligarchs isn't going to fix that.
If I may indulge, I note that a "suggested article" linked to from the above is "A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions", from Robert Jensen, previously famous for other far-left things.
If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.
The text of the article is detailed about "less", but is coyly silent about "fewer". Like many critics, he seems not to have read the book beyond the title, but he does propose an alternative.
Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.
A cheap shot suggests itself. ("You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.") Horseshoe Theory is real.
But on a serious note, when I see this kind of thing, I hear my ancestors screaming from beneath pails of water and bales of hay and endless subsistence-farming toil, and I wonder to what degree the women of the Hill Country, pre-electrification, would agree with Jensen.
Sometimes these women told me something that was so sad I never forgot it. I heard it many times, but I’ll never forget the first woman who said it to me. She was a very old woman who lived on a very remote and isolated ranch—I had to drive hours just to get out there—up in the Hill Country near Burnet. She said, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am?” Well, indeed, I had noticed, without really seeing the significance, that many of these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, were much more stooped and bent than women, even elderly women, in New York. And she said: “I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.” Another woman said to me, “You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.”
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5mo ago
You're being too charitable; consider Sam Seder, who isn't that far to the left, being constitutionally incapable of blaming anything other than corporations and billionaires for high housing costs. This is how you get left-NIMBYs tying themselves into weird knots, like blaming Blackrock (which owns something like 0.1% of single-family homes) or asserting that we don't need more supply, because there are fewer homeless people than vacancies, or because all of those houses are secretly being kept empty by "speculators".
Vaheesan:
Diminishing public power over land use decisions means greater private control, which in turn means more deference to the whims of the market and more discretion for corporate executives and financiers—in short, more oligarchy.
This is the kind of equivocation I was talking about. ("Public power" in this case doesn't mean elected officials doing things, but rather the power of individuals to block the entire process.) When the only tools you have are taxing the rich and breaking up big companies, every problem looks like oligarchs and monopolies.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5mo ago
We already do that; around half of California's construction workers are foreign-born, and of those, about half are undocumented. But the cost of living here is so high that you still have to pay a lot for workers, even if they're under-the-table.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5mo ago
Ideally, it would work like that. And with the Carpenters' union, it has; back in 2023, they broke off from the Building Trades and cut a deal where they'd settle for "prevailing wage" (pay union rates, whether you hire union workers or not) rather than "skilled and trained" (hire only union workers). It raises costs significantly, but it doesn't essentially make the bill a dead letter, which is what the Trades consistently push for.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5mo ago
I understand that you have a visceral distaste for living in a city, and would rather have a lawn and a driveway and plenty of air between your walls and your neighbors'. These are all nice things! But people also seem to dislike having to drive to get anywhere, to enjoy the economic benefits of agglomeration, and the various other benefits of living in cities.
Ideally, people who like cities can live in cities, and people who like cars and driveways can live in suburbs. But nearly every place in the country is designed for cars and driveways. Maybe a little of the residential land could be set aside for city living? (Because right now, in cities, almost none of it is.)
And we can all agree not to dehumanize the people who want to live differently?
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
5mo ago
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.
- SB 79 (CA YIMBY): allow increased height and density limits within a quarter to a half mile of transit stations in three tiers depending on the frequency of service.
- AB 609 (CA YIMBY): actually exempt infill housing from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
- SB 607 (Press release): greatly reduces the ability to use CEQA to indefinitely delay projects.
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.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
11mo ago
And that Shirley exception post is [...] a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.
I saw this this week, and I thought of you.
Rather than stay at the hospital to wait for infection to set in, Farmer went home to wait, monitoring her temperature and her pain. On Aug. 4, she called her state senator, Bill White, and explained her situation to an aide.
He told her, "That’s not what the law was designed for. It’s designed to protect the woman’s life."
"It’s not protecting me. We have to wait for the heartbeat (to stop). There’s no chance for a baby; she’s not going to make it. It’s putting my life in danger. We have to wait for more complications. I’m 41, it’s not something I can recover from quickly. I could lose my uterus, there’s a lot of things that could happen," Farmer said she remembers telling him. "We just want to move on, we just want to grieve."
The aide told her he would reach out to Attorney General Eric Schmitt, and also connected her with Choices Medical Services, "which is basically an anti-abortion clinic" in Joplin, Farmer said. She never heard back about what Schmitt said.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1yr ago
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.
Do we do quotes here? I have some goodies from my commonplace; I'm skipping the Culture War stuff.
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