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Jeanne Kuang for CalMatters, "Abundance meets resistance: Are Democrats finally ready to go all in on building housing?". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)
Those of you who have followed this series may remember the sad history of attempting to upzone around transit in California. It's a straightforward idea: transit infrastructure is expensive to build, more people will ride it if more people live near the stations, and it's a bad idea for cities to enforce apartment bans in those areas. California has made two major attempts in the last decade to fix this, and is embarking on a third.
First, 2018's SB 827, which didn't even make it out of committee. Then, 2019's SB 50, which was delayed until 2020 and then failed to pass the Senate. Since then, there have been some significant reforms; see 2021, 2022, and 2023. But the YIMBYs haven't taken another big swing since 2020, and they're doing that and more this year.
The latter two bills have been absorbed into the budget process, which is the Governor's way of pushing them forward. The former has not.
The politics are interesting. The SB 79 Housing committee hearing is worth watching; the chair, Aisha Wahab, was opposed to the bill, but it passed by a single vote. (This is called "rolling the chair", and it's a big lift.) And then it happened again, in the Local Government committee, the chair, Maria Elena Durazo, opposed the bill, and it again passed by a single vote; it's headed to the Senate floor for a likely vote in early June.
The stunning thing here is that, despite the years that have passed since 2018, the discourse among the bill's opponents hasn't changed. Because this is California, and most of them are Democrats, they oppose it from the left, and seemingly sincerely; Wahab talks about how "affordable" (i.e., subsidized) housing would be preferable, but there's no mention of how to pay for that, so in practice, the alternative is what we've been doing for the last couple decades, i.e., nothing. The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe. And there's generally an idea that market rate housing is bad, but affordable housing is good, and somehow if we outlaw the former, the latter will prosper. This has clearly not happened.
This rhymes with the current Abundance discourse, which has been extensive. (I can't do it full justice, but the basic idea is that we've regulated the government into an inability to accomplish anything, and we should stop doing that. It's most dire in housing, but the same idea applies elsewhere.) Reactions on a national scale oddly mirror the left-NIMBY discourse in California, ranging from Zephyr Teachout describing zoning reform as "relatively small-bore" to Robert Jensen suggesting that maybe poverty and death would be better for the environment instead. (As a treat, enjoy Sam Seder beclowning himself in front of Ezra Klein.)
My theory of this, developed over a series of infuriatingly circular conversations, is that there's a faction which is very attached to the idea that every problem is caused by a failure to write big enough checks or a failure to sufficiently tax (or if you're edgy, guillotine) the wealthy. So, if housing is unaffordable, it must be because we haven't sufficiently subsidized below-market-rate housing, or down payment assistance, or because rich people are hoarding homes and leaving them empty, and if you think otherwise, you must be simping for billionaires. This view is incompatible with understanding the details; for example, in that Sam Seder interview, Seder would talk about the corrupting power of money, Klein would talk about cartels of homeowners, Seder would say that that's just more corrupting power of money, but Seder's approach is very specifically to target oligarchs and corporations, not homeowners.
And this is the kind of equivocation I see in the best-regarded left critique of Abundance I could find, from Sandeep Vaheesan at The Boston Review. He gets the details wrong--he points to the government's support of nuclear power via liability limitation and ignores ALARA; he claims that upzoning doesn't actually produce more housing (so why do the NIMBYs fight so hard?); he defends the exorbitant rents in San Francisco by saying that it's a "superstar" city unlike Houston (is San Jose?)--but at its core, he wishes the book had clear villains like Thomas Piketty's "clear portrait of patrimonial capitalists and lavishly compensated executives thriving at the expense of everyone else". His proposed solutions are, naturally, to break up large corporations and to write bigger checks to bureaucrats so they can do more paperwork.
At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).
"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." This sounds like a promise, but in California's case, it's a warning. The problems, contradictions, and failures of blue governance are at their sharpest here, and if there's a way forward, it'll be here as well.
My rather unpopular opinion is that if housing wasn’t an investment most of these problems would solve themselves.
Nobody really wants more housing supply because it means that the one asset most middle class people can aspire to have — a house — at best stagnates in value and at worst declines in value. No politician want to be the person who made housing values fall. They’d have a hard time getting elected dog catcher if they approve enough new development to lower the cost of housing. Heck, people might not be happy if their house doesn’t increase in value. As such you have a problem that pits the owners of homes against the renters who want to own homes. You have to pick one.
The other issue with everyone trying to buy single family houses is that it’s acre for acre about the worst possible way to build housing. Condos are probably better for housing a lot of families in less space, apartments are cheaper but probably better suited for single people. If you want housing, it’s probably better to build for density and put more people in less acreage.
Condo + strata fees = single family home mortgage payment, so they're not actually cheaper.
The reason detached single-family units are important is because they deliver the ability to personally develop. With a condo you're not actually doing anything; you're not doing maintenance on your mechanical devices (unless you're fortunate enough to have a garage or driveway, of course), you're not really able to store anything, you can't do anything loud (no instruments, etc.), it's more difficult to entertain people, etc. The same thing applies to townhouses to a lesser degree.
You don't get Apple Computer (to name a particularly famous example) without a garage to work in, and condos don't usually have those.
Sure, but (and as "bullets instead of dollars" downthread mentions) that's also balanced against solutions that might be less than democratic (if the dominant voting bloc is smart enough to understand the issue they can avoid that, but they seldom are). Gerontocracies tend to be relatively bad at defending themselves simply because the average 70 year old tends to be an inferior soldier no matter how high up they believe their elbows might go.
This led me down an interesting rabbit hole - I am aware of the importance of the myth of the garage startup in Silicon Valley, but also that the main lines of mentor-mentee and exited founder-investor-founder genealogy run back to Fairchild Semiconductor via companies that were not founded in garages or, mostly, by garage tinkerers. A quick fact-check finds Wozniak denying that Apple was actually founded in the garage (the tinkering that led to the Apple I happened inside the house - it sounds like the garage was just used to store inventory), that pictures of Jeff Bezos founding Amazon in his garage show a room that had not been used to store motor vehicles for a very long time, and that the Google garage was commercially rented space which happened to be a converted garage. It looks like the last significant tech company founded in a space which was primarily designed to store motor vehicles was HP in 1939. Nvidia is often referred to as founded in a garage, but it was actually founded in a spare room in Curtis Priem's townhouse.
In other words, the point of the Silicon Valley garage isn't the idea of the garage as marginal space - it is that it was normal for middle-class Americans to have more square footage than they actually needed, giving space to work in. A spare room, something it is perfectly possible to have in a townhouse, or even in a condo if you live like middle-class Continental Europeans or super-rich New Yorkers do, works better as a home office/workshop than an unconverted garage. And the surplus of square footage is something that you don't get by insisting on sprawl zoning in a place as rich as Silicon Valley - nobody thinks that the next generation of Silicon Valley founders can afford SFHs with garages in the Valley, and it is notable that the only reason that the Apple founders had access to the garage in the first place was because Job's parents had bought the house it was attached to before Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley.
The even more important point is absence (or, in the case of California, lax enforcement) of laws against running businesses out of private homes. The canonical place to found a 21st century startup is a Stanford dorm room. Under UK charity law, that is illegal in a Cambridge College room.
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