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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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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.

It’s great to see political realignment in action. A lot of folks here are extremely blackpilled about politics, but this to me seems a perfect example of how democracy is supposed to work.

The Democrats ignored a major issue for a long time, lost popularity massively from it, then pivoted. Love to see it.

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.

TracingWoodgrains:

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.

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