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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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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".

What, realistically, are the consequences of this actually going to be?

I wonder if "build more housing!" is the "decriminalize drugs!" of the latest generation and once we finally kick that into high gear we'll reap a bunch of unintended side effects that are horrible but nobody wanted to think about at the time.

What possible horrible side effects do you anticipate from building more places to live so they're cheaper and people have more choice and can move around more easily to places that suit their specific needs?

Some degenerate case where a cute town of 150k goes crazy building Connestoga hut villages and a million single people move in that are attracted by the $500/month rent

Traffic goes from easy to abysmal.

All public parks overrun with trash and dirtbags.

Average tax revenue per person craters so police and other services become unavailable.

People paying all of the taxes move away.

Town basically becomes a refugee camp.

The 60-ft2 Conestoga Hut is not a code-compliant permanent house. The 360-ft2 Boxabl Casita or the 660-ft2, two-story Lennar Henley can serve as a less unrealistic boogieman. (Actually, the Lennar Henley isn't even compliant with the IPMC—its bedroom and living room are too small. It must have been designed to a less stringent local code.)

Neat. And I'll be sure to remind my city council that the Connestoga villages they built for the homeless aren't code compliant.

I said code-compliant permanent house. Some cursory searching indicates that at least one municipality has added "temporary housing shelters" to its zoning code as a permitted accessory use, without calling such shelters houses. Your municipality may have done something similar.

See also how some "tiny houses" actually are recreational vehicles that cannot be installed permanently in many places.

building more places to live so they're cheaper

Phrasing things in positive terms doesn't somehow make them positive. You could frame the building of Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects the same way.

Why do you assume I'm advocating for more homes for poor people when I'm advocating for more market rate housing for everyone else besides them

You'll notice I didn't mention "affordable housing" or "community housing" or anything of the sort, and I am in fact against mandating that certain % of developments are "affordable housing" as it's a really stupid policy

I am pretty pessimistic that even the median earner is tax positive (pays more than they cost) and because of progressive taxation cities that incentive anything less than above the 90%ile to relocate become per capita tax revenue poorer.

The examples we have of liberalised planning, both historical and current, are far superior to the examples we have of drug legalisation/decriminalisation, so it seems unlikely

While Houston's lax (lacks?) zoning laws have arguably been successful at keeping the rent reasonable, it does get lots of criticism for its urban design and walkability. Amusingly, people do cite its (non-housing price) approach to homelessness as working better than most.

Housing abundance + walkability is possible, because Tokyo exists.

I agree that it requires world-class policing to work and is therefore not an immediately applicable answer to anywhere in the US, with the possible exception of NYC.

I mean, counterpoint, but people are moving to Houston, despite the awful climate. People are moving away from the med climates on the California coast. Revealed preferences and all that.

I expect not. It was easy to build for the longest time and then we artificially made it difficult. The current situation is the more anomalous one.

America has famously lagged behind other cities of the world in dense urbanism. So, we have a few decades of data from tall-dense cities to read into. NYC is the only exception in the US. and it is a good exception at that. Broadly, nothing catastrophic happened. Ofc, the assumption is that densification comes with an increase in aggregate local taxes and greater investment in public infrastructure (transit, services, etc).

I would like to hear the negative side-effects that you suspect more housing will bring.

IMO, The american youth starting to adopt a nihilistic lying flat mindset, and the lack of affordable housing (esp. in urban areas) has played a role in making it worse. However, building more housing alone is not going to solve this multifaceted problem. So, if the YIMBYs win, there will be more housing and nihilism will continue (if slightly slowed down). In 50 years, some may see that the nihilism and YIMBY movement coincided with each other and wrongly draw a causal link.

Building more housing is like fixing the Ozone layer. When you do it right, nothing happens. Life goes on, and people don't appreciate it because the negative thing never happened. Classic preparedness paradox.

To be clear,

build more housing != build more ugly housing.
This is a 5+1, and this is a 5+1. This is one of the reasons I am strongly against "affordable housing". Build more market rate housing, so the buyer can impose their aesthetic preferences onto the developer.

build more housing = building more housing in urban areas with a huge shortages.
Supply-demand is alright in most of the US. Mostly limited to Boston, NYC, DC, Miami, Austin, Phoenix, LA, SD, SF, Portland, Seattle problem.

build more housing != fit a studio into what used to be 4 bed, so we can all live in kowloon walled city.
build more housing != sprawl out more
More housing means more vertical expansion and more infills.

build more housing = build better transit.
That means safer transit too. (this is a huge issue between YIMBYs and Leftists. YIMBYs are generally pro-police and hard on crime)

Boston, NYC, DC, Miami, Austin, Phoenix, LA, SD, SF, Portland, Seattle problem.

Austin has built so much housing that it's the only metro to have seen rents decline in recent years.

Yeah, Austin is a shining example of how to deal with the problem well.

It certainly feels that way. The 'build more housing' crowd is in full swing where I live in Scandinavia. Usually coupled close with the 'walkable cities' phenomenon.

It's an odd feeling to be stuck in traffic for hours on end in a city of about 300k, on road going through what used to be an industrial area but is now filled with multiple 5+ story high apartment complexes in various states of construction. Where are all these extra cars going to go? It was bad enough already, one wonders.

Well, the city council, on the bleeding edge of progress, decides to deal with traffic by making one lane of an already very busy road a 'bus' lane. So now they feel emboldened to lot these new apartments with 0.4 parking spaces each. Meaning there are cars parked everywhere around the area, as they obviously can not all fit around the apartments. This increases foot traffic around and across the busy road. So every time someone presses the button on a crosswalk, the lights go red, congestion increases even more.

Dense housing - one lane + extra foot traffic = ???

Well, lets hear it, what were they thinking? A member of the city council, speaking in defense of new public transport centric city plan, said that a part of the problem was to do with values. There was a need for a radical confrontation with how people look at and organize their lives. It can not all be centered around cars. Well, are they completely wrong? Maybe not.

Similar to how one can argue that how we view addiction and drugs is wrong. That it's a disease, not a crime and so forth, one can say our relationship with cars and transport is wrong. It's a broader more novel philosophical argument that might not be incorrect, and certainly sounds fair minded and appealing. But to assume therefor that all the relevant factors have been accounted for has shown itself to be lunacy that costs lives.

Sounds like they should build higher capacity transit like LRTs to places people would like to travel, and also further encourage mixed use and commerical construction around the new housing so people can easily access their needs in a way that doesn't generate significant additional traffic?

Accounting for cost, rail is out of the question. Which is why the city has been organizing the future around buses.

The problem is less getting to a store, and more getting to and from work. Because there is not enough parking space you have increased foot-traffic during rush hour around the area, as people who park in the vicinity need to get to their cars. That's compounding an already worsening state of traffic year over year.

I can't really see how it'd directly cause issues, but also trying to 'build more closely-integrated housing' whilst doing nothing to actually create community integration or solve for ghettoification could easily just snowball into a bunch more ghettos.

I know Yardcels hate it, but big fan of the Singapore HDB system (which the Chinese are broadly aping with their apartment builds) but that's built on deliberate integration of different ethnicities and very strongly punishing antisocial behavior.

I have a family member that lives in SoCal and they've recently built higher density housing along the freeway and metrolink stop there. The result has been a massive spike in local traffic, the shopping centers nearby are so crowded that they no longer even bother going to them and generally avoid businesses near the freeway, opting to drive to grocery stores and shopping further away. Lights back up to the point that they routinely get stuck stopped at green lights waiting for the intersection in front of them to empty near these areas.

Doesn't really seem like it'd take a genius to figure this out, but it turns out that just because you live next to a metrolink or freeway or other "quality public transit" doesn't mean you will hop on one or hop on the freeway and drive 30 minutes every time you want to leave your house for basic things. Maybe some people use it to commute, but the local area is still negatively effected. Whatever small shopping centers they might build into these higher density housing can't compete with all the amenities offered by the preexisting suburban sprawl. So you basically just end up plopping a bunch more people in an area with roads and parking lots not equipped for it. Also, the rent on these places wasn't any lower and rent has continued to rise precipitously in the area.

the shopping centers nearby are so crowded

Just build more shopping centers??? Seems like an easy solution

What bothers me about angry "I hate that things changed" posts like this is that it's based on a belief/argument that the status quo was fine, which it was not.

The status quo in this case is 1) ever worsening traffic as population scales via horizontal expansion, but road network capacity does not 2) a perpetual increase in housing prices causing the following (but not limited to): lower birth rates, higher homelessness + higher crime as a result, a general erosion of the Western social contract, lower economic growth from the friction of moving, higher property taxes due to less economies of scale, and more!

If you're going to oppose building, you need to propose a different solution to the status quo, which again, ISN'T WORKING

The shopping centers nearby are so crowded that they no longer even bother going to them and generally avoid businesses near the freeway,

Ah the classic "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". For the particular family member, perhaps their individual utility has decreased but for the surrounding area the overall utility created has likely increased by a significant amount.

Maybe some people use it to commute, but the local area is still negatively effected. Whatever small shopping centers they might build into these higher density housing can't compete with all the amenities offered by the preexisting suburban sprawl. So you basically just end up plopping a bunch more people in an area with roads and parking lots not equipped for it.

The quality might lower for the people who there before, whose main claim to the general area around them was 1. They got there first 2. They used the force of government to take away the property rights of all their neighbors so they don't maximize the value of the land they own, but it opens up a lot for people who want to be there and were previously locked out because of artificial big government restrictions.

Also, the rent on these places wasn't any lower and rent has continued to rise precipitously in the area.

If you build a dam to block flooding, the size of the dam (supply or something) and the amount of rainfall (demand of something) both matter, and a small dam with high rainfall can still flood. But even a small dam will still stem the tide a little bit.

Rent is also a signal of how much people are willing to trade to live somewhere, so if it's a place people are desiring to live at more either by quality increases or less supply of alternatives then rent going up still is expected to begin with. "X is seen as lesser value than before" and "People are willing to spend more on X than before" aren't impossible to coexist, but they are a negative correlation that requires an even worse fall from alternative selections.

Mumbai is crowded. Would you like to live there? Libs worried about rogue ai paperciip maximizers destroying humanity but it turns out they were the paperclip maximizers all along.

worried about rogue ai paperciip maximizers

I always joked (in person) about them creating God in their own image.

The only real difference between a paperclip maximiser and a corp is speed, anyway. (Granted it's a huge difference)

Mumbai no, but that's because it's India. A dense city in a rich and freer country however, yeah why not? 14 million choose to live in Tokyo over the vast rural areas the country has (and 37 million in the surrounding area). 8.5 million choose to live in NYC. 2 million choose to live in Paris. 9.6 million choose Seoul.

It's not going to be a life fit for everyone, I personally prefer my smaller ~100k city. But clearly there's a shit ton of people who like to live in dense areas with lots of opportunities and things to do around over having a little extra space. Rents are so high in dense areas in part because people really want to be there. If people are willing to pay 2.5k for a 1 bedroom in NYC, and only 1k for a two bedroom in super ruralsville, that means something. Assuming equal capability for supply, people want the former more. It's not perfectly equal of course, but it still says something how much more people are willing to pay for the dense areas.

Tokyo is crowded and living there seems pretty cool

NYC is extremely crowded and I am strongly considering moving there

Death Valley is sparsely populated: by your logic, we can assume it's a good place to live.

Plus, I daresay that many Indians would in fact like to live in Mumbai, more than are currently there

If they execute on the plans, LA will be in the midst of America's biggest transit boom. I would wait a few years to find out if the up-zoning led to a loss in quality of life. Often, new infrastructure feels like a net negative until the whole plan gets executed. Many of China's once-ghost cities and trains-to-nowhere are a good example.

the shopping centers nearby are so crowded

Isn't that good for local business ?

Lights back up

That's just LA.

Also, the rent on these places wasn't any lower and rent has continued to rise precipitously in the area.

Wouldn't it have risen even faster if the apartments had not been built ?

Many of China's once-ghost cities and trains-to-nowhere are a good example.

This is, at best, a mixed example.

Lights back up

That's just LA.

That is decidedly not all LA was. As I mentioned in my reply to remzem's comment, the LA I grew up in was not overcrowded as a whole. It was population dense, but not overcrowded except for the most touristy/central spots (Hollywood, downtown).

The question of whether the up-zoning improved quality of life can be answered right now, because it's been going on for over a decade: It decidedly has not. The LA I visit occasionally is unrecognizable in the most in-your-face, uncomfortable way. The streets cannot support it, and barring a radical shift in the entire city council's (and let's be frank, populace's) attitudes toward law enforcement, no amount of transit overhaul will fix the problem.

I will probably get drunk and annoyed enough to write a top-level post about this because watching LA go from a quiet post-90s crime wave city with a ton of culture and places worth visiting to a homelessness, crime, and overpopulation-ridden nightmare has been a huge lesson inspiring my disenchantment with the idea that people on the whole will work to better things.

The streets cannot support it, and barring a radical shift in the entire city council's (and let's be frank, populace's) attitudes toward law enforcement, no amount of transit overhaul will fix the problem.

So it isnt YIMBYism that's the problem, it's pervasive soft on crime attitude that's the problem. How does that indict the YIMBY cause?

YIMBYs don't push for being tougher on crime.

Sounds like Los Angeles to me. I grew up in the Los Angeles area during the best time to grow up there (I might make a top level post about this some time) and it is essentially unrecognizable. I'm no stranger to city living, but whenever I go back, it's almost an anxiety attack as every street, every home, every parking spot is filled beyond its natural capacity in every sense of the word. Small streets are covered in towering luxury apartments that replaced the more meager (and more charming) buildings that preceded them. Single family homes are filled with people, leaving 3-5 cars to somehow fill out the driveways and street parking to the point that visiting is almost impossible unless you coordinate in advance with the people that you are visiting. Shopping centers, as you mention, are plopped down in areas that cannot support them, and the traffic (and light pollution, which is never something I thought I'd care about) make the entire area unpleasant. I know Los Angeles hate has been low hanging fruit for decades, but the city is in such an unlivable state these days I can hardly believe it.

Literally every problem you mentioned could be fixed by building more. More houses so people don't pile into single family homes, more transit, more shopping centers. It seems the problem with LA is shitty development, not development per se.

The problem of "towering luxury apartments" can't be fixed by building more. Nor can the problem of filling places with people. Nor can parking; transit is so bad that the only way to get people to take it is to make driving worse, and the only way to do that is to allow driving infrastructure to become highly oversubscribed.

Nor can parking; transit is so bad

....so build more transit?

This all sounds like a problem of will and not an actual material problem.

Building more transit is doable. Making transit good is not.

Because you lack the political will. Again, not a material problem.

More comments

You can reduce the number/duration of total car trips if you manage to densify the other infrastructure too: if your towering apartments are walking distance (within a block or two?) of the grocery store, bar, gym, or employer. Probably not to zero, but it'd help.

Yes, if you get everyone to do everything they want and need to do within their little neighborhood, you can do that. Places like that in the US either tend to be planned retirement villages, or places which are extremely not-nice to live.

I've heard some anecdotes at times describing Manhattan positively this way. Sometimes Boston or SF, too. If you can afford rent downtown, some blue places can be like this. But for some reason in the nicer places the rent is really high...

I grew up in the Los Angeles area during the best time to grow up there (I might make a top level post about this some time) and it is essentially unrecognizable.

Please do, I would love to read that!

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.

Chuck Marohn (of Strong Towns)'s recent big thing (and more or less the topic of his most recent book Escaping The Housing Trap) is that a major problem with YIMBYs is that simply legalizing housing isn't enough, since the financing for housing is also broken. He's cagey about offering solutions but generally thinks federal level support for 30-year mortgages is a problem and that funding should be at the local level instead.

I don't understand why these people don't want to let developers just make money? It's not like developers are even particularly bourgeoisie, hedge fund types and associated financial wizards are able to make bank much more freely in California.

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".

Great question!

This is a tic that makes me think LLM these days. Not necessarily accusing you of using one here, more commenting on the sad closing of the linguistic frontier as various phrasings become associated with "artificial" text.

Some writers have begun intentionally introducing mistakes into their writing in order to not be thought of as using LLMs. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-waller-1b967671_i-recently-read-an-article-where-the-writer-activity-7381594464328359936-6dNO?rcm=ACoAAAIRfjcBLt5fKoXIZEwnmoXzpmaEixqxsJ8

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!

It's just corporate management speech in text form. It existed well before LLMs and is where their speech patterns come from and are aimed at.

It isn't artificial as much as it is a bit soulless, which I suppose might be fitting for the output of a literal machine.

California has a climate similar to Mediterranean countries.

Italy

built

this

Instead of being inspired by Italy:

california

built

this

Clearly there is a lot of California building regulation that needs to be tossed out. Especially LA is such a wasted opportunity and it could have been one of the nicest cities in the world.

Pre-car urban design is indeed quite different from post-car urban design. The US had walkable "streetcar suburbs" in the early 20th century. Most middle class and above people left them with great haste once car based suburbs were invented and they degenerated into slums.

I think we should legalize building more such places and I'm very skeptical about how many and what sorts of people will occupy them. They may turn into yet more brighted urban slums. But we should accept that risk rather than building so little so rarely in cities.

Pre-car urban design is indeed quite different from post-car urban design. The US had walkable "streetcar suburbs" in the early 20th century. Most middle class and above people left them with great haste once car based suburbs were invented and they degenerated into slums.

My area has several streetcar suburbs; some still aren't slums and they others didn't become slums until the civil riots riots. The ones which are slums the ones which are still "walkable", though buses have replaced the streetcars. You have your main street with all the businesses you might need -- your check-cashing place, your bodega, even a bakery and a nail salon. But of course most people who would call themselves YIMBYs don't want to live there.

I grew up in a town that used to be a streetcar surburb 100 years ago. Looking at those old photos, it's almost like looking at a steampunk fantasy. All the streets that I know as sort of grungy, run-dow stripmalls, are full of very dapper gentlemen and their elegant female companions. They must have had to walk a bit to get there, but that's no problem since they were all (apparently) quite thin and fit. They don't seem to have any concern at at all for crime.

I would dismiss this as just some historical quirk, except that I've also experienced the same thing in real life- in Japan. Pretty much the same thing- low crime, low stress, low car ownership areas with mass transit, high trust, and lots of people walking in fancy fashions. They have other problems too of course (getting groceries every day with no car in a declining economy is no joke), but they still manage to make it work.

Conversely, I've experienced the opposite, living in a somewhat wealthy neighborhood in Mexico. There, razor-wire fences and private security guards are the norm. Plenty of cars and material comforts, but absolutely no social trust.

I feel like (economic wealth) and (social wealth) are almost two independant variables, with very little relationship to each other. In the US, we've gained the former at the expense of the latter. It didn't have to be this way.

Keep in mind that an old photo, especially with people in it, may have been staged. Here's a similarly-aged picture of one of the suburbs I referred to, probably not staged; note the people are blurred.

A lot of those Italian buildings are centuries old. Where as most of California's cities rose up in the last two centuries, especially the last one.

So why not compare it with China instead? They've created cities even faster than USA, and their cities are still much closer to California's design and Italy's.

This is one of those things that sounds easy in theory, but in practice, with the needs of the city you will rarely get city design of Europe unless that's the goal you want to achieve from the start. Which would probably require extremely restrictive building laws.

And speaking of roads, I know people shit on "Just one more lane" road design, but in my experience driving in Italy it has the opposite problem of roads which really do need an extra lane or two, because on a two lane road, one is full of trucks, so you're constantly stuck in traffic. And in general the quality of their roads is much worse than the surrounding countries'.

You posted a picture of an industrial park, which is full of factories and warehouses. Italy has those too but you didn't post a picture of that. Italy also has highways but you didn't post a picture of those either.

What is this supposed to prove exactly? The Italian locations look pretty, but the Californian infrastructure is more useful.

The personal automobile (and every consequence of it, including the specifically American suburb) papers over the cracks of an unusually violent and dangerous first-world society, and has since the 1950s and 1960s.

America can transit, but that would require confronting the actual problem.

Uh, Italy and France use more public transit than the US does, but that's because America is richer(much richer when you account for the greater cost of gasoline in those countries). I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?

And that's leaving aside that most transit systems in America don't even really try to attract middle class ridership, they're aimed at the poor, jurors, and college kids. This is because most people prefer to be in a private space even when that means you have to drive, and the middle class in america by definition has no difficulty affording cars.

I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?

NYC, Toronto, Japan, Germany, London, presumably some tier-1 Chinese cities like Shenzhen or Shanghai, Hong Kong/Singapore(maybe?)

"Jurors." Interesting choice. Hm, is this literally true or is it meant to signify anti-sprawl boomer liberals who value civic participation or something? (Or possibly unsuccessful albeit decent, basic people with nothing better to do with their time? But even those folks mostly have cars.)

I’ve been given a free bus pass with juror summons every time.

Downtown courthouses often don't have good parking options, especially short-term. If you live (and maybe even work) in the 'burbs, when you have to show up downtown for one day, or maybe a week, the bus or train isn't a terrible option. For me, the most convenient option is to park at the office and take the bus directly downtown from there.

I could take the bus (directly!) to work, but it's 3x the time commitment as driving, and there isn't any shelter from sun/rain at the stops at either end. So I drive. On nice days I'll bike.

I haven't taken the bus literally anywhere else in the city I live in.

I mean, what country can you point to where lots of citizens choose public transportation over automobiles for non-economic reasons?

Personally, costs aside, there are a lot of European cities where I would rather travel by public transport than driving a car. Driving a car in a big city is not my idea of a great time even if I do not get stuck in a traffic jam. Then there is always the problem of finding a parking spot, which can quickly eat up any time savings from being able to take the most direct route with the car.

Currently, I commute by car because my commute is 10min by car, 20min by bike, or 30min by public transport. If public transport was 15min instead, I would prefer that -- 5 minutes of being at home is not worth 15 minutes of watching videos while on public transport to me.

For people who go to the city for a drink, taking a car is not a great option, obviously.

I will grant you that once cars are fully autonomous, a lot of the downsides will disappear, as the car can keep you entertained en route and then dropping you off before searching for a parking spot. Still, the amount of people you can transport with a metro if you have a train every two minutes is rather impressive, and I do not see cars with one passenger per vehicle replacing that.

I regularly take the train (NYC metro area). I could easily afford to drive. But train is a lot easier and I can work etc.

Most of the people on the commuter train are not poor or college kids. Maybe ant one point they are jurors but I imagine that was a typo.

Germany and Japan both feel like they would qualify.

It's the whole American car centered bullshit that led to California being the way it is. LA is completely unwalkable for example. The US has produced some of the best architects and urban planners in the world, it's a shame that the cult of the (oversized, let's not forget) car has left them in thrall to malign interests in the name of "convenience".

We need cars so that we can live in suburbs, and we need suburbs because all the urban cores were taken over by the black underclass after the end of segregation.

Repeal the Civil Rights Act and then we can talk about walkable cities.

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?

Crime really is down compared to the crack era, and New York City is reasonably safe, even after COVID-era backsliding. It's not the only city in the country, though. Chicago in particular has a much higher murder rate, with Philadelphia not far behind. And not to leave red state cities out -- both Dallas and Houston are pretty bad. And Atlanta's will knock your socks off (well, strip them from your corpse, most likely)

Repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 probably is neither necessary nor sufficient. But you do need to refuse to allow racial considerations to interfere with stopping serious crime, which might involve some of the law around that act.

There's Left Behind in Rosedale and Philly War Zone; I've heard stories similar to the latter about Baltimore also. "White flight" was in large part ethnic cleansing, and we're still dealing with the results of that.

The blacks don't help, but this isn't fully true. People prefer living in suburbs and driving cars because it's just better for them. Even if all black people were to disappear tomorrow, there would still be suburbs and cars. At most it would add a marginal amount to the populations of dense cities.

I will absolutely tear down civilization before I live in the world Europoors and "walkable cities" types want for me. If I have to visit the grocery store more than once a week you won't need to use public transit to see someone get set the hell on fire.

I just get my food delivered when I want once a week for the in-store price plus a nominal (literally $2) delivery charge, which is viable for the store because of how dense a city is.

I'm in the suburbs and I can get my groceries delivered also, though the charge is $15. Density doesn't make delivery viable; it reduces the area in which delivery is viable. When I can order shit from China for $11 (even after everything Trump has done) you know you don't need a dense city to do delivery. Though I admit it wouldn't be viable to do perishables that way.

I literally live across the street from a large grocery store in the densest part of one of North America's biggest cities and the only time I go more than once a week is when I forget something, in which case, it's really nice it's right there...

I genuinely don't know what windmill you're tilting at right now

"You'll live in the pod, eat the bug, and only shop at cornerstores that don't have all the groceries you'd like to buy in one trip" isn't a WEF conspiracy lol

As a European I am confused: Do Americans not have stores and supermarkets near them?

Depends on exactly where you live. Bear in mind for most Americans it's forty celsius outside for months at a time, so 'walking' is not quite the same thing as in Europe.

I can walk to two grocery stores near me. I grew up being able to bike to a grocery store and a convenience store- and I see the neighborhood preteens biking to QT for slurpees all the time. But most Americans drive to the store. So it's probably partly cultural.

Generally, US zoning strictly separates residential uses like single-family houses and apartment buildings and commercial uses like supermarkets and convenience stores. Ultra-dense places like New York City may allow apartment buildings and convenience stores to exist in the same zone, but they are relatively rare.

For a representative example of zoning that might be used by a random town in the US, see the International Zoning Code. For a comprehensive comparison of US and foreign zoning, see Zoned in the USA.

I watched a video and the first YT comment was an epiphany about the Residential/Commercial/Industrial zoning in Sim City:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WNe9C866I2s

American zoning is even weirder than what I thought, discovering that the zoning from Sim City was not a weird oversimplification for the sake of gameplay but actually based on the USA was a shock.

Not just bikes:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

That would do it. Where I live the residential tower blocks often have at least one commercial outlet on the ground floor, such as groceries, barbershops, hardware store, etc. That's in the suburbs - in the city center the ground floor is often entirely businesses.

Klaus Schwab's nightmarish visage emerges on the projector screen, staring down on you like a god from on high

You vill enjoy fresh food from local stores rather than chemical slop from Walmart.

You vill have a healthy waistline.

You vill have a walkable neighbourhood with trees and park amenities.

You vill commute via bus, train or ferry in safety from lowlives - ve have dispersed them

And... you vill be happy.

Sounds like a setup for a common joke.

Schwab's vision comes to pass but

The food is the same, only more expensive, lesser in variety and the "local stores" are merely subsidiaries of WalMart

The waistline is also the same

The sidewalks are barely navigable due to the kiosks trying to sell you something, the crowds, and the homeless beggars

The parks are dilapidated, the trees are dead (having cracked all the sidewalks before giving up the ghost), and the parks are dominated by drug users and/or aggressive panhandlers.

The commute is by bus, but there is no safety.

And when you ask Schwab about the utopian world he promised... "Oh, zat was zhust ze demo."

“I will flee like a rat to the suburbs and abandon the civilization my forefathers built because getting rid of homeless psychos and dealing with violent crime seems like too much work”

Who can be surprised at 70 years of total failure on the American right when this is the common mindset? Out of sight, out of mind, and all the while you fade into irrelevance.

“I will flee like a rat to the suburbs and abandon the civilization my forefathers built because getting rid of homeless psychos and dealing with violent crime seems like too much work”

  1. My forefathers never lived in those cities. Mostly they lived in rural areas and small towns. Well, some lived in Jersey City for a time, but you'd have a hard time finding its golden age to point to; it was a dump when they lived there too.

  2. Even if I had a solution to homeless psychos and violent crime, I do not have the power to implement it. I am neither omniscient (to come up with the solution) nor omnipotent and neither is not a valid source of shame.

  3. There are a lot of people with power who support the homeless psychos and violent criminals.

  4. Number 2 is true of "the American right" in general. "Red Tribe" / "Blue Tribe" derives from the old rural/urban split. And the left, largely through it's association with minority groups, has pretty much pushed the republicans out of positions of power in the major cities. Every once in a while New York City will elect an authoritarian Republican to sweep away some of the excesses, but they always return to form (and the city council and all other structures remain solidly Democratic). Other cities don't even do that.

  5. Even if none of this was true and the cities didn't have crime and bums, they still have far too many people in far too little area. There will always be conflicts over the limited resources, and they will always be settled by the politically powerful in favor of their clients. So maybe instead of Ramón and Dante's gangs monopolizing the parks by pure menace and police indifference, it ends up being Ralph and Buffy and their friends who somehow manage to get a city permit for its exclusive use every weekend and all the holidays.

  6. Rats, who thrive on the discards of human society, are known to prefer urban areas to suburbs.

The joke is that the US is already a mess from the perspective of outsiders. Economically and technologically advanced, socially backwards. Any actual improvement is so unimaginable to Americans they come up with these warped eschatological narratives about civil war or apocalypse, or they twist themselves around to see this weird lifestyle as normal and any change as a threat. Like a nation of people who tunnel and dig in refuge from a self-inflicted disaster, only to be dazzled and frightened when they see the sun or feel fresh air, rebelling against surface.

Economically and technologically advanced, socially backwards.

That's what the Europeans say as they stagnate in all ways. They can keep telling themselves that. Personally I enjoy watching people find out the opposite, as they realize the joys of having a place where they don't have to deal with their neighbor's noise, or worry about annoying their neighbors with their own. Of being able to get from one place to another without worrying about timetables, or transfers, or weather, or how to carry stuff with them. Of a grocery store that has everything they need for a week or more in one trip. Or even of natural areas larger than a square block and not filled to the brim with people.

They can keep telling themselves that

Americans don't seem to believe this today but there are many outsiders who visit America and really dislike the country, not out of jealousy or poverty but genuine dislike for how society works. This was before Trump too.

New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco... they came, they saw, they don't like it.

Europe is stagnating. Why is this? In large part its due to US influence, US NGOs, US foreign policy. For better and for worse, the US leads the West. Yet there's this kind of schizo American attitude about their role in the world.

One day America is the best and greatest country ever, leader of the free world. The next day the lazy Europeans won't pay for their own defence (suppression of Russia) - they need to buy more weapons from America. Oh and go deal with Russia by yourselves, we're not interested in that anymore. Now it's time to bomb the Middle East and stir up some chaos there. Next, pivot to Asia - the vassals must enforce sanctions against China. Who cares whether this is in their economic interests. Australia needs to buy some submarines (we won't actually hand them over though because after taking their money to build the docks, we're still too clueless to build the damn subs). After that, everyone needs to copy American cultural norms and racial hysteria. Import some sub-Saharans, get some diversity (the refugees from our retarded wars we make you join will do for starters). Copy everything down quickly, you need to be woke... no now you need to be anti-woke. And why are you so poor, unlike us?

Europe and other US allies may well have retarded and despicable governments but the US has a special, higher level of responsibility for how it wields power.

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Yeah I shop regularly at Costco. There's no "walkable Costco infrastructure". I'm not carrying a small bag with one day of groceries. I use my car instead.

There is actually one downtown Costco in Vancouver apparently.

It's still not really walkable -- although I think now there's literally condo towers right on top of it, so I guess if you were in one of those it would work. Otherwise it's several blocks from anywhere people really live. (and of course those towers are not great for going places other than Costco -- or the hockey arena I guess)

If your grocery store is 2 minutes down the road going to it multiple times a week is not an issue. In fact it's preferable because you can get stuff when you want it and not have it clogging up space in your home.

The problem with this is that now you are a captive customer to that one store.

I know this well -- I lived in a "walkable neighborhood" with just such a store. It had insane prices, long lines and shitty product. I did have a car and I make enough that food & sundries isn't a huge fraction of my budget, but seeing far poorer families get completely ripped off by these people was radicalizing.

This is like super-basic game theory: a situation where most customers can easily change which store they patronize is one in which stores compete on price/quality/service far more than one in which customers walk to one and cannot easily substitute.

Where on earth do you live that's somehow walkable but also has literally exactly one grocery store?

Walkability is enabled by density and density by definition means there's lots of stuff around, I am within 4 city blocks of 3 (soon 4) big box grocery stores, at least 3 fruit markets, and if you expand that radius to a ~15 minute walk you can add at least 2 more big box stores and 2 entire neighborhoods of places defined by their vibrant collection of grocers and other food stores.

I have not one but multiple stores within 2 minute walking distance.

This might work, but I doubt stores that close together can match the selection of the one I have to drive five minutes to. It probably takes a minute or more just to walk across the store. Some of it is duplicative (multiple brands of milk), but you'd still lose selection pretty fast.

Yes they can

Source: I live in downtown Toronto very close to three grocery stores only marginally smaller than the suburban ones

Living a block from (the entrance of) a Walmart is actually an amazing thing for QOL if you can manage it. I walked to Walmart a lot when I was living right next to one.

I think we should build housing on the roofs of megamarkets like walmart and costco.

I think we should build housing on the roofs of megamarkets like Walmart and Costco.

There was a news story about this back in 2023.

The nation’s first mixed-use development to feature 800 apartments above a Costco Wholesale store is in the works in south Los Angeles.

The community will include 184 apartments, or 23% of the total units, dedicated to low-income households. There will be a mix of offerings at 30%, 50%, and 80% of the area median income (AMI) levels, with the exact unit allocation still be to be finalized. Plans call for the remaining 616 units to be non-subsidized affordable and workforce housing, serving households around the 120% to 150% AMI levels.

The project is being developed by Thrive Living, a national real estate firm that acquires underutilized properties in urban markets with significant housing affordability gaps. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles is a partner in the project.

Like Thrive’s other projects, the development is privately financed without the use of government subsidies such as low-income housing tax credits, according to officials.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held for the 5035 Coliseum development last September. Construction is expected to take up to two-and-a-half years as the team transforms an old commercial site into a new retail and housing community.

However, Google Maps does not indicate that construction has progressed very far.

23% of the total units, dedicated to low-income households

I live in a nice area specifically to get away from "low income households". This is such a poison pill.

I've lived on top of a supermarket before. It's not ideal because of all the noise, especially early morning deliveries. Lots of crashing and banging.

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Huh, nice.

I don't wanna go to a tiny ass overpriced bodega. I want Walmart. Unfortunately due to physical limitations it's impossible to have everyone live 2 minutes from a decent sized store.

10-15 minute walk is doable depending on the urban layout but that's pushing the distance where you start considering driving.

I don't wanna go to a tiny ass overpriced bodega. I want Walmart.

Comments like this make me suspect anti-urbanists have no idea what dense urban areas are actually like. I live five minutes from a full-sized grocery with substantial better (and higher quality) selection than Wal Mart is going to give me. I can add about 5 min to add another two. All three deliver as well if I feel like contributing to the downfall of America, and I also have access to dozens of more specialized retailers.

10-15 minute walk is doable depending on the urban layout but that's pushing the distance where you start considering driving.

This is half of why Americans are obese. (The other half is what they buy inside). If you're driving to avoid a 10 minute walk, it better be December in Minnesota.

This is half of why Americans are obese.

Obesity is a complicated subject. To claim that this is even half the reason is a high level of hubris.

Obesity is a complicated subject in that the question "why do Americans live sedentary lives and have terrible diets?" is one without an obvious answer or easy solutions. It is not a complicated subject in that the proximate cause of the obesity epidemic is that Americans live sedentary lives and have terrible diets.

If you're driving to avoid a 10 minute walk, it better be December in Minnesota.

Or August in Texas.

A 10 minute walk is chill but a 10 minute walk carrying tons of groceries in my bare hands is not chill

Comments like this make me suspect anti-urbanists have no idea what dense urban areas are actually like. I live five minutes from a full-sized grocery with substantial better (and higher quality) selection than Wal Mart is going to give me.

There isn't a full-sized grocery store in Manhattan. There are a few in Philadelphia, but very few people are within 5 minutes of them.

“Full sized” in terms of product volume or selection? In terms of volume of fresh, OK quality food the average Manhattan Whole Foods has more than a huge big box store in a poorer part of the Midwest. It’s bleak out there, the fact that NYC doesn’t have 37 shelves of 48-pack soda isn’t a downside.

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I want Walmart. Unfortunately due to physical limitations it's impossible to have everyone live 2 minutes from a decent sized store.

A two-minute walk will very literally not get you across the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart Supercenter, but that's not quite a physical limitation. Let's take a closer look.

A two-minute walk is about 160 meters (at 3 mph), which means there is 80240 m^2 within a two-minute walk of any specific point. Given a population density of 100k/square mile (0.039/m^2) (fourth highest in the world), that would mean 3100 people in range of the store.

Locally, each Wal-Mart serves 100k people. You can play around with the numbers a bit by counting Wal-Mart or Costco or etc, and also reduce their required population, and also increase the density above 100k/mi^2 and also this, and also that, but it gets really hard to make up a >30-fold difference by playing around the edges like that.

A 10-minute walk would be approximately possible, but not two.

I have lots of room for food in my large house. I don't even go to the store and pick it up off the shelves myself, I order it from Wal-Mart and have them stuff it in the trunk for me. I will absolutely sell out to transgender wokies, or Sharia law types, or literal fascists before I carry home my one little bag of groceries with like a stalk of celery and a baguette sticking out the top like someone living in some Old World city originally designed for donkey carts.

Recently, I've been giving some thought to the question of what I would do if an intermediate amount of shit hit the fan, such that I couldn't just drive as much as I want but grocery stores were still available. The solution I hit on was the adult-sized cargo tricycle, which is an actual thing that multiple companies offer, and it seems like a decent option for transporting stuff in a degrowth future. Of course, then we're back to the problem of having a big bulky vehicle that needs parking space while you're shopping, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The solution in that case is carpooling. You can get an additional three or four Mad Max cannibals to the grocery store if you just allow them to hang from the sides of your dump-truck-with-a-flamethrower.

[Standing ovation]

Right-materialists unite! Economic growth is all.

All I'm saying is, if you want me out of my hobbit hole you better bring a flamethrower.

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,

I come from a Unix background where we are taught that programs should do one thing and do it well. Seeing all this bullshit makes me seethe in a way very little else does.

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.

Union construction labor does not come with the same issues as say, the UAW. It is simply more expensive by using barriers to entry which effectively exclude the lowest-quality providers(and lots of others, it needs to be acknowledged. A 100% unionization rate would not be a good thing). This is a perfectly reasonable trade for some customers, and mass transit systems may well be one. Exempting counties also makes sense; presumably this stuff isn't really needed in certain inland counties. I can't really defend below-market set asides but ferries and high frequency bus routes might just not be what this is aimed at.

Ah, but it does. If it were merely paying 2x the salary, that is something that can be budgeted for and just passed along.

Instead, you get the guy that you are paying to do the plumbing refuse to cut a hole through the floor for a shower drain because that's not in his trade specification. So you have to get someone from the carpenter's trade to come do that (for more money) while the plumber is sitting there being paid to fondle his balls. A half day later, you might have a shower drain. Or not, maybe the hole is in the wrong place (because what does a carpenter know about plumbing anyway). Everything moves at a snail's pace when someone won't do a tiny job that's blocking their progress just because it's not on a list somewhere.

A whole headquarters for Steph Curry's new outfit wasn't built in the Dogpatch because of this insanity.

Do you think non union tradesmen get out of their trade very often? A non union plumber will not cut a hole in the floor, redo Sheetrock/tile, penetrate a roof for a vent, etc. Just like his union counterpart, he’ll write a quote to have it subcontracted and he comes back to do the job.

The non-union contractors I've dealt with will add new plumbing and cut a vent hole in a ceiling. Specifically the same guy did both for me. Even the American ones quoted two prices: one higher price with permits and second lower price without permits. They aren't strict rule followers.

José and his crew will do whatever the guy paying them needs.

If they're actual plumbers/electricians/whatever, then no they won't.

You are correct that illegal general laborers will do whatever they're paid to do, often quite badly. But they are not actual licensed tradesmen, and the state requires licenses for plumbers and electricians and the like for reasons relating to insurance regulations and not unions. I won't tell you not to use an undocumented handyman to change a faucet but for a major plumbing job, there is a reason your insurance company and city permitting department expect a plumbers license.

My city permitting department will inspect the work done according to code. YMMV.

And that's why people hire general laborers or do it themselves. If you have to hire an electrician, a plumber, a roofer, and a drywall contractor to put in a simple bathroom fan, it's going to cost you thousands.

Yes, I won't tell you not to have Jose from the home depot parking lot/Oaxaca put a fart fan in your bathroom instead of having an HVAC company subcontract an electrician, roofer, and a drywall contractor. But for a major job there is a reason you want a licensed contractor. If you have drainage problems or need an entire HVAC system replaced or you need a new circuit on your panel and you aren't comfortable with DIY you need somebody with experience in that particular trade.

Jose can replace a p-trap. I'm not saying every job that requires a license needs to require a license. But licenses exist for a reason.

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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.

They’ll travel, it just costs more. And really I’d expect transit to be concentrated in the same places as union halls anyways.

barriers to entry which effectively exclude the lowest-quality providers(and lots of others, it needs to be acknowledged

The extent to which 20th century unions were also racial/ethnic spoils systems is, IMO, underappreciated for political reasons. Not saying it always worked that way, but there isn't a shortage of "and then they hired/imported (across state or sometimes country borders) minority scabs workers to break the strike" tales. But it's inconvenient to observe this because "union labor" and minority workers are supposed to be part of the same big tent.

Maybe people will start noticing more if union labor keeps swinging right.

Indeed, the unions exclude lots of people for arbitrary reasons to generate an artificial shortage. In my industry they exclude hacks pretty well so using union labor might be worth it for some people, despite its high costs- hospitals will pay any amount to just not have problems, for example(I'm pretty happy to let someone else deal with that). I don't think they're any more racist than regular HVAC(which is... not politically correct). But there's definitely lots of guys with stories about the union not letting them in, good commercial techs.

Yeah mark this as a point for "Gavin can govern" for me (hey thats kinda catchy, maybe they should use that). When Joe Rogan says he ruined CA, I kinda feel like to me it seems much more like these crazy people with crazy veto power that I can't imagine coordinating with, but maybe that's just my naivete. Or maybe Gavin developed some kind of backbone relatively recently. Idk but this seems like more of a real-world accomplishment than anyone else on the Democrat side bench has managed.

This is the most positive report in the series that I can recall. At least from the California YIMBY perspective. How would you rate it on a scale of Worse Than Nothing to Thank God, I Can Finally Put This Revolver Down?

Every compromise, every amendment, every watering-down was necessary to get this across the finish line.

Ah, so it sounds like it is somewhere between Not Great But Progress... to Oops, I Guess This Revolver Thing Does Work After All. I wonder how it goes from here. Domino effect that has broken the camel's back, or a doubling down from opposing interests? Congratulations!

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!

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