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Yeah, humans tend have an impact on environments they live in. Seriously, how did we get a system that is so self defeating? It's insane that Califorians can't build houses.
Remember that feeling. Hold on to it. One thing I've learned from working in this space is that the systems are always stupider and more vile than you think.
One thing that helps is to remember that at this point, a society that builds is not in living memory for any but the very oldest of Americans.
"And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half generations, the builder's mindset passed out of all knowledge.”
The YIMBYs are envisioning a wonderfully abundant future, and at the same time, doing a lot of Slow Boring of Hard Boards. In practice, the tip of the spear involves showing up at community meetings to politely ask your local officials to knock it off, or calling your legislator to politely ask them to take your local officials' toys away, or to pore over your city's state-mandated reports and politely tell the state that the city is lying. Roughly none of it looks like Punching The Bad People. (There's an excellent, unfortunately Patreon-only, episode of "The War on Cars" interviewing Matthew Lewis that covers a lot of this.)
Sometimes there are wins, and they're worth celebrating. My city's downtown is replacing a closed donut shop with a small apartment building with ground-floor retail. It's only a few stories tall, but it has a cool roof deck, and it'll make our downtown a little nicer. It's only possible because AB 2097 says the city can't require fifteen parking spaces, which would make the project unconstructible. It's not loud, it's not huge, but it's something. And piling up more and more of those will eventually matter.
Hello, sorry for commenting on this out of nowhere, but I found the podcast you suggested and wanted to ask you a question, if you don't mind.
The host of the podcast retweets groups of vandals who slash car tyres and smash people's headlights. Links: https://twitter.com/Naparstek https://twitter.com/T_Extinguishers/status/1630479016531578881
Can you explain? Are you acting as the public facing moderate voice of a violent extremist movement?
The Tyre Extinguishers, so far as I can tell, encourage people to deflate tires, as shown in the linked thread. I'm not saying that Aaron Naparstek has never retweeted a violent extremist, but he's not doing so here. If he has, let me know.
I'm not very public facing, I'm moderate in my approach but radical in my goals, and I absolutely disavow violent extremism.
There is, however, violence involved here. The arms race making vehicles larger and taller means that every life saved by an SUV costs four lives outside of the vehicle. Pedestrian deaths are steeply rising after falling for decades. I think that's worth caring about as well.
I don't care what your noble goal is. This is not a valid legal or moral justification for vandalism and deflating people's tires.
Perhaps I've been unclear. I also dislike vandalism. Not as much as I dislike violent extremism, but I find it distasteful and I don't endorse it. I'm providing some context for why people feel so strongly, but I'm not endorsing vandalism. I hope that clears things up.
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This does not look to me like a question asked in good faith. Why would someone who recommends a podcast be obligated to answer for whatever the host of the podcast might do elsewhere on social media? How do you know he's even aware of these tweets? You've made quite a leap to accuse him of being some sort of shill.
Coming from a "new" account that seems to have been created just for the purpose of asking this question, I almost didn't let your post out of the new user filter, but decided to do so just to point this out as something not to do.
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I'd argue the problem stems from having tons and tons of empty land.
Other countries (specifically Asian ones) simply can't afford inefficiency or the death cult of "environmentalism, therefore do nothing ever" in this area; North America is unique in having the vast majority of its land unsettled so the moralization to preserve its "character" is appealing (to the corrupt citizens and politicians that are getting rich off the inherent rent-seeking this enables).
Most of the places that are growing these days are in deserts or upon flat land as far as the eye can see partially for this reason (US Southwest and to a degree the Midwest up through Idaho, Alberta, Saskatchewan)- can't spoil a view that really wasn't much to begin with (realistically, it's just another farm field), the hard requirement for life support to survive outside 6 months of the year (extreme heat for Southwest, extreme cold for Canada) is complementary to building for cars (obligatory "future car sanctuary states"), while most of the places that are locked in the hardest are the places that look the nicest.
Also, local government and people within that local area actually having actual power.
The dirty secret is one of the ways France, Spain, Germany, etc. can cheaply build trains, metros, and even housing at times is simple - the federal government has immense powers to step in and say, "sorry, we're doing this, giving you market value for your land, and you have no recourse in the law at all to stop us."
There's other things, but this is something people on both sides overlook.
"Moses tore down America's great old cities, Jacobs ensured you could never build great new ones."
I want to emphasize that this is indeed how things used to work in the United States, most notably in postwar New York City, where Robert Moses legendarily used eminent domain to raze neighborhoods to build his projects. (If you have plenty of time, the Henry George Program had an excellent discussion about Moses.) The environmental movement of the sixties and seventies was in large part a backlash to Moses; the edifice of law and regulation they erected made it harder to build bad things by making it harder to build anything.
The tradition that separates us from better-functioning countries dates back seventy years at most.
You see this in our transit projects, where things simply get bogged down because it's much easier to say no or be cautious or add requirements than it is to say yes. You see this in our environmental laws like CEQA and NEPA (the federal version of CEQA), where they're used to delay obviously environmentally-friendly projects (congestion pricing, solar panels, offshore wind) in favor of an environmentally-unfriendly status quo. You see it in the way that these processes provide a foothold, so, for example, labor unions fight against CEQA reform because their process involves threatening obstruction to get labor benefits. And you see it in the infuriating "precautionary principle" which acts as a fully-general excuse for inaction, because you're comparing the worst case of "Life Continues" if you don't do something and "Extreme Catastrophe" if you do.
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