“ This school of thought doesn’t have much of a voice on the internet, though, in part because it’s a politics of cranky old people who aren’t especially online.”
I dipped my toe in there once or twice and had to scrub with tomato juice and Fels Naphtha soap for a week to get out the stench of racism and paranoia.
And here I am in Boise, where the city officials here took it upon themselves to rewrite their own zoning code, which allows by right ADUs almost everywhere, (du/tri/quad)plexes in the grand majority of residential land, up to four stories on most parcels, and my favorite: completely abolished commercial zoning and replaced it with mixed used zoning so that any retail or office space can also by right add housing on the lot...while meanwhile, the city is being utterly repressed by a zillion evil state preemption measures imposed by people who, live far, far away from Boise and have little in common other than being lumped in together via arbitrarily drawn borders from more than a century ago.
And since Matt is curious about the "greater than # residents" provisions, the purpose is very much to keep urban centers down and powerless, because of rural resentment and fear over urban areas doing the same, even though whatever laws the cities pass wouldn't impact each other! "Greater than 100,000" has been used for many years just to specifically target Boise, and now that some of the suburbs ans Coeur d'Alene are surpassing that, I'm guessing they'll change all of that to 250,000 some day. This should be an Equal Protection Clause violation. Just evil, evil stuff.
I think I can understand that rural lawmakers may worry about the state turning into Colorado or Illinois, where the metro area dominates to the point it controls state politics.
I get irrationally annoyed by bills that pretend to be generic but have clearly been written to apply only to the people the bill-writers hate. The dishonesty, I mean. I don't know why but I just want to do some lapel-shaking and shout "just say who you're targeting instead of lying about it."
I like the idea of big cities / counties being able to form their own state. For instance, let's say counties with a population of more than 500,000 are allowed to hold a referendum to request secession from their state. If 2/3 of local voters are in favor, and there is majority consent in the state legislature and Congress, the county is henceforth a new state with its own state legislature and its own representation in Congress. If 4/5 of local voters favor statehood, the consent of the old state legislature is not required.
It would take a constitutional amendment, but I'd vote for that amendment.
I've proposed a constitutional amendment on forming new states out of territories which would abolish the requirement for Congressional consent, provided that:
1. A constitution has been drafted and has been approved by the Supreme Court as fulfilling the requirement for a Republican Form of Government.
2. That constitution has been presented to the people of the territory in a referendum and a majority of those voting, being at least one-third* of the whole population of the territory have voted in favour.
3. The whole population of the territory is greater than that of the second-smallest state and was so in each of the last two censuses.
The second-smallest is to avoid situations where a state's population crashes (e.g. there's a massive volcano and Hawaii has to be evacuated for a few years) and suddenly there's a narrow window that a bunch of tiny territories can use to become states with 80K population.
Yes, the net effect is just to lay down a process for Puerto Rico to become a state, but I was trying to work out a sensible set of principles for what the requirements should be for becoming a state - and having a large fraction of your population as being citizens and those people wanting to be a state seems like a reasonable set of rules to me.
I'd be fine with big cities doing the same, provided they don't just do it on city/county boundaries. I don't think that they should be able to leave their suburbs behind - and I'd really like them to pull in the bits from other states (e.g. Newark should be in the same state as Manhattan).
* Children and noncitizens are part of the whole population but can't vote, this ensures that a large fraction of the population are citizens and that there has been a healthy turnout.
Aside: I'd also add one Senator and one Representative who are elected by the combination of all US citizens living in the USA who aren't otherwise represented, ie DC + the territories. Yes, this would make the Senate an odd number, reducing the power of the VP.
It's a constitutional amendment so you have a lot of leeway in what you can do with respect to SCOTUS, but note that part (1) not only contravenes the Court's holding that the Guarantee clause is nonjusticiable (Luther v. Borden), but also seems to be outside of the "cases or controversies" requirement of the Constitution.
You could probably do this, since it's a an amendment, but the latter is actually kind of a fundamental change in the Court's remit.
You would think when you post something like "Are we going to let 500,000 people have two Senators" one would bother to Google "what is the population of Wyoming"?
That was the idea. Half a million people in small towns in a sparsely populated state can have two senators already. Urbanites are structurally underrepresented in the senate -- no matter how big a city gets, it doesn't bring any more senators to its state. Small urban states will balance this out, shifting federal politics in a direction that is presumably agreeable to urbanites.
Not necessarily. If Portland forms its own state it would result in two left wing Senators, but Oregon proper would then elect two right wing ones. So a balanced four versus what is right now two Democrats. If the whole process is managed by the DNC then I guess Portland would not do it but Salt Lake City would. It wouldn’t be managed that way though.
I looked up what the rest of Oregon would be by making the Portland metro its own state, and in 2024 it was actually closer than I thought, Trump would have won but with only 50.9% of the vote. Eugene, Salem, and Bend would balance out the rest of the state.
Also, SLC gets a double whammy of a shit sandwich not just in the Senate, but in the House they got gerrymandered into oblivion so they don't have truly accurate representation. They and Nashville got royally fucked in the last redistricting shenanigans.
On the other hand, if Portland formed its own state, it would have two left Senators, but *the rest of Oregon* would then elect 2 right wing senators creating a net negative for Democrats.
This is only the case for states with only one big city. Other states, like Ohio and PA would shift the balance: If Cleveland, Cincinnati Columbus and Rural Ohio were now four different states that would be 6 D and 2 R. Likewise PA with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia would be 4D and 2R. Texas would be 8D, 2R. California would be at a minimum 6 D 2 R. I haven't done the total accounting but I think this idea -- especially if deployed strategically -- would almost certainly help dems.
Eh we need less state and local subdivisions not more. We should do the opposite and give states quotas of construction production that would be impossible to fulfill without involving cities.
Under Wickard v. Filburn logic I think one can easily make an argument that the housing market has grand interstate effects. See all the Californians that leave for other states in the West because they're priced out.
That was just a continuing extension of Wickard v. Filburn, and really the two cases were very similar, both involving people growing plants on their own that they weren't allowed to grow.
Not a super hard court case to prove the need for national quotas of production. You can even allocate them to states to implement as they please as long as they hit the quotas in the areas designated. Give the option to create via public or private means. Not sure what the argument would be against that legislation
In Flagstaff, housing is ridiculously expensive because the federal government owns basically all of the outlying land and hasn’t sold it. Infill is just an expensive band aid. Wouldn’t selling off some tracts from national forests and BLM properties do the trick?
It could! But you have to be careful with this, because once that NFS and BLM land is gone it's gone for good. I, meanwhile, just don't have the visceral opposition to infill that you do, and I'm also very skeptical of calling it expensive.
You may notice on that NYC Council map that there’s one kind of aberration: a “No” vote from Chris Marte in CD1, representing lower Manhattan.
Marte is a Democrat of the left-wing graduate student pro-rent control “anti-developer” type. Fortunately, he faces several primary challengers this month. If anyone here lives in CD1, please consider voting for anyone but Marte.
Don't want to be critical, but if you want to beat the incumbent, you don't want people to vote 'for anyone but Marte', but for whoever is the best-placed challenger. And this seems to be a problem, as a quick glance online suggests the yimby-est challenger is not the highest-fundraising challenger. So some working out to do on this.
The following information is from the Geographic Areas Reference Manual, published by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, November 1994, chapter 6 entitled "Statistical Groupings of States and Counties":
"Although the system of regions and divisions has remained largely unchanged for many decades, the data user community periodically suggests new approaches to large-area summary geography. The Census Bureau, in turn, examines these proposals and considers them as possible improvements to the existing framework of State groupings.
One major review took place after the 1950 census, when an interagency committee within the Department of Commerce compared the existing Census Bureau regions and divisions to other schemes of regionalization and assessed the usefulness of an alternative system. Because the existing State groupings resulted largely from tradition, with few major changes from the 1880 set of summary units, it seemed worthwhile to test these combinations by using more modern statistical approaches and techniques... Socioeconomic homogeneity [was] the principal criterion for grouping States into regions.
...the proposed new arrangement contained the same number of groupings (four regions and nine divisions) as the existing system. It retained the same names for the four regions, but made a number of changes in grouping the States. The proposal assigned many States that were on the border of an existing region to a different region, and some to entirely new divisions. For instance, it shifted Delaware, the District of Columbia, and Maryland from the South Region to the Middle Atlantic Division of the Northeast Region...
This suggested reclassification had its merits, for on a purely statistical basis it provided a more homogeneous set of areas than any others then in use by the Department of Commerce. However, the new system did not win enough overall acceptance among data users to warrant adoption as an official new set of general-purpose State groupings. The previous development of many series of statistics, arranged and issued over long periods of time on the basis of the existing State groupings, favored the retention of the summary units of the current regions and divisions."
I think it was visible. The DC area was booming, metro was under construction to unit the region, and Arlington had big plans for high density development near its stations.
Maryland has always been kind of a red headed step child in this regard as a border state but I also think this is just Matt's usual transplant clumsiness. Mason-Dixon line is the boundary. Anyone who doesn't believe me should go visit St. Mary's county sometime.
More seriously I think this post would have made more sense if he described those areas as the Mid Atlantic. Its blue here but dynamics are totally different than New England and even NY.
My uncle's Grandfather was a Colonel in the Union Army, and present at the signing at Appomattox (he's in some pictures from the event), and was reportedly adamant that he was always a Union man but never a Northerner.
Don't get them started on whether New York is in the northeast. If it's not in New England it's not the northeast. Or so I'm reminded by my friends from Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
A lot of my map-staring has been at various wargames covering the American War of Independence and the American Civil War, and for those periods, you'd divide the US Atlantic Coast into four parts:
New England
Mid-Atlantic (NY, PA, NJ)
Upper South (VA, MD)
Deep South (GA, SC)
DE is gradually transitioning from Upper South to Mid-Atlantic in this period. NC is usually Deep in 1776 but Upper in 1861.
FL is Spanish in 1776, and firmly Deep South in 1861.
But I don't think that reflects the modern geography of the southern half of the region at all. There's a good argument that the boundary between northeast and southeast, which was on the Mason-Dixon line in 1776 and gradually moved south to the Potomac has now crossed the river and includes all of northern Virginia - but the Tidewater or Richmond are very clearly in the southeast.
I'd go with the 104th meridian (MT/WY/ND/SD borders, still properly keeps Denver/Taos/Albuquerque/El Paso in the West). I wish I could go higher than the 39th parallel, as I don't see SLC and Denver as part of the Northwest, but that would also do goofy things like putting Philly and Baltimore in the Southeast, so 39th it is.
100th is the traditional line, because that’s close to where the rain gets too low for non-irrigated agriculture. But in Texas, the line should bend a bit to stay just west of the Balcones Escarpment (so that Fort Worth, Killeen, Austin, and San Antonio all stay on the east).
A post that is basically a summation of half my comments the last 3 years. This Long Islander is reading all this and just thinking “sounds about right”.
I’ll therefore pivot to something else that Matt touches on that Noah Smith wrote about recently that was a real “glass shattering” moment for me. I think a lot of us (including me) like pointing out the ways the GOP doesn’t follow its own supposed commitments to free market principles. I think now with Trump, the whole “Republicans are committed to free market” schtick is basically dead.
What Noah pointed out that is that in a lot of ways the 80s/90s GOP and the 80s/90s Tory party are actually an anomaly in the world of conservative politics. I think because he’s lived in Japan he’s more familiar with most that conservative parties around the world are often not all that aligned with free market principles. Quite famously in the current discourse, early 20th century GOP was in a lot of ways the less free market party.
I think what I’m getting at is I think there is actually a space for a left wing free market ideology which Matt kind of alludes to. Which leads me to this; Elizabeth Warren come back! What happened to the pre 2020 Elizabeth Warren? Because this was you to a large degree. An Elizabeth Warren from 2010 I actually think could find a real “new” niche for herself here.
To the topic of the article, part of the reason Elizabeth Warren lost her way is that the MA Republican party doesn't even try to compete anymore, so the seat is safe. I'm afraid Charlie Baker will go down as the last "New England Republican" in MA. And he signed the first state-level transit oriented development law in the country.
I kind of think this is a problem generally across the country. It's funny because as much grief as Matt gives to lefties about now being more supportive of nominating more centrists in swing states for Congress and senate, it seems really clear to me that Democrats are more committed to moderating their views than GOP. This isn't universal of course; Susan Collins being a very obvious but kind of outlier counterexample.
Like I think about the NYC mayoral race. NYC clearly swung right in the last election. The fact that Andrew Cuomo is the most likely person to become the next NYC mayor is in part name recognition but is in part because there is clearly a constituency for more moderate policy in NYC. And yet while I wouldn't call Curtis Sliwa a raging right wing Trump sycophant (he's come out saying 2020 election denial is nonsense), he's clearly a right winger*. NYC moving right is not at all the same thing as NYC is now right wing.
So instead, Cuomo gets to be the moderate candidate and unfortunately someone like me is left in the position of hoping Zohran Mamdani gets the nomination despite having a bunch of far left positions that I think would be actively damaging to the city** (Can't emphasize enough that Cuomo should not be anywhere near political office again. The stuff that came out about him is tip of the iceberg stuff. I'm the Democratic equivalent of a "Never Trumper" on this).
* In fitting with the topic of Matt's post, this is what Curtis Sliwa has said about housing from Wikipedia "His platform includes addressing the housing shortage in the city by repealing current mayor Eric Adams' "City of Yes" proposals, restoring zoning control to "local residents, community boards, and City Council members", and revising the city's zoning laws to "prioritize affordability and community stability"."
** Mamdani has come out in favor of universal rent control. I don't think he'd be able to pass this if he became mayor, but the fact he thinks this is a good idea is horrifying. Also, an example where "Popularism" has major flaws. Because rent control is actually popular with lots of people including a lot of people we would not call lefty activists. Sounds like "common sense" too a lot of normies.
This is...not really true especially on the state and local level.
First of all, just keeping to Federal level, please see the new BBB bill that passed the House. It absolutely comes with massive entitlement cuts. The fact that GOP dresses it up by saying it's really about making sure healthy people don't get Medicaid they "don't deserve" is obviously an indication that GOP is aware that Medicaid cuts are unpopular. But as the author of this Substack has noted, these are massive cuts plain and simple.
But on the state level? Yeah those Medicaid work requirements have passed in a number of states. On abortion? Yeah immediately after Dobbs, a number of states either passed or automatically passed based on previous legislation passed. And yeah, please see what the likely new senator from Texas has been up to. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-sues-activist-new-york-doctor-illegally-providing-abortion-drugs-across. And I know there is a lot ink spilled about whether these "don't say gay" bills are has harsh as critics say they are, but it's hard to make the argument there isn't an element of anti-gay posturing.
Point being, while Matt makes a point of showing Trump's rhetorical moderation (and it really his more rhetorical as evidenced by the BBB bill) it still seems to be pretty out of step with rest of GOP.
I'm not a fan of Cuomo, but I'm not clear on what "should not be anywhere near political office again" means. Do you mean corruption, sexual assault, extra-legal measures to punish his opponents, or is there potentially something else I am missing here that we should know about? And yes, I believe these are all really bad, just like I believe Mamdani might fundamentally fail to run the city and under him NYC could end up like Chicago right now. There don't seem to be good options here.
I mean with policy, Cuomo was pretty big impediment to increasing housing supply and was personally responsible for a decent amount of the cost overruns of the 2nd avenue subway. Don't think Mamdani is great on this stuff, but hard for me to make the argument that Cuomo is way better.
But yeah on the personal stuff? Yeah, can tell you that a lot of the more troubling aspects of his character and general behavior has not actually come to light and he's kind of lucky more didn't come out.
In Germany, the right-wing free market niche is held by the FDP (the "liberal" party), with the major right-wing party (the CDU/CSU) being much less free market. This is a pretty common formation in Europe - PP (right) and C's (liberal) in Spain, Gaullists (now called LR) and liberals (currently MoDo) in France, etc. There are some exceptions where the main right-wing party is the descendant of the C19 liberal (ie pro-constitution) party, like Venstre in Denmark or VVD in the Netherlands.
The other big exception is the British Liberal Party / Liberal Democrats, which is possibly the only surviving undivided liberal party, including both right-wing liberals (ie the political movement that American libertarians come from) and left-wing liberals (a political movement that often confuses people as we tend to be a minority group in much larger parties; the only relatively pure left-liberal parties I can think of are the Dutch D66 and the Danish Radikal Venstre)
Catholic conservative parties echo the Roman Catholic church in being conservative socially while being very suspicious of the "all that is solid melts into air" aspects of the free market. The CDU/CSU has a strong Catholic tinge.
That’s very true, but there are non-Catholic parties like this as well: e.g. the Swedish Moderata or the Norwegian Høyre. Also Greece’s Néa Dimokratía.
These (plus Finland, whose politics I know little about) are the only non-Catholic European countries, other than the already mentioned Netherlands and Denmark, that were democratic before the fall of Communism, and the political systems of the various ex-Communist countries have rarely stabilised (and, in any case, they didn’t revive pre-1917/1940 parties in 1989-91, so there aren’t parties with deep roots in liberalism like Venstre or VVD or in anti-liberalism like Moderata or Høyre)
For most of the countries of Europe, one can roughly summarise party histories starting in the nineteenth century something like this: There was an absolute monarchy, there was one party that supported the absolute monarchy, the nobility, the church, and power and wealth coming from land. This party was usually called either "Conservatives" or "Right". Their main opponent, who supported a constitutional monarchy or a republic, elections, secularism, the bourgeoisie, and power and wealth coming from capital and trade and industrial production were called either "Liberals" or "Left".
Eventually the "social question" started to arise, that is to say, there were lots of poor urban people and some people cared about them, but also poor urban people demonstrated that when they revolted it was a much bigger problem than when poor rural people (peasants) revolted*, and socialists were those who supported the poor-people side of the "social question", trying to improve working contitions.
The Liberal parties then divided over the social question, with the rise of welfare liberalism and social liberalism as the left-liberals and right-liberals starting to call themselves "market liberals" or, later "classical liberals".
In the same period, the Catholic church, which had usually asked its congregants not to participate in electoral politics - regarding elections as part of the anti-clerical spirit of the French Revolution - came to support Catholic parties, starting with Zentrum in Germany in 1870, and Christian Democratic parties became more widespread after rerum novarum in 1891.
In some countries, the principal right party was the descendant of the right-liberals, as the Conservative party retained a narrow focus on nobility and absolutism and became an utter irrelevance in a democratic system (the Danish Højre and Dutch Conservative parties are examples of parties that disappeared), in others, the Conservative party was able to refocus as a mass party - such as in Britain, Norway and Sweden; in these countries the right-liberals tended to become a minority party or else they merged into the Conservatives, while the left-liberals combined with the social democrats - either through formal merger or a collapse of one party and people of that opinion joining the other. There are not many places where there are two liberal parties, one of the left and the other of the right, but unified liberal parties did survive in a lot of places for a long time.
In a similar period (ie around the turn of the twentieth century), broad socialist parties tended to split into multiple strands, one is reformists (often calling themselves social democrats, but also often coming from trades unions and calling themselves parties of labour or of the workers) who sought to reform the economic system, another is electoralists (socialists or democratic socialists, or leftists; in some languages, you can't contrast social democrat with democratic socialist) who sought to overthrow the capitalist system through democratic/constitutional means, and the third are the various types of revolutionary (Leninists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc). Marxists can be either revolutionary or electoralist. Some socialist/social democratic parties combine both electoralist and reformist groups; some socialist parties combine both electoralists and revolutionaries.
All of Europe's traditional centre-left parties are descended from socialist/social democratic parties, there's nowhere that a left-liberal party (like the New Deal Democrats in the US) became the dominant party of the centre-left. Centre-right parties may be descended from Christian Democrats, from conservatives, or from right-liberals. While these parties are all pretty similar (they all join the European People's Party and the International Democracy Union), there are nonetheless times when their different histories do show up in different policies and sentiments.
Christian Democrats are originally a Catholic thing - in countries that have both Catholics and Protestants, the Catholic party was founded first, followed by a Protestant party, and then they later merged (e.g. Netherlands in 1975) or else a new multi-denominational party was founded that replaced both (e.g. Germany in 1947). There are a few Christian Democratic parties in non-Catholic countries, but they were founded as copies of the idea from other countries much later on (usually post-WWII) - the original Catholic version dates to either the 1870s or 1890s (depending on your view whether Germany's Zentrum and the Dutch KVP were really Christian Democrat before rerum novarum, or whether they were a minority-religion protection party until they assimilated to the broader Christian Democratic movement after 1891, a historical/political science fight in which I do not have a dog).
Note that the countries (barring East Germany, which largely inherited the West German system) that were part of the Soviet Bloc or Yugoslavia before 1989 have a completely different political history, and these general outlines don't apply.
Also Portugal's 1975 revolution means their political history is very different - their main centre-right party was originally the social democrats (ie the moderate revolutionaries) and their main centre-left party was originally the socialists (ie the less-moderate revolutionaries: the extreme revolutionaries didn't participate in democracy).
* Peasant revolts have been taking place since the end of Roman-style slavery, and they were slave revolts before that. The usual solution was that the army burned the crops and the peasants starved until they submitted in exchange for food. This works pretty well, but it's much harder to do an equivalent in cities, where burning down the city burns down all the assets of the wealthy as well (crops are valuable, but they can be replanted and regrown).
Sort of a reminder that parliamentary systems kind of (rightly) skew what should be considered a "right wing" or "left wing" party.
Makes me think about what the party breakdown basically "should" be in the US. One, southern based Christian conservative party. One libertarian party (this one would likely not be nearly as "crank" based since it would attract a decent number of small c conservative business types), one "green" party, one Farmers party, one Union party and one anti-immigrant party. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but point being it's very clear there should be at least 5+ major parties in the US Congress in a parliamentary system.
The confounding variable as usual with the US is race. Given existing dynamics in 19th and early 20th century, I suspect there would have been an "African American" party in much the same way there are historically black colleges. Now what would happen to that party post 1965 would be a very interesting question and maybe a good subject for one of Matt's alternative history posts.
Obviously the details of the system matter, but I've mapped out in my mind how multiple parties would emerge from proportional representation, starting postbellum.
The Republicans would probably dominate for quite a while over the Democrats. I agree that there would be a Southern party that would commonly play kingmaker, and for worse, as that's another route to institute Jim Crow. I actually do not foresee a Black Party, as they have too much at stake to lose in not supporting the major party that is least hostile to them.
I foresee a decent Prohibition Party emerging as well, potentially as a kingmaker that gets what it wants at some point before it becomes the dog that caught the car. After the Panic of c. 1893 I then foresee the Democratic Party disintegrating at the hands of several smaller parties (Farmers, as you say definitely being one), eventually coalescing around a proper Labor Party like most of the rest of the industrialized world got in the early 20th century. This Labor Party then takes over and dominates after the Great Depression. Mid 20th century, if civil rights prevails then the Southern party probably disintegrates. I very much agree that we would eventually get a Libertarian Party, a Green Party, and a Christian Party some time within the mid to late 20th century.
Notably, the surveys of political views he used to draw up those parties show the biggest gap where a true libertarian party would be. Growth and Opportunity party is probably closest to filling that niche, followed by New Liberals.
You have to wonder a lot about an "abundance" politics where the goal is (1) get hard stuff done in blue states, (2) leverage this to win national elections. Given that the GOP (which is very fluid between national and local politics) has almost a total veto on (1), what exactly is left as a political strategy?
I think that’s the point - for getting hard stuff done, you can never expect 100% in your caucus. So unless your party gets substantially over the threshold, the other party has veto power by just agreeing to vote as a bloc. It’s much easier to get unanimity blocking something than doing something.
The key insight from Mitch McConnell circa 2008/2009 (or someone in his camp). If you can keep your caucus united, you can actually do serious damage to you're opponents legislative agenda; especially in the senate (think it's really underrated how much our current 60 vote threshold for literally anything only really became status quo post Obama victory).
The other dynamic nationally is there clearly was and to extent is a fetishization for bipartisanship and "reaching across the aisle" in MSM. Matt is talking in this post about the practical reasons this is a good idea. But especially pre Trump there was a real sense that this was goal irrespective of the actual policy objectives. So if a bill had bipartisan buy in it must by definition be good and if it passes along partisan lines then there must be something wrong with it.
McConnell (or someone on his team) very clearly understood that if you forced Obama to pass bills on partisan lines, you can count on a certain amount of MSM "tsk tsk" that would help undermine his overall popularity.
In the couple examples Matt gave of GOP being unanimously against zoning reform - NYC and Connecticut - they were too small of a minority on the legislative bodies to make a difference. Those bills passed easily without them.
Yeah you can never expect 100% in your own caucus but is it reasonable to expect maybe two thirds? That would be enough to get reform through in a lot of these state houses where Dems have 75-85% of the seats! At what point can you no longer blame the minority party for not doing enough to save you from yourselves on housing?
I actually think Matt's headline is questionable. Yes he gives plenty of examples showing blue state Republicans (especially in the northeast) are often bad on housing, but doesn't really demonstrate this is the primary reason for reform failure in any case. With all this put together, the notion that the above poster had that the GOP has an "almost total veto" on Democrats running their states well is just ridiculous to me, I'm sorry.
I'm sure it is true that conservatives around the world aren't committed to free market values just as left of center parties aren't committed to the poor. My take is wonks over value "Party X supports Policy Y which is incompatible with Party's Xs stated values."
Human beings are great at coming up arguments to justify self-interested and selfish policies.
I think Republicans are pro housing development and deregulation AFTER local authorities ok it. For example, reducing environmental requirements, etc. once it gets past the local zoning it’s off to the races, before that they’ll defer to the NIMBYs.
I’d prefer if they were pro upzoning AND making construction cheaper and easier, but I suppose it’s better than the left who hates both.
I’m a zoning commissioner in Connecticut, and another aspect to the “local control” debate is minority representation requirements. The zoning commission can only be up to 2/3 of a single party, which means in practice it’s 2/3 Democratic and 1/3 Republican. So for any development proposal, we can only afford one Democratic defection because the Republicans get three automatic no votes.
There's no actual requirement to be a conservative to be a Republican. In a state that is so blue as Connecticut, is it not possible for a large number of moderates or progressives to join and effectively take over the Republican Party?
Most liberals are pretty turned off of calling themselves republicans, to the degree that local parties are more often taken over by whackjobs. The thought has crossed my mind though.
Lots of Nimbyism from Democrats is also Right Nimbyism. We're currently doing a small expansion of SROs here in my very liberal college town and there are lots of cranky old people who hate Republicans but also don't want any new people to live in their neighborhood.
And this generally seems... okay? Because the city is where you want high density housing anyway, for a multitude of reasons, and where the vast majority of it would be built anyway if everywhere were upzoned.
I feel like it's not the worst thing in the world to just roll with the political winds here. Upzone the cities, leave the suburbs alone. Makes it easier to get support for your reform without many actual negative consequences.
In the very liberal college town where I live part-time, a very heavily advertised (online and IRL) comp plan rewrite has been underway for more than a year now. Finally, the local government is moving to permit higher density throughout the city, which in housing stock terms has been mostly frozen in time since my undergrad days in the previous millennium. NIMBYs have recently awakened from their slumber of ignorance and disengagement and are now touting an effort to “pause the plan” and “do it right.”
'On the list of things Texas Republicans could possibly do, forcing Texas cities and some of the Dallas suburbs to upzone is pretty good. I’m glad most of the Democrats in the legislature voted for it, and I wish that more did.'
Wouldn't it lose it's 'lib-owning' qualities if all libs agreed it was a good idea and voted for it? Frankly it seems in danger of losing those qualities even with a majority of Dems voting for it, as here. The broader point being that while good policies might occasionally emerge from a purely 'own the libs' mindset (in the 'stopped clock is right twice a day' style), it's actually a pretty bad governance mindset, creating a bunch of perverse incentives.
Yeah I think Matt is underestimating how much GOP mindset on anything right now is anything other than “own the libs”. The state bill probably doesn’t pass if the Dems are for it; defeats the purpose.
It’s the same crap now with this insane overreaction from Trump with the LA protests. It has nothing to do with “law and order” or because the immigrants arrested are dangerous. It’s all “make the libs cry” crap.
One thing I noticed - College Station currently has a population of 128,000 and Brazos County is at 250,000. At current growth rates, that becomes 150,000 and 300,000 around 2032.
I wanted them to zone Texas Ave for apartment towers a decade ago, and rationalize the bus system with a frequent bus running up and down - but doing it a decade from now is better than never.
I see a bunch of others that either already qualify, or will in the next decade or two by current trends.
Lubbock and Killeen already qualify (though apparently Amarillo is split across counties in a way that keeps every county population below the city!) A few Houston suburbs are just under 150,000 (Pasadena, Pearland, and League City), and Round Rock just north of Austin will reach 150,000 soon as well. Waco is at 149,000 and McClellan county was at 260,000 in 2020 and 270,000 now, so it will likely qualify in a decade or two as well. New Braunfels and Comal county are a bit far from the threshold, but they are basically the fastest growing area in the country, so there’s a good chance they qualify too - when the Austin-to-San Antonio area is the new Dallas-Fort Worth, it’ll at least have upzoning in all its strip malls.
Here in WA, a Republican from Walla Walla (midsize town in the Eastern, more rural part of the state) proposed a bill to preempt local zoning to allow neighborhood cafes statewide. Hasn't gone anywhere yet, but I appreciate the effort.
Suburban and rural Republicans both different problems. What motivates most suburban Republicans seems to be a desire to avoid what they see as the dysfunction of the city they live next to. That leads to stuff like "stop the crimetrain" where residents of Vancouver vehemently oppose light rail from Portland whereas rural WA residents probably wouldn't give a shit. I have some sympathy for the suburbanites. Its not unreasonable to not want crime in your community and your kids' schools to not have fights in the cafeteria every day and such. I do think their NIMBY attitude is defeatist. It's just assumed that light rail would bring crime to the burbs, as if we don't have a police department and we have to just roll over and allow public masturbation just because we have a train. Rural WA doesn't really care what's happening in Portland or Seattle so they have no reason to be NINBYish. Instead they lean more Cliven Bundy/Dale Gribble/don't ask where they were on 1/6. So you know, mixed bag there.
Your point about the crime train is downstream of the broader lack of public trust in civic governance. The reasonable suburbanite looks at Portland and maybe their own local government and thinks - I have zero confidence that this bunch would harshly resist the slippery slope of lifestyle crimes that make city life unattractive to many. Keeping the train out is a structural solution to a governance problem - we don't trust our leaders to protect us or uphold public order, so we bunker in our homes and resist facially neutral policy changes that encourage density.
I feel like the lack of NIMBY conservatives in the online discourse because the internet overrepresents conservative intellectuals and underrepresents cranky old conservatives is just one data point from a broader trend. I remember the internet has always over-represented intellectual efforts to make conservatism respectable. After 2004 you had Megan McArdle trying to argue that the GOP was the party of ideas and pushing for Social Security privatization, when really most Americans just didn't like terrorists or gay marriage.
When I was in college, my friends and I would call our congressman's office while drinking and rant to the automated recording system for constituent comments. Usually it was generic college bro libertarian stuff, one time a friend discussed at length the need for a nationwide bigfoot sighting reporting system.
the thing is because of educational polarization conservative intellectuals are generally a lot nuttier than overtly selfish conservative NIMBYs who are at least honest in saying they don't want anyone to park on their street. It's a parochial concern but is it crazier than the stuff Curtis Yarvin writes?
I like this article, but I feel like Matt is missing the level of analysis needed to get from "I wish blue-state Republicans were more like red-state Republicans" to actually coming up with strategies to get there.
It seems to me like the missing piece is that conservatism genuinely occupies a complicated perspective wrt housing construction. Matt notes that conservatives should theoretically support zoning reform because they like free markets and property rights and deregulation. It's true that these are values typically associated with conservatives, though moreso with libertarians - and the difference matters on this issue especially. Conservatives *also* have a strong streak of caring about local control and federated authority - empowering state governments to override localities triggers the same anti-big-government impulses that show up in states-rights debates. It's sort of beside the point that what the state government wants to do is *decrease* regulation - conservatives aren't *always* against regulation if they think there's something important to be gained from regulation. (Case in point: abortion.)
Here, then, is the critical point: housing deregulation and upzoning have the potential to disrupt other values that conservatives care about: strong families, stable communities, functioning schools, low crime. I personally don't think they're *right* about this causal analysis, but it's not at all incoherent or surprising that a conservative would support regulation in the name of protecting these things, *especially* when that regulation comes in the form of disempowering big blue state governments and empowering local democracy. Yes, it's a strike against free markets, but conservatives - as opposed to libertarians - were never strict free-market ideologues, and there are multiple competing values pulling in different directions here.
I think the major problem with these analyses is that you're pointing to a kind of principled conservatism that doesn't exist, or that doesn't win GOP elections anymore.
The GOP has been utterly relentless in (1) focusing on promising relatively selfish suburban purple voters whatever short-term selfish crap they're angry about, which is typically *not* thoughtful long-term housing policy. And (2) they've had no problem whatsoever stripping local control from cities in red states, despite this being obviously hypocritical and mostly pointless to most conservative voters anyway.
TL;DR I think people need to stop applying old templates for "what conservative politicians care about" and actually focus on the real conservatives being elected in blue states.
"housing deregulation and upzoning have the potential to disrupt other values that conservatives care about: strong families, stable communities, functioning schools, low crime." I'm not sure how housing deregulation does any of these things. Is is just that conservatives don't want "those people" moving into their neighborhood, and believe that ADUs and sixplexes will contain criminals? To be sure, conservatives are not alone in those beliefs. I once had a long conversation, in my front yard, with a pedestrian passer-by who kept claiming that if I replaced my house in my expensive suburb with a fourplex, the fourplex would be filled with criminals because all fourplexes are filled with criminals.
“Stable communities” is the only relevant item in that list. Blocking people from doing anything to change the built environment means the community is limited to changing at the speed of individuals moving, which ensures a certain kind of stability. Allowing construction can allow the income demographic to stay constant in the longer run, but makes for very visible “instability” in the short to medium term.
I guess my thought was that it’s at the speeds of moving in a larger neighborhood. Instead of one family moving out and one moving in, it’s one moving out, a year of construction, and then ten moving in, which is faster. But you’re right, not that much faster.
I guess the other thing is that the possibility of cashing out might speed up the rate at which people sell and move out.
If you have upzoning in a very narrow area, that would raise land costs and might entice people to cash out. But if you upzone in a very wide area, eg statewide, or region-wide that doesn't raise land costs because most people will still want to use the land for whatever it was already being used for.
I was originally just coming here to say Andy Harris, Maryland Republican, is a giant asshole with zero redeeming qualities, although he's not really relevant to the article.
Then I got to the end of the post. This is really the most tiresome part of "normal" politics (non-Trump craziness) for most of my adult life. Spanberger puts forward something cautious and restrained and the right gets outraged anyway. Exhausting dynamic, people need to chill out.
The lib-owning dynamic is so real—this also happens in my home state of Utah where the state legislature delights in thwarting local control on a variety of issues incliding zoning in liberal Salt Lake City/County. The bad dynamics in the Northeast seem to stem from the mistaken notion that density/growth/change is a burden that no one wants to bear. I would wager a NYS upzoning that focused on NYC (e.g. ‘cities with >1 million population) would get ample support from upstate and Long Island Republicans.
The problem is that Long Island and Westchester approve ~0 units already, so they're actually more of a contributor than NYC to the regional housing shortage. Truly depressing to think about what housing costs would look like in the region without New Jersey.
For sure it would be preferable to build more all over NYS but in terms of the political economy it might be easier to upzone NYC, much of which is surprisingly low-density.
Long Island might be ground zero for the Blue State Republican NIMBY factor. Any gesture toward building more housing is “turning Nassau County into Queens.” Suddenly a retired Fox News viewer cares a lot about preserving green space. It’s in the same vein as the Republicans’ opposition to offshore wind around here - I don’t typically think of Trump voters as being especially concerned about the fate of endangered whales, but it’s another way of pushing back against any measure of “change” to the 1978 world in which they first bought their homes.
I’d be pretty surprised if Long Island voters were insincere in their desire to preserve green space given that the presence of such green space is a key point of distinction between Long Island and NYC.
They're not insincere in their desire to preserve *THEIR* green space. The point is that these are people who have never cared about environmentalism and preserving wild areas generally ever before.
Got it. But you see why a sincere desire to preserve local greenspace despite indifference to wild areas in general is different from the whales example, where the implication is that the stated motive (helping whales) is purely pretextual rather than genuine (if self-interested.)
I enjoyed this piece because I feel like the Slow Boring commentariat sometimes treats Republicans like they have quite literally no agency or responsibility for policy outcomes, whereas Democrats are responsible for people on dirt bikes waving Mexican flags. A lot of this is just navel gazing, but Republicans do, in fact, have the theoretical ability to make the world a better place as well.
I have little to no faith in Republicans to make the world a better place, but have some faith that Democrats can, so that's why I'd rather focus on what Democrats can do better.
Is that attitude wrong? Should I have less faith in the Democratic Party?
Matt didn’t mention one of the biggest influencers in these discussions which is the home building lobby in each state.
In North Carolina they are the big advocates of HB 765 which would preempt most local zoning. This is the route to get more Republicans in support of these efforts.
I have been assured that "Corporate Power" is all on the side of not providing more housing, and is in fact the single thing that must be defeated in order for the revolution, erm I mean more abundance, to be realized.
“ This school of thought doesn’t have much of a voice on the internet, though, in part because it’s a politics of cranky old people who aren’t especially online.”
May I introduce you to Nextdoor?
Also increasingly private Facebook groups
I dipped my toe in there once or twice and had to scrub with tomato juice and Fels Naphtha soap for a week to get out the stench of racism and paranoia.
Oh the paranoia!
Does anybody recognize this guy? I've never seen him before! He looks like he's just walking around LOOKING AT THINGS!
How about these kids? Does anybody know if they live around here???
Does the name Gladys Kravitz ring a bell?
I hope Matt loves hearing about every lost dog and suspicious person in the DC Metro!
And here I am in Boise, where the city officials here took it upon themselves to rewrite their own zoning code, which allows by right ADUs almost everywhere, (du/tri/quad)plexes in the grand majority of residential land, up to four stories on most parcels, and my favorite: completely abolished commercial zoning and replaced it with mixed used zoning so that any retail or office space can also by right add housing on the lot...while meanwhile, the city is being utterly repressed by a zillion evil state preemption measures imposed by people who, live far, far away from Boise and have little in common other than being lumped in together via arbitrarily drawn borders from more than a century ago.
And since Matt is curious about the "greater than # residents" provisions, the purpose is very much to keep urban centers down and powerless, because of rural resentment and fear over urban areas doing the same, even though whatever laws the cities pass wouldn't impact each other! "Greater than 100,000" has been used for many years just to specifically target Boise, and now that some of the suburbs ans Coeur d'Alene are surpassing that, I'm guessing they'll change all of that to 250,000 some day. This should be an Equal Protection Clause violation. Just evil, evil stuff.
The situation sounds very frustrating.
""greater than # residents" provisions, the purpose is very much to keep urban centers down and powerless"
In the case of pro-housing bills, doesn't this ultimately empower cities by giving them more residents?
Right? Seems like a long-term own goal
I think I can understand that rural lawmakers may worry about the state turning into Colorado or Illinois, where the metro area dominates to the point it controls state politics.
Exactly. Here in the Northwest it's the Seattle and Portland specters that they envision.
I'm talking about things way out of the realm of housing.
I get irrationally annoyed by bills that pretend to be generic but have clearly been written to apply only to the people the bill-writers hate. The dishonesty, I mean. I don't know why but I just want to do some lapel-shaking and shout "just say who you're targeting instead of lying about it."
Are they allowed to name their targets, though? When I see such obfuscation in lawmaking, my first assumption is that using plain text is prohibited.
I think this is how Florida targeted Disney.
The obvious answer is the states should be preempted by federal legislation the instant we get the opportunity
I like the idea of big cities / counties being able to form their own state. For instance, let's say counties with a population of more than 500,000 are allowed to hold a referendum to request secession from their state. If 2/3 of local voters are in favor, and there is majority consent in the state legislature and Congress, the county is henceforth a new state with its own state legislature and its own representation in Congress. If 4/5 of local voters favor statehood, the consent of the old state legislature is not required.
It would take a constitutional amendment, but I'd vote for that amendment.
Love it, great idea. And because I must, "Dear Mr. President, there are too few states these days. Please add dozens more. I am *not* a crackpot!"
I've proposed a constitutional amendment on forming new states out of territories which would abolish the requirement for Congressional consent, provided that:
1. A constitution has been drafted and has been approved by the Supreme Court as fulfilling the requirement for a Republican Form of Government.
2. That constitution has been presented to the people of the territory in a referendum and a majority of those voting, being at least one-third* of the whole population of the territory have voted in favour.
3. The whole population of the territory is greater than that of the second-smallest state and was so in each of the last two censuses.
The second-smallest is to avoid situations where a state's population crashes (e.g. there's a massive volcano and Hawaii has to be evacuated for a few years) and suddenly there's a narrow window that a bunch of tiny territories can use to become states with 80K population.
Yes, the net effect is just to lay down a process for Puerto Rico to become a state, but I was trying to work out a sensible set of principles for what the requirements should be for becoming a state - and having a large fraction of your population as being citizens and those people wanting to be a state seems like a reasonable set of rules to me.
I'd be fine with big cities doing the same, provided they don't just do it on city/county boundaries. I don't think that they should be able to leave their suburbs behind - and I'd really like them to pull in the bits from other states (e.g. Newark should be in the same state as Manhattan).
* Children and noncitizens are part of the whole population but can't vote, this ensures that a large fraction of the population are citizens and that there has been a healthy turnout.
Aside: I'd also add one Senator and one Representative who are elected by the combination of all US citizens living in the USA who aren't otherwise represented, ie DC + the territories. Yes, this would make the Senate an odd number, reducing the power of the VP.
It's a constitutional amendment so you have a lot of leeway in what you can do with respect to SCOTUS, but note that part (1) not only contravenes the Court's holding that the Guarantee clause is nonjusticiable (Luther v. Borden), but also seems to be outside of the "cases or controversies" requirement of the Constitution.
You could probably do this, since it's a an amendment, but the latter is actually kind of a fundamental change in the Court's remit.
Are we going to let 500,000 people have two Senators? I’m not automatically against your idea, but that one needs to be thought through.
Wyoming has entered the chat, albeit just a shade over 500,000. Perhaps the threshold should be "any area with population over the smallest state".
You would think when you post something like "Are we going to let 500,000 people have two Senators" one would bother to Google "what is the population of Wyoming"?
That was the idea. Half a million people in small towns in a sparsely populated state can have two senators already. Urbanites are structurally underrepresented in the senate -- no matter how big a city gets, it doesn't bring any more senators to its state. Small urban states will balance this out, shifting federal politics in a direction that is presumably agreeable to urbanites.
Not necessarily. If Portland forms its own state it would result in two left wing Senators, but Oregon proper would then elect two right wing ones. So a balanced four versus what is right now two Democrats. If the whole process is managed by the DNC then I guess Portland would not do it but Salt Lake City would. It wouldn’t be managed that way though.
I looked up what the rest of Oregon would be by making the Portland metro its own state, and in 2024 it was actually closer than I thought, Trump would have won but with only 50.9% of the vote. Eugene, Salem, and Bend would balance out the rest of the state.
Also, SLC gets a double whammy of a shit sandwich not just in the Senate, but in the House they got gerrymandered into oblivion so they don't have truly accurate representation. They and Nashville got royally fucked in the last redistricting shenanigans.
On the other hand, if Portland formed its own state, it would have two left Senators, but *the rest of Oregon* would then elect 2 right wing senators creating a net negative for Democrats.
This is only the case for states with only one big city. Other states, like Ohio and PA would shift the balance: If Cleveland, Cincinnati Columbus and Rural Ohio were now four different states that would be 6 D and 2 R. Likewise PA with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia would be 4D and 2R. Texas would be 8D, 2R. California would be at a minimum 6 D 2 R. I haven't done the total accounting but I think this idea -- especially if deployed strategically -- would almost certainly help dems.
Eh we need less state and local subdivisions not more. We should do the opposite and give states quotas of construction production that would be impossible to fulfill without involving cities.
Uh if Democrats wrote a national housing bill it would probably be national rent control/egregious public housing spending.
I'm not sure zoning regulation would constitute "interstate commerce" under the Commerce Clause?
Under Wickard v. Filburn logic I think one can easily make an argument that the housing market has grand interstate effects. See all the Californians that leave for other states in the West because they're priced out.
I think it's Gonzales v. Raich logic nowadays.
That was just a continuing extension of Wickard v. Filburn, and really the two cases were very similar, both involving people growing plants on their own that they weren't allowed to grow.
Although, come to think of it I could see a certain type of ConLaw brain thinking like this: https://i.imgflip.com/9ww9tx.jpg
The latter is a Penn Central issue.
Not a super hard court case to prove the need for national quotas of production. You can even allocate them to states to implement as they please as long as they hit the quotas in the areas designated. Give the option to create via public or private means. Not sure what the argument would be against that legislation
In Flagstaff, housing is ridiculously expensive because the federal government owns basically all of the outlying land and hasn’t sold it. Infill is just an expensive band aid. Wouldn’t selling off some tracts from national forests and BLM properties do the trick?
It could! But you have to be careful with this, because once that NFS and BLM land is gone it's gone for good. I, meanwhile, just don't have the visceral opposition to infill that you do, and I'm also very skeptical of calling it expensive.
I thought the new zoning code went into effect.
https://boisedev.com/news/2023/11/15/newness-for-everybody-boises-new-zoning-code-set-to-take-effect-december-1-opposition-effort-disbands/
It did! I described the key points about it before the ellipsis.
You may notice on that NYC Council map that there’s one kind of aberration: a “No” vote from Chris Marte in CD1, representing lower Manhattan.
Marte is a Democrat of the left-wing graduate student pro-rent control “anti-developer” type. Fortunately, he faces several primary challengers this month. If anyone here lives in CD1, please consider voting for anyone but Marte.
Edit: this article discusses Marte further, including his occasional criticism of congestion pricing (despite representing one of the districts that benefits most from reduced congestion) and opposition to “virtually every contested development” in the district. https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/04/28/league-of-what-now-conservation-groups-endorsement-criteria-is-bizarre
Don't want to be critical, but if you want to beat the incumbent, you don't want people to vote 'for anyone but Marte', but for whoever is the best-placed challenger. And this seems to be a problem, as a quick glance online suggests the yimby-est challenger is not the highest-fundraising challenger. So some working out to do on this.
It’s RCV, so I’m hopeful people will literally rank anyone and everyone but Marte.
Just to be clear I liked your comment because I love the name Nude Africa Forum Moderator. Any relation to the Estate of Bob Saget?
Thanks! And no, although I do recall that person being a very funny commenter. I’m not much of a humorist, I take my moderation work very seriously.
That district is ultra-NIMBY by actual residents, though I really hope he loses
Not this one!
Virginia being the northeast is wild.
With the growth of Northern VA and the relative decline of rural VA, this is more and more true everyday. It is wild.
I wonder if the Republican tweet in the article is aimed specifically at making it harder for non-Southerners to move to NOVA.
The US Census still has Maryland and Delaware in the South!
I love the hardworking folks at the Census Bureau, but they're insane for this.
The following information is from the Geographic Areas Reference Manual, published by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, November 1994, chapter 6 entitled "Statistical Groupings of States and Counties":
"Although the system of regions and divisions has remained largely unchanged for many decades, the data user community periodically suggests new approaches to large-area summary geography. The Census Bureau, in turn, examines these proposals and considers them as possible improvements to the existing framework of State groupings.
One major review took place after the 1950 census, when an interagency committee within the Department of Commerce compared the existing Census Bureau regions and divisions to other schemes of regionalization and assessed the usefulness of an alternative system. Because the existing State groupings resulted largely from tradition, with few major changes from the 1880 set of summary units, it seemed worthwhile to test these combinations by using more modern statistical approaches and techniques... Socioeconomic homogeneity [was] the principal criterion for grouping States into regions.
...the proposed new arrangement contained the same number of groupings (four regions and nine divisions) as the existing system. It retained the same names for the four regions, but made a number of changes in grouping the States. The proposal assigned many States that were on the border of an existing region to a different region, and some to entirely new divisions. For instance, it shifted Delaware, the District of Columbia, and Maryland from the South Region to the Middle Atlantic Division of the Northeast Region...
This suggested reclassification had its merits, for on a purely statistical basis it provided a more homogeneous set of areas than any others then in use by the Department of Commerce. However, the new system did not win enough overall acceptance among data users to warrant adoption as an official new set of general-purpose State groupings. The previous development of many series of statistics, arranged and issued over long periods of time on the basis of the existing State groupings, favored the retention of the summary units of the current regions and divisions."
Have we re surveyed the Mason-Dixon line? No suh, we have not!
cannot help but be reminded of Johnny Cash's classic about taking the train to visit his friends in the DC suburbs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGyUDzU4IIs
Imagine showing that sentence to someone 40 or 50 years ago.
I think it was visible. The DC area was booming, metro was under construction to unit the region, and Arlington had big plans for high density development near its stations.
I have in fact been told by several folks from Georgia and South Carolina that they consider Virginia to be in the North.
At this point I have no idea how to classify Florida. It should be at least 3 different states. attributed to different regions.
It does kind of contradict my notion of what makes the South.
Maryland has always been kind of a red headed step child in this regard as a border state but I also think this is just Matt's usual transplant clumsiness. Mason-Dixon line is the boundary. Anyone who doesn't believe me should go visit St. Mary's county sometime.
More seriously I think this post would have made more sense if he described those areas as the Mid Atlantic. Its blue here but dynamics are totally different than New England and even NY.
Mason-Dixon is a fake boundary. Deciding your regions based on 18th century property lines is foolishness.
My uncle's Grandfather was a Colonel in the Union Army, and present at the signing at Appomattox (he's in some pictures from the event), and was reportedly adamant that he was always a Union man but never a Northerner.
The new border is roughly in Fredericksburg.
That's certainly where the traffic starts to feel New England.
Don't get them started on whether New York is in the northeast. If it's not in New England it's not the northeast. Or so I'm reminded by my friends from Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
A lot of my map-staring has been at various wargames covering the American War of Independence and the American Civil War, and for those periods, you'd divide the US Atlantic Coast into four parts:
New England
Mid-Atlantic (NY, PA, NJ)
Upper South (VA, MD)
Deep South (GA, SC)
DE is gradually transitioning from Upper South to Mid-Atlantic in this period. NC is usually Deep in 1776 but Upper in 1861.
FL is Spanish in 1776, and firmly Deep South in 1861.
But I don't think that reflects the modern geography of the southern half of the region at all. There's a good argument that the boundary between northeast and southeast, which was on the Mason-Dixon line in 1776 and gradually moved south to the Potomac has now crossed the river and includes all of northern Virginia - but the Tidewater or Richmond are very clearly in the southeast.
Isn't New York technically Mid-Atlantic?
My understanding was that northeast included New England and the Mid Atlantic.
Mine too but the man from Woonsocket got very heated when I said it.
A notable part of that is RI having an inferiority complex, I think.
Also the typical definition of “the south”
Shouldn’t that be capitalized?
(modest) proposal:
Consider the 100th meridian west that divides the Continental United States in half.
Next consider the 39th parallel north that also divides the Continental United States in half.
Label the four quadrants thus formed NE, SE, SW, and NW.
Yeah, sure, whatever, when do you get to the eating of tasty Irish babies?
I'd go with the 104th meridian (MT/WY/ND/SD borders, still properly keeps Denver/Taos/Albuquerque/El Paso in the West). I wish I could go higher than the 39th parallel, as I don't see SLC and Denver as part of the Northwest, but that would also do goofy things like putting Philly and Baltimore in the Southeast, so 39th it is.
100th is the traditional line, because that’s close to where the rain gets too low for non-irrigated agriculture. But in Texas, the line should bend a bit to stay just west of the Balcones Escarpment (so that Fort Worth, Killeen, Austin, and San Antonio all stay on the east).
Sure.
Though I would encourage letting go of these feelings of goofiness. Commit to the Cartesian system.
Lol thought the same thing!
A post that is basically a summation of half my comments the last 3 years. This Long Islander is reading all this and just thinking “sounds about right”.
I’ll therefore pivot to something else that Matt touches on that Noah Smith wrote about recently that was a real “glass shattering” moment for me. I think a lot of us (including me) like pointing out the ways the GOP doesn’t follow its own supposed commitments to free market principles. I think now with Trump, the whole “Republicans are committed to free market” schtick is basically dead.
What Noah pointed out that is that in a lot of ways the 80s/90s GOP and the 80s/90s Tory party are actually an anomaly in the world of conservative politics. I think because he’s lived in Japan he’s more familiar with most that conservative parties around the world are often not all that aligned with free market principles. Quite famously in the current discourse, early 20th century GOP was in a lot of ways the less free market party.
I think what I’m getting at is I think there is actually a space for a left wing free market ideology which Matt kind of alludes to. Which leads me to this; Elizabeth Warren come back! What happened to the pre 2020 Elizabeth Warren? Because this was you to a large degree. An Elizabeth Warren from 2010 I actually think could find a real “new” niche for herself here.
To the topic of the article, part of the reason Elizabeth Warren lost her way is that the MA Republican party doesn't even try to compete anymore, so the seat is safe. I'm afraid Charlie Baker will go down as the last "New England Republican" in MA. And he signed the first state-level transit oriented development law in the country.
I kind of think this is a problem generally across the country. It's funny because as much grief as Matt gives to lefties about now being more supportive of nominating more centrists in swing states for Congress and senate, it seems really clear to me that Democrats are more committed to moderating their views than GOP. This isn't universal of course; Susan Collins being a very obvious but kind of outlier counterexample.
Like I think about the NYC mayoral race. NYC clearly swung right in the last election. The fact that Andrew Cuomo is the most likely person to become the next NYC mayor is in part name recognition but is in part because there is clearly a constituency for more moderate policy in NYC. And yet while I wouldn't call Curtis Sliwa a raging right wing Trump sycophant (he's come out saying 2020 election denial is nonsense), he's clearly a right winger*. NYC moving right is not at all the same thing as NYC is now right wing.
So instead, Cuomo gets to be the moderate candidate and unfortunately someone like me is left in the position of hoping Zohran Mamdani gets the nomination despite having a bunch of far left positions that I think would be actively damaging to the city** (Can't emphasize enough that Cuomo should not be anywhere near political office again. The stuff that came out about him is tip of the iceberg stuff. I'm the Democratic equivalent of a "Never Trumper" on this).
* In fitting with the topic of Matt's post, this is what Curtis Sliwa has said about housing from Wikipedia "His platform includes addressing the housing shortage in the city by repealing current mayor Eric Adams' "City of Yes" proposals, restoring zoning control to "local residents, community boards, and City Council members", and revising the city's zoning laws to "prioritize affordability and community stability"."
** Mamdani has come out in favor of universal rent control. I don't think he'd be able to pass this if he became mayor, but the fact he thinks this is a good idea is horrifying. Also, an example where "Popularism" has major flaws. Because rent control is actually popular with lots of people including a lot of people we would not call lefty activists. Sounds like "common sense" too a lot of normies.
> prioritize affordability and community stability
Politicians keep using that word, "prioritize." I do not think it means what they think it means.
"it seems really clear to me that Democrats are more committed to moderating their views than GOP."
Really?
Republicans have dropped opposition, to gay marriage, entitlement reform, and Trump threw pro life groups under the bus.
This is...not really true especially on the state and local level.
First of all, just keeping to Federal level, please see the new BBB bill that passed the House. It absolutely comes with massive entitlement cuts. The fact that GOP dresses it up by saying it's really about making sure healthy people don't get Medicaid they "don't deserve" is obviously an indication that GOP is aware that Medicaid cuts are unpopular. But as the author of this Substack has noted, these are massive cuts plain and simple.
But on the state level? Yeah those Medicaid work requirements have passed in a number of states. On abortion? Yeah immediately after Dobbs, a number of states either passed or automatically passed based on previous legislation passed. And yeah, please see what the likely new senator from Texas has been up to. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-sues-activist-new-york-doctor-illegally-providing-abortion-drugs-across. And I know there is a lot ink spilled about whether these "don't say gay" bills are has harsh as critics say they are, but it's hard to make the argument there isn't an element of anti-gay posturing.
Point being, while Matt makes a point of showing Trump's rhetorical moderation (and it really his more rhetorical as evidenced by the BBB bill) it still seems to be pretty out of step with rest of GOP.
Republican support for gay marriage has dropped 14 points from its high of 55% in 2021–22: https://news.gallup.com/poll/691139/record-party-divide-years-sex-marriage-ruling.aspx
Fair point.
The trans push has really backfired against the broader gay community
I'm not a fan of Cuomo, but I'm not clear on what "should not be anywhere near political office again" means. Do you mean corruption, sexual assault, extra-legal measures to punish his opponents, or is there potentially something else I am missing here that we should know about? And yes, I believe these are all really bad, just like I believe Mamdani might fundamentally fail to run the city and under him NYC could end up like Chicago right now. There don't seem to be good options here.
I mean everything you noted.
I mean with policy, Cuomo was pretty big impediment to increasing housing supply and was personally responsible for a decent amount of the cost overruns of the 2nd avenue subway. Don't think Mamdani is great on this stuff, but hard for me to make the argument that Cuomo is way better.
But yeah on the personal stuff? Yeah, can tell you that a lot of the more troubling aspects of his character and general behavior has not actually come to light and he's kind of lucky more didn't come out.
Thanks for adding specifics, I appreciate it.
Yeah, I’m super glad that Matt is actually grappling with the political economy here, not JUST leaving it at blaming Dems for incompetent governance.
In Germany, the right-wing free market niche is held by the FDP (the "liberal" party), with the major right-wing party (the CDU/CSU) being much less free market. This is a pretty common formation in Europe - PP (right) and C's (liberal) in Spain, Gaullists (now called LR) and liberals (currently MoDo) in France, etc. There are some exceptions where the main right-wing party is the descendant of the C19 liberal (ie pro-constitution) party, like Venstre in Denmark or VVD in the Netherlands.
The other big exception is the British Liberal Party / Liberal Democrats, which is possibly the only surviving undivided liberal party, including both right-wing liberals (ie the political movement that American libertarians come from) and left-wing liberals (a political movement that often confuses people as we tend to be a minority group in much larger parties; the only relatively pure left-liberal parties I can think of are the Dutch D66 and the Danish Radikal Venstre)
Catholic conservative parties echo the Roman Catholic church in being conservative socially while being very suspicious of the "all that is solid melts into air" aspects of the free market. The CDU/CSU has a strong Catholic tinge.
That’s very true, but there are non-Catholic parties like this as well: e.g. the Swedish Moderata or the Norwegian Høyre. Also Greece’s Néa Dimokratía.
These (plus Finland, whose politics I know little about) are the only non-Catholic European countries, other than the already mentioned Netherlands and Denmark, that were democratic before the fall of Communism, and the political systems of the various ex-Communist countries have rarely stabilised (and, in any case, they didn’t revive pre-1917/1940 parties in 1989-91, so there aren’t parties with deep roots in liberalism like Venstre or VVD or in anti-liberalism like Moderata or Høyre)
Good context. The core European Union drive was very much a Catholic tinged affair, but these other countries have a similar heritage.
For most of the countries of Europe, one can roughly summarise party histories starting in the nineteenth century something like this: There was an absolute monarchy, there was one party that supported the absolute monarchy, the nobility, the church, and power and wealth coming from land. This party was usually called either "Conservatives" or "Right". Their main opponent, who supported a constitutional monarchy or a republic, elections, secularism, the bourgeoisie, and power and wealth coming from capital and trade and industrial production were called either "Liberals" or "Left".
Eventually the "social question" started to arise, that is to say, there were lots of poor urban people and some people cared about them, but also poor urban people demonstrated that when they revolted it was a much bigger problem than when poor rural people (peasants) revolted*, and socialists were those who supported the poor-people side of the "social question", trying to improve working contitions.
The Liberal parties then divided over the social question, with the rise of welfare liberalism and social liberalism as the left-liberals and right-liberals starting to call themselves "market liberals" or, later "classical liberals".
In the same period, the Catholic church, which had usually asked its congregants not to participate in electoral politics - regarding elections as part of the anti-clerical spirit of the French Revolution - came to support Catholic parties, starting with Zentrum in Germany in 1870, and Christian Democratic parties became more widespread after rerum novarum in 1891.
In some countries, the principal right party was the descendant of the right-liberals, as the Conservative party retained a narrow focus on nobility and absolutism and became an utter irrelevance in a democratic system (the Danish Højre and Dutch Conservative parties are examples of parties that disappeared), in others, the Conservative party was able to refocus as a mass party - such as in Britain, Norway and Sweden; in these countries the right-liberals tended to become a minority party or else they merged into the Conservatives, while the left-liberals combined with the social democrats - either through formal merger or a collapse of one party and people of that opinion joining the other. There are not many places where there are two liberal parties, one of the left and the other of the right, but unified liberal parties did survive in a lot of places for a long time.
In a similar period (ie around the turn of the twentieth century), broad socialist parties tended to split into multiple strands, one is reformists (often calling themselves social democrats, but also often coming from trades unions and calling themselves parties of labour or of the workers) who sought to reform the economic system, another is electoralists (socialists or democratic socialists, or leftists; in some languages, you can't contrast social democrat with democratic socialist) who sought to overthrow the capitalist system through democratic/constitutional means, and the third are the various types of revolutionary (Leninists, anarchists, syndicalists, etc). Marxists can be either revolutionary or electoralist. Some socialist/social democratic parties combine both electoralist and reformist groups; some socialist parties combine both electoralists and revolutionaries.
All of Europe's traditional centre-left parties are descended from socialist/social democratic parties, there's nowhere that a left-liberal party (like the New Deal Democrats in the US) became the dominant party of the centre-left. Centre-right parties may be descended from Christian Democrats, from conservatives, or from right-liberals. While these parties are all pretty similar (they all join the European People's Party and the International Democracy Union), there are nonetheless times when their different histories do show up in different policies and sentiments.
Christian Democrats are originally a Catholic thing - in countries that have both Catholics and Protestants, the Catholic party was founded first, followed by a Protestant party, and then they later merged (e.g. Netherlands in 1975) or else a new multi-denominational party was founded that replaced both (e.g. Germany in 1947). There are a few Christian Democratic parties in non-Catholic countries, but they were founded as copies of the idea from other countries much later on (usually post-WWII) - the original Catholic version dates to either the 1870s or 1890s (depending on your view whether Germany's Zentrum and the Dutch KVP were really Christian Democrat before rerum novarum, or whether they were a minority-religion protection party until they assimilated to the broader Christian Democratic movement after 1891, a historical/political science fight in which I do not have a dog).
Note that the countries (barring East Germany, which largely inherited the West German system) that were part of the Soviet Bloc or Yugoslavia before 1989 have a completely different political history, and these general outlines don't apply.
Also Portugal's 1975 revolution means their political history is very different - their main centre-right party was originally the social democrats (ie the moderate revolutionaries) and their main centre-left party was originally the socialists (ie the less-moderate revolutionaries: the extreme revolutionaries didn't participate in democracy).
* Peasant revolts have been taking place since the end of Roman-style slavery, and they were slave revolts before that. The usual solution was that the army burned the crops and the peasants starved until they submitted in exchange for food. This works pretty well, but it's much harder to do an equivalent in cities, where burning down the city burns down all the assets of the wealthy as well (crops are valuable, but they can be replanted and regrown).
Sort of a reminder that parliamentary systems kind of (rightly) skew what should be considered a "right wing" or "left wing" party.
Makes me think about what the party breakdown basically "should" be in the US. One, southern based Christian conservative party. One libertarian party (this one would likely not be nearly as "crank" based since it would attract a decent number of small c conservative business types), one "green" party, one Farmers party, one Union party and one anti-immigrant party. I'm sure I'm missing a few, but point being it's very clear there should be at least 5+ major parties in the US Congress in a parliamentary system.
The confounding variable as usual with the US is race. Given existing dynamics in 19th and early 20th century, I suspect there would have been an "African American" party in much the same way there are historically black colleges. Now what would happen to that party post 1965 would be a very interesting question and maybe a good subject for one of Matt's alternative history posts.
Obviously the details of the system matter, but I've mapped out in my mind how multiple parties would emerge from proportional representation, starting postbellum.
The Republicans would probably dominate for quite a while over the Democrats. I agree that there would be a Southern party that would commonly play kingmaker, and for worse, as that's another route to institute Jim Crow. I actually do not foresee a Black Party, as they have too much at stake to lose in not supporting the major party that is least hostile to them.
I foresee a decent Prohibition Party emerging as well, potentially as a kingmaker that gets what it wants at some point before it becomes the dog that caught the car. After the Panic of c. 1893 I then foresee the Democratic Party disintegrating at the hands of several smaller parties (Farmers, as you say definitely being one), eventually coalescing around a proper Labor Party like most of the rest of the industrialized world got in the early 20th century. This Labor Party then takes over and dominates after the Great Depression. Mid 20th century, if civil rights prevails then the Southern party probably disintegrates. I very much agree that we would eventually get a Libertarian Party, a Green Party, and a Christian Party some time within the mid to late 20th century.
The Pirate Party. What about the Pirate Party?!
Yeah, they probably get created in reaction to Sonny Bono's bullshit.
Have you read any of Lee Drutman's writing? His breakdown of potential parties, along with estimates of support:
Progressive 12% (Bluesky)
New Liberal 20% (probably most commenters here)
New Populist 22% (economically center-left / culturally center-right)
Growth and Opportunity 21% (center-right/pro-business)
Patriot 9% (closed borders 'n tariffs)
Christian Conservative 16% (self-explanatory)
Adapted from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/14/opinion/fix-congress-proportional-representation.html
Notably, the surveys of political views he used to draw up those parties show the biggest gap where a true libertarian party would be. Growth and Opportunity party is probably closest to filling that niche, followed by New Liberals.
You have to wonder a lot about an "abundance" politics where the goal is (1) get hard stuff done in blue states, (2) leverage this to win national elections. Given that the GOP (which is very fluid between national and local politics) has almost a total veto on (1), what exactly is left as a political strategy?
Except the GOP doesn't have a veto over blue states, that's kind of the point.
Dems have trifecta's in blue states like CA. If Republicans were able to stop them it would only be because of Dem defections.
I think that’s the point - for getting hard stuff done, you can never expect 100% in your caucus. So unless your party gets substantially over the threshold, the other party has veto power by just agreeing to vote as a bloc. It’s much easier to get unanimity blocking something than doing something.
The key insight from Mitch McConnell circa 2008/2009 (or someone in his camp). If you can keep your caucus united, you can actually do serious damage to you're opponents legislative agenda; especially in the senate (think it's really underrated how much our current 60 vote threshold for literally anything only really became status quo post Obama victory).
The other dynamic nationally is there clearly was and to extent is a fetishization for bipartisanship and "reaching across the aisle" in MSM. Matt is talking in this post about the practical reasons this is a good idea. But especially pre Trump there was a real sense that this was goal irrespective of the actual policy objectives. So if a bill had bipartisan buy in it must by definition be good and if it passes along partisan lines then there must be something wrong with it.
McConnell (or someone on his team) very clearly understood that if you forced Obama to pass bills on partisan lines, you can count on a certain amount of MSM "tsk tsk" that would help undermine his overall popularity.
This has very little to do with getting things done in blue states where the legislature and governorship are controlled by Democrats.
It does if your majority is only just larger than the threshold needed to pass the bill.
Is this actually a practical issue though?
In the couple examples Matt gave of GOP being unanimously against zoning reform - NYC and Connecticut - they were too small of a minority on the legislative bodies to make a difference. Those bills passed easily without them.
Yeah you can never expect 100% in your own caucus but is it reasonable to expect maybe two thirds? That would be enough to get reform through in a lot of these state houses where Dems have 75-85% of the seats! At what point can you no longer blame the minority party for not doing enough to save you from yourselves on housing?
I actually think Matt's headline is questionable. Yes he gives plenty of examples showing blue state Republicans (especially in the northeast) are often bad on housing, but doesn't really demonstrate this is the primary reason for reform failure in any case. With all this put together, the notion that the above poster had that the GOP has an "almost total veto" on Democrats running their states well is just ridiculous to me, I'm sorry.
I'm sure it is true that conservatives around the world aren't committed to free market values just as left of center parties aren't committed to the poor. My take is wonks over value "Party X supports Policy Y which is incompatible with Party's Xs stated values."
Human beings are great at coming up arguments to justify self-interested and selfish policies.
I think Republicans are pro housing development and deregulation AFTER local authorities ok it. For example, reducing environmental requirements, etc. once it gets past the local zoning it’s off to the races, before that they’ll defer to the NIMBYs.
I’d prefer if they were pro upzoning AND making construction cheaper and easier, but I suppose it’s better than the left who hates both.
I’m a zoning commissioner in Connecticut, and another aspect to the “local control” debate is minority representation requirements. The zoning commission can only be up to 2/3 of a single party, which means in practice it’s 2/3 Democratic and 1/3 Republican. So for any development proposal, we can only afford one Democratic defection because the Republicans get three automatic no votes.
What a dumb requirement! If a party can't compete for votes they shouldn't get to govern!
Affirmative action for conservatives continues to garner support for some reason
There's no actual requirement to be a conservative to be a Republican. In a state that is so blue as Connecticut, is it not possible for a large number of moderates or progressives to join and effectively take over the Republican Party?
Most liberals are pretty turned off of calling themselves republicans, to the degree that local parties are more often taken over by whackjobs. The thought has crossed my mind though.
Who’s gonna take that risk. Why not label yourself as Democrat and become Mayor.
It's basically proportional representation, ymmv on that
Are you coming to the Slow Boring meet up in New Haven in September?
I was unaware of it, but I am now!
Lots of Nimbyism from Democrats is also Right Nimbyism. We're currently doing a small expansion of SROs here in my very liberal college town and there are lots of cranky old people who hate Republicans but also don't want any new people to live in their neighborhood.
Yes, rural and suburbs are totally fine with the density occurring in the cities, they just don't want change near them
And this generally seems... okay? Because the city is where you want high density housing anyway, for a multitude of reasons, and where the vast majority of it would be built anyway if everywhere were upzoned.
I feel like it's not the worst thing in the world to just roll with the political winds here. Upzone the cities, leave the suburbs alone. Makes it easier to get support for your reform without many actual negative consequences.
In the very liberal college town where I live part-time, a very heavily advertised (online and IRL) comp plan rewrite has been underway for more than a year now. Finally, the local government is moving to permit higher density throughout the city, which in housing stock terms has been mostly frozen in time since my undergrad days in the previous millennium. NIMBYs have recently awakened from their slumber of ignorance and disengagement and are now touting an effort to “pause the plan” and “do it right.”
'On the list of things Texas Republicans could possibly do, forcing Texas cities and some of the Dallas suburbs to upzone is pretty good. I’m glad most of the Democrats in the legislature voted for it, and I wish that more did.'
Wouldn't it lose it's 'lib-owning' qualities if all libs agreed it was a good idea and voted for it? Frankly it seems in danger of losing those qualities even with a majority of Dems voting for it, as here. The broader point being that while good policies might occasionally emerge from a purely 'own the libs' mindset (in the 'stopped clock is right twice a day' style), it's actually a pretty bad governance mindset, creating a bunch of perverse incentives.
Yeah I think Matt is underestimating how much GOP mindset on anything right now is anything other than “own the libs”. The state bill probably doesn’t pass if the Dems are for it; defeats the purpose.
It’s the same crap now with this insane overreaction from Trump with the LA protests. It has nothing to do with “law and order” or because the immigrants arrested are dangerous. It’s all “make the libs cry” crap.
So use child psychology, "Please Brer Fox, don't throw me in that briar patch!"
Serious question: what is stopping the Dems from just upzoning Staten Island to Manhattan density? It’s not like that’s their constituents anyway.
Isn't that where NYPD mostly live? After how much they hurt De Blasio, I can imagine some fear of their reaction.
One thing I noticed - College Station currently has a population of 128,000 and Brazos County is at 250,000. At current growth rates, that becomes 150,000 and 300,000 around 2032.
I wanted them to zone Texas Ave for apartment towers a decade ago, and rationalize the bus system with a frequent bus running up and down - but doing it a decade from now is better than never.
Also, looking at the list of Texas cities (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Texas)
I see a bunch of others that either already qualify, or will in the next decade or two by current trends.
Lubbock and Killeen already qualify (though apparently Amarillo is split across counties in a way that keeps every county population below the city!) A few Houston suburbs are just under 150,000 (Pasadena, Pearland, and League City), and Round Rock just north of Austin will reach 150,000 soon as well. Waco is at 149,000 and McClellan county was at 260,000 in 2020 and 270,000 now, so it will likely qualify in a decade or two as well. New Braunfels and Comal county are a bit far from the threshold, but they are basically the fastest growing area in the country, so there’s a good chance they qualify too - when the Austin-to-San Antonio area is the new Dallas-Fort Worth, it’ll at least have upzoning in all its strip malls.
https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/02/10/neighborhood-cafe-law-washington-state
Here in WA, a Republican from Walla Walla (midsize town in the Eastern, more rural part of the state) proposed a bill to preempt local zoning to allow neighborhood cafes statewide. Hasn't gone anywhere yet, but I appreciate the effort.
Suburban and rural Republicans both different problems. What motivates most suburban Republicans seems to be a desire to avoid what they see as the dysfunction of the city they live next to. That leads to stuff like "stop the crimetrain" where residents of Vancouver vehemently oppose light rail from Portland whereas rural WA residents probably wouldn't give a shit. I have some sympathy for the suburbanites. Its not unreasonable to not want crime in your community and your kids' schools to not have fights in the cafeteria every day and such. I do think their NIMBY attitude is defeatist. It's just assumed that light rail would bring crime to the burbs, as if we don't have a police department and we have to just roll over and allow public masturbation just because we have a train. Rural WA doesn't really care what's happening in Portland or Seattle so they have no reason to be NINBYish. Instead they lean more Cliven Bundy/Dale Gribble/don't ask where they were on 1/6. So you know, mixed bag there.
Your point about the crime train is downstream of the broader lack of public trust in civic governance. The reasonable suburbanite looks at Portland and maybe their own local government and thinks - I have zero confidence that this bunch would harshly resist the slippery slope of lifestyle crimes that make city life unattractive to many. Keeping the train out is a structural solution to a governance problem - we don't trust our leaders to protect us or uphold public order, so we bunker in our homes and resist facially neutral policy changes that encourage density.
Yes that's basically the problem, which is why I'd encourage both cities and suburbs to take disorder seriously.
I would like to hear more about Republican allies on this issue and reaching across the aisle (like MY's example in TX)
I feel like the lack of NIMBY conservatives in the online discourse because the internet overrepresents conservative intellectuals and underrepresents cranky old conservatives is just one data point from a broader trend. I remember the internet has always over-represented intellectual efforts to make conservatism respectable. After 2004 you had Megan McArdle trying to argue that the GOP was the party of ideas and pushing for Social Security privatization, when really most Americans just didn't like terrorists or gay marriage.
Ironically, these type of cranky old conservatives love to call members of Congress and just ramble absolute nonsense.
When I was in college, my friends and I would call our congressman's office while drinking and rant to the automated recording system for constituent comments. Usually it was generic college bro libertarian stuff, one time a friend discussed at length the need for a nationwide bigfoot sighting reporting system.
the thing is because of educational polarization conservative intellectuals are generally a lot nuttier than overtly selfish conservative NIMBYs who are at least honest in saying they don't want anyone to park on their street. It's a parochial concern but is it crazier than the stuff Curtis Yarvin writes?
I like this article, but I feel like Matt is missing the level of analysis needed to get from "I wish blue-state Republicans were more like red-state Republicans" to actually coming up with strategies to get there.
It seems to me like the missing piece is that conservatism genuinely occupies a complicated perspective wrt housing construction. Matt notes that conservatives should theoretically support zoning reform because they like free markets and property rights and deregulation. It's true that these are values typically associated with conservatives, though moreso with libertarians - and the difference matters on this issue especially. Conservatives *also* have a strong streak of caring about local control and federated authority - empowering state governments to override localities triggers the same anti-big-government impulses that show up in states-rights debates. It's sort of beside the point that what the state government wants to do is *decrease* regulation - conservatives aren't *always* against regulation if they think there's something important to be gained from regulation. (Case in point: abortion.)
Here, then, is the critical point: housing deregulation and upzoning have the potential to disrupt other values that conservatives care about: strong families, stable communities, functioning schools, low crime. I personally don't think they're *right* about this causal analysis, but it's not at all incoherent or surprising that a conservative would support regulation in the name of protecting these things, *especially* when that regulation comes in the form of disempowering big blue state governments and empowering local democracy. Yes, it's a strike against free markets, but conservatives - as opposed to libertarians - were never strict free-market ideologues, and there are multiple competing values pulling in different directions here.
I think the major problem with these analyses is that you're pointing to a kind of principled conservatism that doesn't exist, or that doesn't win GOP elections anymore.
The GOP has been utterly relentless in (1) focusing on promising relatively selfish suburban purple voters whatever short-term selfish crap they're angry about, which is typically *not* thoughtful long-term housing policy. And (2) they've had no problem whatsoever stripping local control from cities in red states, despite this being obviously hypocritical and mostly pointless to most conservative voters anyway.
TL;DR I think people need to stop applying old templates for "what conservative politicians care about" and actually focus on the real conservatives being elected in blue states.
"housing deregulation and upzoning have the potential to disrupt other values that conservatives care about: strong families, stable communities, functioning schools, low crime." I'm not sure how housing deregulation does any of these things. Is is just that conservatives don't want "those people" moving into their neighborhood, and believe that ADUs and sixplexes will contain criminals? To be sure, conservatives are not alone in those beliefs. I once had a long conversation, in my front yard, with a pedestrian passer-by who kept claiming that if I replaced my house in my expensive suburb with a fourplex, the fourplex would be filled with criminals because all fourplexes are filled with criminals.
“Stable communities” is the only relevant item in that list. Blocking people from doing anything to change the built environment means the community is limited to changing at the speed of individuals moving, which ensures a certain kind of stability. Allowing construction can allow the income demographic to stay constant in the longer run, but makes for very visible “instability” in the short to medium term.
Allowing infill or denser housing would still be change at the speed of people moving, surely? A developer can't eminent domain someone's house.
I guess my thought was that it’s at the speeds of moving in a larger neighborhood. Instead of one family moving out and one moving in, it’s one moving out, a year of construction, and then ten moving in, which is faster. But you’re right, not that much faster.
I guess the other thing is that the possibility of cashing out might speed up the rate at which people sell and move out.
If you have upzoning in a very narrow area, that would raise land costs and might entice people to cash out. But if you upzone in a very wide area, eg statewide, or region-wide that doesn't raise land costs because most people will still want to use the land for whatever it was already being used for.
I was originally just coming here to say Andy Harris, Maryland Republican, is a giant asshole with zero redeeming qualities, although he's not really relevant to the article.
Then I got to the end of the post. This is really the most tiresome part of "normal" politics (non-Trump craziness) for most of my adult life. Spanberger puts forward something cautious and restrained and the right gets outraged anyway. Exhausting dynamic, people need to chill out.
The lib-owning dynamic is so real—this also happens in my home state of Utah where the state legislature delights in thwarting local control on a variety of issues incliding zoning in liberal Salt Lake City/County. The bad dynamics in the Northeast seem to stem from the mistaken notion that density/growth/change is a burden that no one wants to bear. I would wager a NYS upzoning that focused on NYC (e.g. ‘cities with >1 million population) would get ample support from upstate and Long Island Republicans.
The problem is that Long Island and Westchester approve ~0 units already, so they're actually more of a contributor than NYC to the regional housing shortage. Truly depressing to think about what housing costs would look like in the region without New Jersey.
For sure it would be preferable to build more all over NYS but in terms of the political economy it might be easier to upzone NYC, much of which is surprisingly low-density.
Long Island might be ground zero for the Blue State Republican NIMBY factor. Any gesture toward building more housing is “turning Nassau County into Queens.” Suddenly a retired Fox News viewer cares a lot about preserving green space. It’s in the same vein as the Republicans’ opposition to offshore wind around here - I don’t typically think of Trump voters as being especially concerned about the fate of endangered whales, but it’s another way of pushing back against any measure of “change” to the 1978 world in which they first bought their homes.
Wasn't opposition to offshore wind a big part of RFK's crank turn?
I wonder how much of this is couched in a Malthusian mindset many people still have that we're running out of room and resources.
I’d be pretty surprised if Long Island voters were insincere in their desire to preserve green space given that the presence of such green space is a key point of distinction between Long Island and NYC.
They're not insincere in their desire to preserve *THEIR* green space. The point is that these are people who have never cared about environmentalism and preserving wild areas generally ever before.
Got it. But you see why a sincere desire to preserve local greenspace despite indifference to wild areas in general is different from the whales example, where the implication is that the stated motive (helping whales) is purely pretextual rather than genuine (if self-interested.)
I enjoyed this piece because I feel like the Slow Boring commentariat sometimes treats Republicans like they have quite literally no agency or responsibility for policy outcomes, whereas Democrats are responsible for people on dirt bikes waving Mexican flags. A lot of this is just navel gazing, but Republicans do, in fact, have the theoretical ability to make the world a better place as well.
Let’s be clear commentators believe people on dirt bikes waving Mexican flags must be democrat leaders and policy makers.
It's actually Nancy Pelosi underneath the mask.
I have little to no faith in Republicans to make the world a better place, but have some faith that Democrats can, so that's why I'd rather focus on what Democrats can do better.
Is that attitude wrong? Should I have less faith in the Democratic Party?
Matt didn’t mention one of the biggest influencers in these discussions which is the home building lobby in each state.
In North Carolina they are the big advocates of HB 765 which would preempt most local zoning. This is the route to get more Republicans in support of these efforts.
I have been assured that "Corporate Power" is all on the side of not providing more housing, and is in fact the single thing that must be defeated in order for the revolution, erm I mean more abundance, to be realized.
Wait until the leftys find out who would build their precious public housing. It ain’t the WPA…