Bakersfield has a population of 413,381 people. It is not a suburb. San Bernardino has a population of 223,728. It is not a suburb. Ontario, east of San Bernardino in the Inland Empire has a population of 182,457. It is not a suburb. Combined with its neighbor that’s a total of 406,000+ people — just about the same number when combined as Bakersfield. These are or sleepy Republican Country Club towns. They have pockets of great wealth but face all the same issues of any city of that size. Los Angeles County has just short of 10,000,000 people alone. It has more people than about forty States. To get to SB County you have to get through millions and millions of people. I don’t think those three Republicans were doing anyone a favor other than their own constituents.
The NIMBY Democrats were protecting wealthy areas with large lots, new planned, high values, good public schools. And white white white …
California should get rid of Prop 13, if it wanted to really get things moving. That’s the biggest NIMBY b*llshit going.
My wife and I bought our house in 1995 at the bottom of real estate wipeout (and had to borrow from family to put up the down payment). for $350,000. Neighbors, about eight houses down the block, just sold their house for $3.98M. That new owner will be paying almost $40,000 in property taxes A YEAR, while I pay about $9,000. My wife and I now own our house. We’ll soon retire. Our monthly cost is $750, which will go up 2% a year. We’re not going anywhere. We can walk ten blocks to Cedars-Sinai for world class health care or drive five miles to UCLA for world class health care. We can walk to the County Art Museum. We have Michelin star restaurants nearby. And this isn’t a fancy neighborhood. It’s expensive. Not fancy. There are several huge apartment complexes nearby that charge $5,000 month rent.
I can’t wait for the three new subway stops to will open by next year. Two I can walk to easily; one would be a bit of a hike. And because of this, my house which has gone through three restrictive zoning re-writes (to combat the perceived horror of “McMansions” restricting building 4500sf homes to 3000sf) will now get an upgrade for ADUs or multi-units. It’s not for me and I wife, but would benefit our sons when they inherit it.
Oh, and back to Prop 13, the homeowners in the State passed an even bigger boondoggle. We can now take our original basis ($350,000 for us) and take it to any County in the State and that becomes the basis for the new house. We can sell our house for $3.5M, use that money to purchase a home in Santa Barbara or LaJolla and keep paying property taxes of $9,000 a year instead of $35,000.
It’s nuts. It’s beyond greedy. But that’s how it is.
Praying to the Orange Deity that, in his infinite wisdom and grace, He learns from the Texas GOP and uses the Marines to abolish land use regulations in the deviant and debouched democrat cities, as His WRAITH is wholly deserved.
By Texas forcing upzoning primarily in blue areas, doesn’t it inadvertently help increase democrats’ relative power in the state? Seems like actually a preferable result (even if stupid on the merits).
I still don't quite understand why concerns about destroying property values just don't seem to matter.
I have a nice house. If you build a big apartment building next door, it would like lose 50% of its value due to traffic, loss of view, crime, etc. The government actively doing something to make me lose that much money definitely makes me want to vote for someone else.
One of the problems is that we do it backwards. We build a bunch of single family homes, then try to build apartments in those areas, and NONE of the current residents like it. We should build apartments first, then homes. I am not sure how to do that, but I am sure there are some genius political thinkers here that can figure it out.
I also don't understand why building apartments downtown is such a bad thing. If you are less wealthy, you have less reliable transportation, you need a grocery store close by and living downtown is preferable. People here want to see big apartment buildings in the far out suburbs?
Unfortunately CT Governor Lamont has now been waffling on whether or not he will sign 5002. But I believe he will end up signing it, although he may make the legislature promise to slightly weaken it (although the part he is objecting to is not the most impactful part of the bill).
I am involved in CT housing politics, and have been encouraging Desegregate CT to rename themselves for years. There is not that much "left NIMBYism" in CT, so the advocacy shouldn't be be aimed at the left but instead at the center and the right.
A lot of Democrats from swing districts feel that they must vote against these bills because it will be used against them in the next election. If we could get some bipartisan support then many of those members would vote for these bills, as it is much harder to attack a legislator for a bipartisan bill. So even when the Democrats have a 2/3 legislative majority, it would be extremely useful to get some Republican support.
I am not sure if CT Republicans can be moved from their current NIMBY position. Senator Ryan Fazio, a Republican from Greenwich, has expressed admiration for the libertarian Mercatus Center. When a Mercatus Center research fellow testified in favor of a housing reform bill Fazio simply expressed regret that the first time he met a Mercatus Center fellow he would end up so strongly disagreeing with him.
But we might be able to get there if YIMBYs in blue states have better message discipline.
I think the usual Republican solution is to damn the dissonance and have some idiosyncratic rich guy stand up a different org that pretend not to like the others.
I.e., Desegregate Connecticut would be joined by “Common Sense Connecticut”, “Democrats for Deregulation”, and so on. Each one a bit of an astorturf but also providing… uh… political homes in high demand YIMBY policy areas.
The piece I really don't understand is... at this point Spanberger should know the reaction is going to have similar levels of vitriol regardless of the reality of the proposal, right? So why not say what's actually needed? What further cost is there, politically speaking?
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.
But don’t, because theory and reality are two different things. Trump is speeding $50M on a parade for his birthday viagra, not using that $50M on homeless veterans or meals for impoverished children.
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?
A lot of policy sentiments, housing chief among them, are just entirely orthogonal to party ideology. The primary motivation among NIMBYs is that they don't want the built environment around them to change because the neighborhood character is precisely why they decided to move there in the first place. Everything else is just a confused attempt to reconcile their political identity with their neighborhood preference using whatever terminology they can find in their ideology appendix. Their justifications are less of an argument and more of an attempt to rationalize two sets of beliefs they've kept compartmentalized for a long time.
Say what you will about the Freedom Caucus, but at least they espouse a largely coherent set of political positions. For instance, they walk the walk when it comes to advocating for policies that actually represent fiscal conservatism.
On the other hand, perhaps the defining characteristic of the current incarnation of the broader Republican Party is that they want to have their cake and eat it, too (oh, and also they want your cake). They’ve proven that deregulation is just another hallmark of Reaganite conservatism that they’re ready to abandon when and where expedient.
Upper-middle class Republicans will advocate for deregulation in the business sector, because they’re the business owners and corporate stockholders that benefit from such deregulation. But as soon as deregulation is not associated with a financial windfall, and maybe even causes a financial headwind as with housing deregulation, then regulation is fine because it treads on thee, not on me.
It's unfortunate that it appears to be between Cuomo and Mamdani for the primary. You can't always get what you want. This is one of those articles where the people commenting all seem to be correct to me. “But I worry more about lack of experience with this enormous assignment.” about Mamdani. For Mamdani supporters, they want "His supporters see the mayoralty as about setting values and vision. Mr. Mamdani, they say, can hire technocrats to decide how to pick up the trash." “I think we need ideas and the ability to lead a movement, which seems to be what he’s doing here in New York City.” “But I don’t know about his level of experience and running a complex organism like a city,” he added. “It’s way more complex than Mamdani talks about.”
So it comes down to vibes vs. managerial competence. I think I understand the managerial competence angle. I'd like to understand the vibes/build a movement angle.
I don't like the convolution of youth with inexperience because it isn't always true. AOC has, at this point, a fair amount of legislative experience while still being a relatively young legislator, for example. But Mamdani doesn't and certainly doesn't for an executive level role of the complexity of being NYC mayor. He's got the least experience of anyone running in the Democratic primary, including Tillson, who at least had to lead a business. Zellnor and Ramos have more experience, even thought they don't have a lot. Blake and Adrienne Adams have more, and Lander and Stringer have even more. Obviously Cuomo has a lot of experience in executive roles.
I think if I were voting in this election, I wouldn’t list either Cuomo or Mamdani - I don’t know that I actually prefer one over the other and I think a lot of others deserve a shot at being the second to last one standing.
No date set for the SoCal SB meetup because I haven't seen many responses, I don't want to schedule it for when everyone is out of town/unavailable. If you are between L.A. and San Diego and are interested in a meetup, please let me know! I'll be in town all summer. Maybe we could have an Orange County meetup this time?
Credit where credit is due! Thank you, Republican elected officials in California, for supporting the YIMBY legislation instead of killing it out of spite to make pro-YIMBY libs cry.
I live in a red state suburb that was Republican country 20 years ago but has become decidedly blue. The now Dem-controlled city council in our town wanted to do something about housing and allow more multi-family units, but it has been met with a coordinated response from a NIMBY group backed by anti-tax think-tanks. They've used every lever at their disposal to gum up the works (a really nice example of the things Ezra and Derek talk about in Abundance) and now nothing has been done.
And it really comes down to this:
"they just literally do not want their neighborhood to change and don’t necessarily have long-winded essays or critical geography papers about why that is."
They don't have solutions. They just don't want YOUR solution. (and THOSE kind of people).
Bakersfield has a population of 413,381 people. It is not a suburb. San Bernardino has a population of 223,728. It is not a suburb. Ontario, east of San Bernardino in the Inland Empire has a population of 182,457. It is not a suburb. Combined with its neighbor that’s a total of 406,000+ people — just about the same number when combined as Bakersfield. These are or sleepy Republican Country Club towns. They have pockets of great wealth but face all the same issues of any city of that size. Los Angeles County has just short of 10,000,000 people alone. It has more people than about forty States. To get to SB County you have to get through millions and millions of people. I don’t think those three Republicans were doing anyone a favor other than their own constituents.
The NIMBY Democrats were protecting wealthy areas with large lots, new planned, high values, good public schools. And white white white …
California should get rid of Prop 13, if it wanted to really get things moving. That’s the biggest NIMBY b*llshit going.
My wife and I bought our house in 1995 at the bottom of real estate wipeout (and had to borrow from family to put up the down payment). for $350,000. Neighbors, about eight houses down the block, just sold their house for $3.98M. That new owner will be paying almost $40,000 in property taxes A YEAR, while I pay about $9,000. My wife and I now own our house. We’ll soon retire. Our monthly cost is $750, which will go up 2% a year. We’re not going anywhere. We can walk ten blocks to Cedars-Sinai for world class health care or drive five miles to UCLA for world class health care. We can walk to the County Art Museum. We have Michelin star restaurants nearby. And this isn’t a fancy neighborhood. It’s expensive. Not fancy. There are several huge apartment complexes nearby that charge $5,000 month rent.
I can’t wait for the three new subway stops to will open by next year. Two I can walk to easily; one would be a bit of a hike. And because of this, my house which has gone through three restrictive zoning re-writes (to combat the perceived horror of “McMansions” restricting building 4500sf homes to 3000sf) will now get an upgrade for ADUs or multi-units. It’s not for me and I wife, but would benefit our sons when they inherit it.
Oh, and back to Prop 13, the homeowners in the State passed an even bigger boondoggle. We can now take our original basis ($350,000 for us) and take it to any County in the State and that becomes the basis for the new house. We can sell our house for $3.5M, use that money to purchase a home in Santa Barbara or LaJolla and keep paying property taxes of $9,000 a year instead of $35,000.
It’s nuts. It’s beyond greedy. But that’s how it is.
Praying to the Orange Deity that, in his infinite wisdom and grace, He learns from the Texas GOP and uses the Marines to abolish land use regulations in the deviant and debouched democrat cities, as His WRAITH is wholly deserved.
By Texas forcing upzoning primarily in blue areas, doesn’t it inadvertently help increase democrats’ relative power in the state? Seems like actually a preferable result (even if stupid on the merits).
I still don't quite understand why concerns about destroying property values just don't seem to matter.
I have a nice house. If you build a big apartment building next door, it would like lose 50% of its value due to traffic, loss of view, crime, etc. The government actively doing something to make me lose that much money definitely makes me want to vote for someone else.
One of the problems is that we do it backwards. We build a bunch of single family homes, then try to build apartments in those areas, and NONE of the current residents like it. We should build apartments first, then homes. I am not sure how to do that, but I am sure there are some genius political thinkers here that can figure it out.
I also don't understand why building apartments downtown is such a bad thing. If you are less wealthy, you have less reliable transportation, you need a grocery store close by and living downtown is preferable. People here want to see big apartment buildings in the far out suburbs?
Dense building lowers the property value of everything around it, which is why property in Manhattan is so cheap now.
Unfortunately CT Governor Lamont has now been waffling on whether or not he will sign 5002. But I believe he will end up signing it, although he may make the legislature promise to slightly weaken it (although the part he is objecting to is not the most impactful part of the bill).
I am involved in CT housing politics, and have been encouraging Desegregate CT to rename themselves for years. There is not that much "left NIMBYism" in CT, so the advocacy shouldn't be be aimed at the left but instead at the center and the right.
A lot of Democrats from swing districts feel that they must vote against these bills because it will be used against them in the next election. If we could get some bipartisan support then many of those members would vote for these bills, as it is much harder to attack a legislator for a bipartisan bill. So even when the Democrats have a 2/3 legislative majority, it would be extremely useful to get some Republican support.
I am not sure if CT Republicans can be moved from their current NIMBY position. Senator Ryan Fazio, a Republican from Greenwich, has expressed admiration for the libertarian Mercatus Center. When a Mercatus Center research fellow testified in favor of a housing reform bill Fazio simply expressed regret that the first time he met a Mercatus Center fellow he would end up so strongly disagreeing with him.
But we might be able to get there if YIMBYs in blue states have better message discipline.
Post the Tuesday thread you coward.
Still 32 minutes away! SB's punctuality is regularly not late nor early.
I think the usual Republican solution is to damn the dissonance and have some idiosyncratic rich guy stand up a different org that pretend not to like the others.
I.e., Desegregate Connecticut would be joined by “Common Sense Connecticut”, “Democrats for Deregulation”, and so on. Each one a bit of an astorturf but also providing… uh… political homes in high demand YIMBY policy areas.
The piece I really don't understand is... at this point Spanberger should know the reaction is going to have similar levels of vitriol regardless of the reality of the proposal, right? So why not say what's actually needed? What further cost is there, politically speaking?
This is not a new insight. If the punishment for rebellion is death, but the punishment for being late is also death, and you can't avoid being late, well then... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising
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.
But don’t, because theory and reality are two different things. Trump is speeding $50M on a parade for his birthday viagra, not using that $50M on homeless veterans or meals for impoverished children.
Pope Leo called the whole lot out.
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?
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.
A lot of policy sentiments, housing chief among them, are just entirely orthogonal to party ideology. The primary motivation among NIMBYs is that they don't want the built environment around them to change because the neighborhood character is precisely why they decided to move there in the first place. Everything else is just a confused attempt to reconcile their political identity with their neighborhood preference using whatever terminology they can find in their ideology appendix. Their justifications are less of an argument and more of an attempt to rationalize two sets of beliefs they've kept compartmentalized for a long time.
Say what you will about the Freedom Caucus, but at least they espouse a largely coherent set of political positions. For instance, they walk the walk when it comes to advocating for policies that actually represent fiscal conservatism.
On the other hand, perhaps the defining characteristic of the current incarnation of the broader Republican Party is that they want to have their cake and eat it, too (oh, and also they want your cake). They’ve proven that deregulation is just another hallmark of Reaganite conservatism that they’re ready to abandon when and where expedient.
Upper-middle class Republicans will advocate for deregulation in the business sector, because they’re the business owners and corporate stockholders that benefit from such deregulation. But as soon as deregulation is not associated with a financial windfall, and maybe even causes a financial headwind as with housing deregulation, then regulation is fine because it treads on thee, not on me.
This is a good article that needs a better headline.
New article on Mamdani's inexperience in the NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/nyregion/mamdani-age-mayor-young.html
It's unfortunate that it appears to be between Cuomo and Mamdani for the primary. You can't always get what you want. This is one of those articles where the people commenting all seem to be correct to me. “But I worry more about lack of experience with this enormous assignment.” about Mamdani. For Mamdani supporters, they want "His supporters see the mayoralty as about setting values and vision. Mr. Mamdani, they say, can hire technocrats to decide how to pick up the trash." “I think we need ideas and the ability to lead a movement, which seems to be what he’s doing here in New York City.” “But I don’t know about his level of experience and running a complex organism like a city,” he added. “It’s way more complex than Mamdani talks about.”
So it comes down to vibes vs. managerial competence. I think I understand the managerial competence angle. I'd like to understand the vibes/build a movement angle.
I don't like the convolution of youth with inexperience because it isn't always true. AOC has, at this point, a fair amount of legislative experience while still being a relatively young legislator, for example. But Mamdani doesn't and certainly doesn't for an executive level role of the complexity of being NYC mayor. He's got the least experience of anyone running in the Democratic primary, including Tillson, who at least had to lead a business. Zellnor and Ramos have more experience, even thought they don't have a lot. Blake and Adrienne Adams have more, and Lander and Stringer have even more. Obviously Cuomo has a lot of experience in executive roles.
I think if I were voting in this election, I wouldn’t list either Cuomo or Mamdani - I don’t know that I actually prefer one over the other and I think a lot of others deserve a shot at being the second to last one standing.
Just read that he is Mira Nair's son. Wow what a small world!
Huh wow I had no idea!
Hi everyone!
No date set for the SoCal SB meetup because I haven't seen many responses, I don't want to schedule it for when everyone is out of town/unavailable. If you are between L.A. and San Diego and are interested in a meetup, please let me know! I'll be in town all summer. Maybe we could have an Orange County meetup this time?
Thanks Kenny and Marc! I popped up a couple of times on open threads with a “who wants a So Cal meetup,” easy to miss, there’s a lot going on.
I'm interested too and like Kenny didn't see any announcement.
Absolutely interested of course! I don’t think I saw a recent mention of a possibility - perhaps it was in a thread I wasn’t following.
Credit where credit is due! Thank you, Republican elected officials in California, for supporting the YIMBY legislation instead of killing it out of spite to make pro-YIMBY libs cry.
I live in a red state suburb that was Republican country 20 years ago but has become decidedly blue. The now Dem-controlled city council in our town wanted to do something about housing and allow more multi-family units, but it has been met with a coordinated response from a NIMBY group backed by anti-tax think-tanks. They've used every lever at their disposal to gum up the works (a really nice example of the things Ezra and Derek talk about in Abundance) and now nothing has been done.
And it really comes down to this:
"they just literally do not want their neighborhood to change and don’t necessarily have long-winded essays or critical geography papers about why that is."
They don't have solutions. They just don't want YOUR solution. (and THOSE kind of people).