I just want to point out you weren't exactly making a case for Trump along these lines in 2016... but you kinda were, noting frequently how he made random gestures in favor of an enhanced safety net, his promises not to cut Social Security/Medicare, and things like that. Of course, that's consistent with your position here, that you'd still rank Cuomo above Mamdani.
And as with every discussion of this topic, I want to raise the salience of the fact that there are perhaps half a million Orthodox Jews in NYC, they are victims of regular, strictly one-sided street violence, and they are called "Zionists" when it occurs almost every time. Whatever gambles anyone wants to take on Zohran and free buses, and whatever you want to say about whether or not his Israel views are good or should matter - it is beyond insane that dog-whistling to antisemites at a time when antisemitic violence is a daily occurrence is a winning tactic, and should terrify more people than just the Jews themselves.
The rise of Sewer Socialism in Milwaukee is really interesting to consider given today's issues around immigration as well as Mamdani's recent primary victory. To wit:
- In the late 1800's MKE was like 60% foreign-born German, and like 90% immigrant generally, with lots of German speaking Poles.
- The upper/upper-middle class was comprised of 1st generation Germans and their 2nd gen children who had fled the failed revolutions of 1848, which had various factions and reasons for fighting but in the end was the left/liberals who lost.
- These educated leftists/liberals formed an elite establishment that was able to assimilate second wave lower class German and Polish into their governing structures and coalition.
- The new coalition was able to wrest control from the WASPs, who like more or less everywhere in America at that time ran everything
- The "Sewer" part of "Sewer Socialist" was both a YIMBY policy and anti-WASP policy--private landowners in the Yankee Hill neighorhood were dumping sewage into neighboring lower income communities, making life shitty and development difficult. The new sewage systems made low lying land more desirable for residential/industrial/commercial development, taking distributing some economic power from existing landowners to immigrant landowners with formerly undesirable land.
- A lot of the socialist organizing happened at German beer halls/gardens, which were major community gathering hubs until WWI/WWII shifted the vibe, as they say.
This is really interesting! I hadn’t thought about the impacts of the people fleeing failed 1848 uprisings as relevant for big city American politics! I learned a little about it when visiting the Texas hill country, where it was culturally influential, but never ran San Antonio or Austin.
As an Angeleno who is absolutely fascinated by the NYC mayoral race and reads everything about it, I'm disgusted by the national media's monomaniacal focus on it. Stop feeding me things I can't resist reading!
On the other hand . . . there are other cities out there (Dothraki voice: it is known). I look forward to measuring comparative column inches in next year's Los Angeles mayoral contest. There are big issues there (maybe even bigger than New York City's!) and I'm sure the national media will be fiercely competing to write about how Karen Bass has performed in dealing with the homelessness crisis, the affordability crisis, the climate change/urban wildfire crisis, the race for preparing for the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, and on and on.
Mamdani's is a cool story and I admit to interest but I'm just starting to get a glimmer, the barest hint of an inkling, that maybe just maybe there's a media bias about the centrality of New York in the nation's consciousness.
Similarly, I could have voted for Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago's teachers union or Paul Vallas, the mayor of the cops. Johnson is a terrible mayor but I'm sure Vallas, who has failed repeatedly in bids for higher office, would have been equally bad. I purposely chose not to vote for mayor and instead put my effort into down ballot races. We typically have to vote for 50 judges every two years. Blech.
I don't think NYC can run the stationary bandits out of town without tearing up the playing field. He seems willing to take them on, maybe even the public employee unions.
What I think is happening (and is a good thing) is that Mamdani could the the first of a new type of Democrat to emerge, in a strange way a kind of liberal-left form of 1st term Donald Trump: in the sense that he could be a "far left nutjob" that promotes mostly reasonable center-left policies. A "raging marxist" that speaks to the everyday struggles of regular Americans and bread & butter issues. An "ultra-left FIGHTER" that more or less continues the policies of his predecessors, albeit with a leftist flair!
"A big problem with the current discourse is that everyone the progressive wing of the Democratic Party actually likes are powerless back-benchers in safe seats. This gives them strong incentives to do wild position-taking with zero accountability for whether their ideas work or whether they can manage to set priorities."
This criticism is utterly vacuous.
Yes, lefty Dems only get elected in deep blue seats and they shout loudly on twitter.
But as Matt Y would himself have preferred, there was never a speaker of either chamber or a Dem President that was lefty.
Yet the party as a whole failed to prevent a deranged criminal and fascist wanna be from getting elected. The failures of Obama-Hillary-Biden-Harris are catastrophic and should have been party ending.
Yet we have people like Matt Y always seeking to blame "powerless back-benchers in safe seats" for the failure of those that actually held power. Its an insane argument.
In other advanced countries, leaders resign as a form of accountability when they fail at their #1 stated goals. Pelosi et al utterly failed at an epoch defining task and still continue on as if nothing happened.
Even if we grant that today's leaders are shameless, the strategic value of leaders like Pelosi is questionable as mainstream media's ability to mediate our politics has all but disappeared. Pelosi gained power because she could bring in the big campaign bribes (sorry, bucks) from SF. That power allowed her to cultivate a caucus of dependents who relied on the dough she brought in to fund TV ads for their boring campaigns. That model is clearly breaking down now. So I don't think we need the "corruption is actually good" style of leaders anymore.
It’s not insane at all - the groups making democratic politicians sign a promise to provide gender reassignment surgery to prisoners and immigrants is criminally negligent. If you hired someone to undermine candidates you could have hardly done better.
C'mon, Harris signed what she signed because she had no idea what she stood for other than her own career progression. If you can't say "no", that's on you as a so called leader. If people trust you to stand for something that is actually popular, then they will not care that you took a couple of unpopular stands on other stuff. Harris had no positive credibility on any issue that was important to voters so the trans issue defined her.
Are you running for anything? If not then you have to deal with the fact that we have the politicians we have. It’s not a good idea to temp them into taking catastrophically unpopular positions.
"We have the politicians we have" is maybe too defeatist? Maybe we need a better class of politician that is actually able to listen to the median voter rather than paid consultants and seek to blame those without power for their own failures? The existing Democratic party needs to be totally re-constituted after failing to achieve its #1 stated goal of preventing a return of the cheeto.
Unfortunately, after listening to the Plain English interview I’m incredibly bearish about how effective Zohran would be as Mayor. I thought the most telling part of the interview was the discussion of Zohran’s city-owned grocery store proposal, which occurred shortly after a discussion of Chicago failing at building affordable housing for a reasonable cost. Derrick attributed this failure in part to Chicago using a myriad of criteria for awarding projects other than how much the developer will be able to manage costs (one example is how diverse the developer’s management team is). The grocery store discussion came shortly after this, and Zohran was critical of an existing city grocery program, partially on the basis of the current participants of this program not collectively bargaining with their employees.
This begs the same question that the Chicago example does - is the purpose of these government initiatives, whether it is creating affordable housing or access to affordable/healthy food, to actually solve those issues, or is it to address progressives’ other many pet issues (DEI, pro-union matters, etc)? I fear that despite his stated desire to make government effective, he will not check the progressive impulses to weigh these programs down with other interests.
I think the supporters think it can be all those things, because once you eliminate all of the wasteful profit, there's so much left over than every dream can come true.
The concept that they have single digit profit margins to work with, assuming that they're every bit as efficient as the private sector, is beyond them. These are not math people.
Two observations. I saw the same wish-casting that Matt mentioned, of how his mayoralty will be smarter than his platform. Thats a bet with lot of downside risk. The second is that there is a larger upside in a Socialist star that isn't Bernie Sanders. They note how much more inclusive, pluralist, and less grievance filled Mamdani is than much of the left. Even going on the Bulwark or Odd lots and listening to critiques of his policy is a lot more than Bernie would have done and I respect that.
I worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society for several years, and the Victor Berger Papers was one of our most popular collections with researchers, so I especially appreciate the intro to this column. Even now, years later, I do a double-take when I see a Sherwin-Williams Paint logo - a can with SWP on the label and red paint pouring out of it that says "cover the world" - thinking for a minute that it means Socialist Workers Party.
"As Fiorello LaGuardia famously said, there’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage."
Is that really true?
I would argue right now. The democratic way is with a heavily unionized workforce with out of control costs and a bunch of rules that make things very inefficient and quite possibly don't pick up half the garbage
Isn't that the whole point of the abundance movement? that democratic administrations have not been prioritizing Actually making government services work
Is the statement you made true of most cities? NYC is a special case wrt trash collection, is the reason it didn't have containerized trash because of union rules?
Cities just aren't functional as communities anymore. The square mileage of neighborhoods that one can live without fear of crime or have a place to raise a family just keeps shrinking, and the few neighborhoods that meet living standard criteria have exploded in cost. This is the unspoken truth about the "housing crisis". Maybe in 1910 Milwaukee you could raise a family and send kids to school in a poor neighborhood because people were still married and working, raising their kids, and trying to improve their lives. Now the underclass, aided and abetted by progressive city governments, have no behavioral standards and can make any formerly decent but poor area totally unlivable. I'm amazed that progressives keep targeting the minority of citizens that are actually productive. It's been the same movie since 1960 and only when there is a tough on crime "clean up the streets" initiative we get any progress in making neighborhoods livable as communities.
The promises of progressive government amount to nothing more than short term handouts that won't improve behavior, and will mostly enrich the redistributors rather than reduce the destructive behavior that continues to ruin lives.
I'd love to see socialism and progressive politics in a community of productive law abiding citizens. It might work a little. It will just lead to yet another financial and social death spiral here...as it always has.
This is not actually true. Almost all major American cities are objectively much safer than they were for most of say, the 1970-2000 period. (Especially true for NYC, which is one of the safest cities in the US.)
As a longtime LA resident who just moved into a slowly gentrifying neighborhood, my experience is the opposite, that the number of safe neighborhoods is growing, not shrinking. Of course that’s just one anecdote. If you have data showing that your read on things is correct, I’d read it!
I think a fulsome rebuttal[1][2] might require establishing that the gentrifying neighborhoods aren't better purely as a result of selection effects pricing out residents who would otherwise cause problems, in which case the claim that "neighborhoods that meet living standard criteria have exploded in cost" wouldn't just be true, but actually causal.
[1] Beyond the square mileage factual claim, as to which an expanding gentrification frontier would indeed be a complete rebuttal.
[2] There are obviously a lot of predicate factual claims being made here, including that behavioral standards have declined and in particular that there's a more acute bifurcation between upwardly mobile working / lower-middle-class-strivers and the class of poorer residents characterized primarily by antisocial behaviors than there used to be, so I'm kind of stipulating to those here but obviously they could be independently challenged.
Removing people who cause problems is good and necessary if cities can’t/won’t enforce order.
This is probably the final boss of the YIMBY movement. You need to be able to promise people that their QOL won’t drop if the neighborhood is more affordable.
I don't think we can just abstract out DP's claim of a declining number of livable areas. If the situation is that more and more neighborhoods are becoming desirable to live, and their costs are going up correspondingly, that definitely has its problems but it's quite different from what DP suggests, especially when it comes to the governance question.
The piece touches on, but then side steps the ideologically salient points from early 20th century socialism:
"Hoan implemented the first public bus system in America, he built the country’s first public housing project, and he spearheaded municipal ownership of the sewer and water system."
So the critical points to consider are:
1. Are water and sewer services a public right that cannot be met by for-profit utility companies? Something like 90% of water and sewer utilities are publicly owned so this seems like a decisive win.
2. Is bus transport a public right that cannot be met by private streetcar operators? These are also overwhelmingly public owned so this is another decisive win.
3. Is housing a public right that requires substantial municipal support? Less than 1% of housing stock is public housing. And even including things like section 8, this remains a small part of housing overall.
4. Are there other such services in 2025 that you would either move under or move out of municipal control? Public Wi-Fi? Groceries? Pre-K? after school?
The rest of the piece is ideology-neutral administrative functions that one could write about no matter who wins.
> 1. Are water and sewer services a public right that cannot be met by for-profit utility companies? Something like 90% of water and sewer utilities are publicly owned so this seems like a decisive win.
I think it's clear that redundant infrastructure is generally a bad idea, but there are plenty of for-profit electricity companies (SoCal Edison comes to mind) that exist inside a highly-regulated space.
> 2. Is bus transport a public right that cannot be met by private streetcar operators? These are also overwhelmingly public owned so this is another decisive win.
I would argue that what ended up happening is that the government so subsidized private vehicle ownership that it was forced to also subsidize public transport, but even in countries with less private vehicle subsidies, the public transport is publicaly owned. There are plenty of private taxi services, however.
One hopes a victorious Mamdani doesn’t follow the lead of Chicago’s Brandon Johnson too closely.
More interesting in IL-09, Kat Abugazeleh (a tiktok influencer and way left progressive) is running to replace retiring Jan Schakowsky against, among others, current Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, who pushed so hard for a YIMBY-centric Evanston Zoning Code re-write that he got out in front of his own council. Whether that was chastening or not, he’s now running socials bemoaning … the end of Dobbs. Talk about an issue with no opposition, other than by some veiled threat from that “group” and its donors.
Please, Mr. Mayor. you don’t have to praise Dobbs to de-center it as an issue. Just don’t mention it!
I can’t get a read on the place. They do weird university town political stuff all the time, but it seems much larger than even a bigger college town like Madison.
I mean: be a rep for the most people in the district, which means having sufficient overlap between your top 5 issues and the voters' top 5. In this district, PERFORMATIVELY, abortion probably qualifies...but I would argue its salience is lower today, especially with working class voters. Strictly, centering abortion among the upper-middle-class people in IL-09 is performative-only, given that none of that class will ever have any trouble obtaining an abortion, whereas, with cuts to Medicaid, many Obamacare expansion voters WILL find it harder to obtain, even in IL.
“Mamdani… I just don’t know.”
For the record, that’s when he decided to kick your ass…
I just want to point out you weren't exactly making a case for Trump along these lines in 2016... but you kinda were, noting frequently how he made random gestures in favor of an enhanced safety net, his promises not to cut Social Security/Medicare, and things like that. Of course, that's consistent with your position here, that you'd still rank Cuomo above Mamdani.
And as with every discussion of this topic, I want to raise the salience of the fact that there are perhaps half a million Orthodox Jews in NYC, they are victims of regular, strictly one-sided street violence, and they are called "Zionists" when it occurs almost every time. Whatever gambles anyone wants to take on Zohran and free buses, and whatever you want to say about whether or not his Israel views are good or should matter - it is beyond insane that dog-whistling to antisemites at a time when antisemitic violence is a daily occurrence is a winning tactic, and should terrify more people than just the Jews themselves.
The rise of Sewer Socialism in Milwaukee is really interesting to consider given today's issues around immigration as well as Mamdani's recent primary victory. To wit:
- In the late 1800's MKE was like 60% foreign-born German, and like 90% immigrant generally, with lots of German speaking Poles.
- The upper/upper-middle class was comprised of 1st generation Germans and their 2nd gen children who had fled the failed revolutions of 1848, which had various factions and reasons for fighting but in the end was the left/liberals who lost.
- These educated leftists/liberals formed an elite establishment that was able to assimilate second wave lower class German and Polish into their governing structures and coalition.
- The new coalition was able to wrest control from the WASPs, who like more or less everywhere in America at that time ran everything
- The "Sewer" part of "Sewer Socialist" was both a YIMBY policy and anti-WASP policy--private landowners in the Yankee Hill neighorhood were dumping sewage into neighboring lower income communities, making life shitty and development difficult. The new sewage systems made low lying land more desirable for residential/industrial/commercial development, taking distributing some economic power from existing landowners to immigrant landowners with formerly undesirable land.
- A lot of the socialist organizing happened at German beer halls/gardens, which were major community gathering hubs until WWI/WWII shifted the vibe, as they say.
This is really interesting! I hadn’t thought about the impacts of the people fleeing failed 1848 uprisings as relevant for big city American politics! I learned a little about it when visiting the Texas hill country, where it was culturally influential, but never ran San Antonio or Austin.
No, I haven't.
As an Angeleno who is absolutely fascinated by the NYC mayoral race and reads everything about it, I'm disgusted by the national media's monomaniacal focus on it. Stop feeding me things I can't resist reading!
On the other hand . . . there are other cities out there (Dothraki voice: it is known). I look forward to measuring comparative column inches in next year's Los Angeles mayoral contest. There are big issues there (maybe even bigger than New York City's!) and I'm sure the national media will be fiercely competing to write about how Karen Bass has performed in dealing with the homelessness crisis, the affordability crisis, the climate change/urban wildfire crisis, the race for preparing for the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, and on and on.
Mamdani's is a cool story and I admit to interest but I'm just starting to get a glimmer, the barest hint of an inkling, that maybe just maybe there's a media bias about the centrality of New York in the nation's consciousness.
Similarly, I could have voted for Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago's teachers union or Paul Vallas, the mayor of the cops. Johnson is a terrible mayor but I'm sure Vallas, who has failed repeatedly in bids for higher office, would have been equally bad. I purposely chose not to vote for mayor and instead put my effort into down ballot races. We typically have to vote for 50 judges every two years. Blech.
I don't think NYC can run the stationary bandits out of town without tearing up the playing field. He seems willing to take them on, maybe even the public employee unions.
What I think is happening (and is a good thing) is that Mamdani could the the first of a new type of Democrat to emerge, in a strange way a kind of liberal-left form of 1st term Donald Trump: in the sense that he could be a "far left nutjob" that promotes mostly reasonable center-left policies. A "raging marxist" that speaks to the everyday struggles of regular Americans and bread & butter issues. An "ultra-left FIGHTER" that more or less continues the policies of his predecessors, albeit with a leftist flair!
"A big problem with the current discourse is that everyone the progressive wing of the Democratic Party actually likes are powerless back-benchers in safe seats. This gives them strong incentives to do wild position-taking with zero accountability for whether their ideas work or whether they can manage to set priorities."
This criticism is utterly vacuous.
Yes, lefty Dems only get elected in deep blue seats and they shout loudly on twitter.
But as Matt Y would himself have preferred, there was never a speaker of either chamber or a Dem President that was lefty.
Yet the party as a whole failed to prevent a deranged criminal and fascist wanna be from getting elected. The failures of Obama-Hillary-Biden-Harris are catastrophic and should have been party ending.
Yet we have people like Matt Y always seeking to blame "powerless back-benchers in safe seats" for the failure of those that actually held power. Its an insane argument.
Wasn’t Pelosi a lefty of the AOC type who realized what it takes to run a coalition in Congress?
In other advanced countries, leaders resign as a form of accountability when they fail at their #1 stated goals. Pelosi et al utterly failed at an epoch defining task and still continue on as if nothing happened.
Even if we grant that today's leaders are shameless, the strategic value of leaders like Pelosi is questionable as mainstream media's ability to mediate our politics has all but disappeared. Pelosi gained power because she could bring in the big campaign bribes (sorry, bucks) from SF. That power allowed her to cultivate a caucus of dependents who relied on the dough she brought in to fund TV ads for their boring campaigns. That model is clearly breaking down now. So I don't think we need the "corruption is actually good" style of leaders anymore.
It’s not insane at all - the groups making democratic politicians sign a promise to provide gender reassignment surgery to prisoners and immigrants is criminally negligent. If you hired someone to undermine candidates you could have hardly done better.
C'mon, Harris signed what she signed because she had no idea what she stood for other than her own career progression. If you can't say "no", that's on you as a so called leader. If people trust you to stand for something that is actually popular, then they will not care that you took a couple of unpopular stands on other stuff. Harris had no positive credibility on any issue that was important to voters so the trans issue defined her.
Are you running for anything? If not then you have to deal with the fact that we have the politicians we have. It’s not a good idea to temp them into taking catastrophically unpopular positions.
"We have the politicians we have" is maybe too defeatist? Maybe we need a better class of politician that is actually able to listen to the median voter rather than paid consultants and seek to blame those without power for their own failures? The existing Democratic party needs to be totally re-constituted after failing to achieve its #1 stated goal of preventing a return of the cheeto.
“ Maybe we need a better class of politician”
When you find some be sure to let us know.
Well defeating people like Cuomo is a good start but we have a long way to go.
Unfortunately, after listening to the Plain English interview I’m incredibly bearish about how effective Zohran would be as Mayor. I thought the most telling part of the interview was the discussion of Zohran’s city-owned grocery store proposal, which occurred shortly after a discussion of Chicago failing at building affordable housing for a reasonable cost. Derrick attributed this failure in part to Chicago using a myriad of criteria for awarding projects other than how much the developer will be able to manage costs (one example is how diverse the developer’s management team is). The grocery store discussion came shortly after this, and Zohran was critical of an existing city grocery program, partially on the basis of the current participants of this program not collectively bargaining with their employees.
This begs the same question that the Chicago example does - is the purpose of these government initiatives, whether it is creating affordable housing or access to affordable/healthy food, to actually solve those issues, or is it to address progressives’ other many pet issues (DEI, pro-union matters, etc)? I fear that despite his stated desire to make government effective, he will not check the progressive impulses to weigh these programs down with other interests.
I think the supporters think it can be all those things, because once you eliminate all of the wasteful profit, there's so much left over than every dream can come true.
The concept that they have single digit profit margins to work with, assuming that they're every bit as efficient as the private sector, is beyond them. These are not math people.
Is there something about the socialist, anti-market worldview that necessarily does not even consider policy trade offs?
Really recommend a podcast from Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes that came out over the weekend about Mamdani, focusing mainly on his communication breakthrough but on substance as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-chris-hayes.html
Two observations. I saw the same wish-casting that Matt mentioned, of how his mayoralty will be smarter than his platform. Thats a bet with lot of downside risk. The second is that there is a larger upside in a Socialist star that isn't Bernie Sanders. They note how much more inclusive, pluralist, and less grievance filled Mamdani is than much of the left. Even going on the Bulwark or Odd lots and listening to critiques of his policy is a lot more than Bernie would have done and I respect that.
Agreed good pod
I worked at the Wisconsin Historical Society for several years, and the Victor Berger Papers was one of our most popular collections with researchers, so I especially appreciate the intro to this column. Even now, years later, I do a double-take when I see a Sherwin-Williams Paint logo - a can with SWP on the label and red paint pouring out of it that says "cover the world" - thinking for a minute that it means Socialist Workers Party.
"As Fiorello LaGuardia famously said, there’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage."
Is that really true?
I would argue right now. The democratic way is with a heavily unionized workforce with out of control costs and a bunch of rules that make things very inefficient and quite possibly don't pick up half the garbage
Is this accurate? Seems like the current democratic administration is actually improving trash collection in a substantial way in new York right now.
After how long?
Isn't that the whole point of the abundance movement? that democratic administrations have not been prioritizing Actually making government services work
Is the statement you made true of most cities? NYC is a special case wrt trash collection, is the reason it didn't have containerized trash because of union rules?
Cities just aren't functional as communities anymore. The square mileage of neighborhoods that one can live without fear of crime or have a place to raise a family just keeps shrinking, and the few neighborhoods that meet living standard criteria have exploded in cost. This is the unspoken truth about the "housing crisis". Maybe in 1910 Milwaukee you could raise a family and send kids to school in a poor neighborhood because people were still married and working, raising their kids, and trying to improve their lives. Now the underclass, aided and abetted by progressive city governments, have no behavioral standards and can make any formerly decent but poor area totally unlivable. I'm amazed that progressives keep targeting the minority of citizens that are actually productive. It's been the same movie since 1960 and only when there is a tough on crime "clean up the streets" initiative we get any progress in making neighborhoods livable as communities.
The promises of progressive government amount to nothing more than short term handouts that won't improve behavior, and will mostly enrich the redistributors rather than reduce the destructive behavior that continues to ruin lives.
I'd love to see socialism and progressive politics in a community of productive law abiding citizens. It might work a little. It will just lead to yet another financial and social death spiral here...as it always has.
This is not actually true. Almost all major American cities are objectively much safer than they were for most of say, the 1970-2000 period. (Especially true for NYC, which is one of the safest cities in the US.)
As a longtime LA resident who just moved into a slowly gentrifying neighborhood, my experience is the opposite, that the number of safe neighborhoods is growing, not shrinking. Of course that’s just one anecdote. If you have data showing that your read on things is correct, I’d read it!
I think a fulsome rebuttal[1][2] might require establishing that the gentrifying neighborhoods aren't better purely as a result of selection effects pricing out residents who would otherwise cause problems, in which case the claim that "neighborhoods that meet living standard criteria have exploded in cost" wouldn't just be true, but actually causal.
[1] Beyond the square mileage factual claim, as to which an expanding gentrification frontier would indeed be a complete rebuttal.
[2] There are obviously a lot of predicate factual claims being made here, including that behavioral standards have declined and in particular that there's a more acute bifurcation between upwardly mobile working / lower-middle-class-strivers and the class of poorer residents characterized primarily by antisocial behaviors than there used to be, so I'm kind of stipulating to those here but obviously they could be independently challenged.
Removing people who cause problems is good and necessary if cities can’t/won’t enforce order.
This is probably the final boss of the YIMBY movement. You need to be able to promise people that their QOL won’t drop if the neighborhood is more affordable.
I don't think we can just abstract out DP's claim of a declining number of livable areas. If the situation is that more and more neighborhoods are becoming desirable to live, and their costs are going up correspondingly, that definitely has its problems but it's quite different from what DP suggests, especially when it comes to the governance question.
People want to live in south central, it’s wild. The LA of my youth that would NEVER happen
Anecdata but the light rail really helped there, not just Culver City becoming expensive
There are some really nice new developments in the Crenshaw area. Much more is needed, but just noting this.
I’m a hard “NO” on any person who wants to Globalize the Intifada. Once someone says that, I don’t care about anything else.
Did he say that, or was he just in places where other people said it?
If the latter, then he shouldn’t have been in those places! Either way, I’m for the crook, not the Communist.
If you don't know the answer to that then probably you should try to get more information before coming to the strong conclusions you seem to have.
No. Shan’t.
That seems like an unsound epistemic approach.
What I love about politics, as opposed to economics, is that a sound epistemic approach is not a prerequisite in this business.
Global war does indeed seem awful
The piece touches on, but then side steps the ideologically salient points from early 20th century socialism:
"Hoan implemented the first public bus system in America, he built the country’s first public housing project, and he spearheaded municipal ownership of the sewer and water system."
So the critical points to consider are:
1. Are water and sewer services a public right that cannot be met by for-profit utility companies? Something like 90% of water and sewer utilities are publicly owned so this seems like a decisive win.
2. Is bus transport a public right that cannot be met by private streetcar operators? These are also overwhelmingly public owned so this is another decisive win.
3. Is housing a public right that requires substantial municipal support? Less than 1% of housing stock is public housing. And even including things like section 8, this remains a small part of housing overall.
4. Are there other such services in 2025 that you would either move under or move out of municipal control? Public Wi-Fi? Groceries? Pre-K? after school?
The rest of the piece is ideology-neutral administrative functions that one could write about no matter who wins.
> 1. Are water and sewer services a public right that cannot be met by for-profit utility companies? Something like 90% of water and sewer utilities are publicly owned so this seems like a decisive win.
I think it's clear that redundant infrastructure is generally a bad idea, but there are plenty of for-profit electricity companies (SoCal Edison comes to mind) that exist inside a highly-regulated space.
> 2. Is bus transport a public right that cannot be met by private streetcar operators? These are also overwhelmingly public owned so this is another decisive win.
I would argue that what ended up happening is that the government so subsidized private vehicle ownership that it was forced to also subsidize public transport, but even in countries with less private vehicle subsidies, the public transport is publicaly owned. There are plenty of private taxi services, however.
One hopes a victorious Mamdani doesn’t follow the lead of Chicago’s Brandon Johnson too closely.
More interesting in IL-09, Kat Abugazeleh (a tiktok influencer and way left progressive) is running to replace retiring Jan Schakowsky against, among others, current Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, who pushed so hard for a YIMBY-centric Evanston Zoning Code re-write that he got out in front of his own council. Whether that was chastening or not, he’s now running socials bemoaning … the end of Dobbs. Talk about an issue with no opposition, other than by some veiled threat from that “group” and its donors.
Please, Mr. Mayor. you don’t have to praise Dobbs to de-center it as an issue. Just don’t mention it!
Is Evanston more than people experiencing… wildcatness? (Sad mrowr sound)
lol
I can’t get a read on the place. They do weird university town political stuff all the time, but it seems much larger than even a bigger college town like Madison.
Do you mean the end of Roe?
I mean: be a rep for the most people in the district, which means having sufficient overlap between your top 5 issues and the voters' top 5. In this district, PERFORMATIVELY, abortion probably qualifies...but I would argue its salience is lower today, especially with working class voters. Strictly, centering abortion among the upper-middle-class people in IL-09 is performative-only, given that none of that class will ever have any trouble obtaining an abortion, whereas, with cuts to Medicaid, many Obamacare expansion voters WILL find it harder to obtain, even in IL.