+1 for the comment to EJ about being mindful with your political social media posting. The Baileys don’t read a ton of political news but they are on Facebook fairly often, and they are really put off by unnecessary nastiness. How do we all brand the Democrats as a team they want to be associated with?
In terms of demand for dense housing. Imagine you’re from suburban Dallas, you went to Michigan and you’ve graduated with a degree in accounting or IT and you’re starting at $70k-$110k. You’re being onboarded remotely. You’re single. You expect to have one kid in 10 years and they will be out of the house by the time you’re 50. Where do you want to live for the next 10 years?
Out in the middle of nowhere? Or a place where there is a ton of things to do after sitting in front of your computer all day?
I get the sense that a lot of internet commenters are introverts so they don’t really grok the need to socialize.
I had never heard of "earning to give" but I have knocked on a lot of doors and made a lot of calls, and my intuition was always something along the lines of what was stated, i.e., "Are we sure we aren't just annoying people?"
I literally had people tell me on the phone that if we called them again they weren't going to vote at all. There is something that feels a little icky and dystopian to me, though, that in a democracy we should be encouraging people to personally participate less and give money more. I'm not saying it's ineffective, or that working more to donate money to advance a cause you care for isn't *also* activism, but...I don't know.
If some enthusiastic high schooler came to me all bright-eyed and wanted to know how to best make a difference, I would feel a little gross being like, "Get a part-time job and start chucking that money at [organization X], kid."
I think if you took a group of random people and asked them to rethink land use they would end up with the same or more restrictive zoning. I understand the current process is frustrating but I think experts and most elected officials are ahead of most random residents on this who haven’t thought about the issue before, and the political dynamic of how people have an incentive to try to push development elsewhere is still real but held in check by activism and lobbying to some extent. Of course you and others have successfully educated many people but is it most? I’m not so sure.
Anyone else have their own YIMBY red pill moments they want to share, now that Matt shared his?
Mine was about 15 years ago when a cool looking midrise condo building was being proposed right next to multiple buildings of similar height (thinking the proposed building was in the 8-10 story range) on the same side of a busy street. But oh boy, the neighborhood association on the opposite side of this busy street, a neighborhood that I spent my childhood living next to and spent plenty of time in, they completely lost their shit. They did stunts like tie balloons to a really long string to try to demonstrate the alleged horrors of the height of this building. When I talked to them in their community building effort, their reasoning for opposition was basically "if you approve this building, they'll approve many more like it in our neighborhood in the future!" And when I attended the P&Z meeting over this, that's when I got the full experience of hearing dumb NIMBY comments from people that had the privilege to raise hell in such meetings in person.
The project got reduced to 4 stories, which as far as outcomes go could have been far worse, but it sent me down the path of no return in this regard.
I'm shocked no one mentioned the truly shocking thing in that chart on the homeless...the homeless population went down almost 10% over the last 13 years! I trust the data comes from a reliable source, so maybe it's only my personal history of living in LA that makes that data so head-spinning.
I take MY's point that if drug addiction is increasing, the homeless data trend runs the opposite way. But it also runs counter to the trends in house prices and affordability! I don't doubt MY's main premise, that homeless is mostly about housing, but it's strange that this chart doesn't seem to support that connection. And since homelessness and housing affordability are not really correlating, you can hardly point out the same lack of correlation with drug abuse and say "see it can't be that!". At least not if you believe it's about affordability.
But also - I question the premise of Tim Lee's particularly question. I don't think we do know that drug addiction, is rising recently. It seems clear that prescription drug addictions and misuse rose through the early 2000s. But the rise of overdose over the last 10 years seems more about stronger opioids, a la fentanyl, than about the size of the addicted population. There's sadly a lack of reliable data on number of drug addicts, but the best I can find shows overall drug use as flat over the last ten years or so:
To clarify on fentanyl - it's not really a separate thing people get addicted to. Generally it's added to other opioids, and sometimes to other drugs like cocaine, to strengthen the dose. Imagine you're a dealer with a kg of heroin. Add a little fentanyl and suddenly you can sell 5 or 10 times the "high" with the same amount of product.
At the risk of rambling - I also don't know that fentanyl is associated with mental problems beyond addiction. My understanding is drugs like coke and meth are more likely to trigger violence or mental health disorders. The main "mental" problem with opioids is they are very addicting and that seems to push many people into lying, stealing, other forms of petty crime or other plain stupid things to feed their expensive habit.
Re: homelessness, I look forward to reading the results of your research into the various causes at work. An additional dimension might be recent changes in how governments/social workers/etc. address homelessness. To the extent those changes do or do not succeed at improving people's lives, they impact homelessness rates over time, too.
For example, Michael Shellenberger has been on the podcasting circuit lately, and he attributes SF's homelessness problem primarily to addiction and mental illness. He has an interesting take about how the incorporation of "victim ideology" (for lack of a better term, on my part) among social workers and other relevant institutions has led to ineffective and counterproductive services for homeless people. On his account, the new changes assume it's immoral to make people with addiction issues at least partly responsible for improving their own situation and to make certain social services contingent on concrete efforts to recover. (It's possible I'm misremembering his specific beliefs/arguments.)
I'm inclined to think something like his account is at least partly true for places like SF, but it'd be interesting to look at when specific changes were made and how that timeline fits with the data cited in this post. (Shellenberger might address this exact question in his new book, which I haven't read.) If you start to see big changes in approach in big cities around 2014, say, then that could be one factor contributing to the rise in unsheltered / chronically homeless since then.
One part of the country, New England, already has the sort of citizen-engaged democracy Kyle asks about in its town meeting form of government. (Towns, legally defined, have twice-a-year meetings in which any registered voter can vote and be heard on major questions facing the town.) The system has much to recommend it (if you’re patient and have a high tolerance for tedium, but maybe all government demands that). But I’m not sure it yields less caution than other forms; if anything, status quo bias seems greater (since older people and long-time residents disproportionately participate). Whether town meetings work and could be exported to the rest of the country might be an interesting topic for a future post.
"...the classic Unseld/Hayes frontcourt from the 1970s...."
Oh my god. How do you know about these guys? They retired before you were born. I'm amazed that people still talk about them.
But, yeah -- it was an awesome collaboration. Wes had the worst knees and the biggest heart in the business. He could block out guys a foot taller, and throw a rebound from under the defensive boards down to his guard at the other basket, easy as looking. Hayes was erratic, sometimes cold, but a solid scorer when he was on. They were both working-class heroes, not prima donnas.
I haven't thought about them in over forty years. Again, I'm amazed that they are remembered.
Citizens' assembly sounds cool except people will try to escape it like jury duty. California did put a lot of effort into making its redistricting commission representative of the population but there were many challenges.
+1 on Twitter being a great source of information. I'll even up the temperature on the take and say that I can also find the arguments informative at times, even if they can be tedious. The key is to limit your follows to arguers that you trust can be good at informing you through argument. (Matt of course is one of those follows for me.)
The other thing I'd say about Twitter is that it's best not to participate unless you have some really unique information to share. I registered for a Twitter account just a year or two after it got popular, but I never actually tweeted anything for years until I found a niche of information (that has nothing to do with subject material that would be familiar here at Slow Boring) that had yet to be filled, and once I did that I found a purpose to actually participate. People who use Twitter like any other social media site are the ones that for me are not worth following.
Long-time admirer, recent paid subscriber. The search function produced inconclusive results, so must ask: where are you at on “revenue-neutral tax reform to achieve progressive taxation on all income, regardless of source?” My financial-planner brother thinks that (if we include such arcana as eliminating the Step-up in Cost Basis) we could raise so much more from the capital-rich class that overall brackets would fall for pretty much anyone actually *earning* (payroll/bonus etc) income. Revenue neutrality, I’d like to hope, de-fangs or at least forstalls the fight over the proper size or scope of government. Thoughts?
The section that begins "Suppose that door-knocking" and ends "just as you would if you were knocking on strangers’ doors." was wonderful and could potentially be very impactful.
I'd humbly suggest Matt or others find a way to spread it on Twitter or FB. Maybe even as a pinned tweet (if that's what they're called).
I think the clearest answer to “how much demand is there for dense housing?” comes from places like Manhattan, where 1.5 million people live on the island and rents are still high because the demand outstrips the supply. It’s certainly not what everyone wants, but more people want it than can actually have it right now.
Interesting my experience with aphantasia seems to be slightly different in that I can't really recreate music in my head like that. I'm curious have you never had visual images come to your head? On rare occasion I can sort of briefly visualize a memory/photo though not on command and I'm certain I dream visually.
+1 for the comment to EJ about being mindful with your political social media posting. The Baileys don’t read a ton of political news but they are on Facebook fairly often, and they are really put off by unnecessary nastiness. How do we all brand the Democrats as a team they want to be associated with?
In terms of demand for dense housing. Imagine you’re from suburban Dallas, you went to Michigan and you’ve graduated with a degree in accounting or IT and you’re starting at $70k-$110k. You’re being onboarded remotely. You’re single. You expect to have one kid in 10 years and they will be out of the house by the time you’re 50. Where do you want to live for the next 10 years?
Out in the middle of nowhere? Or a place where there is a ton of things to do after sitting in front of your computer all day?
I get the sense that a lot of internet commenters are introverts so they don’t really grok the need to socialize.
I had never heard of "earning to give" but I have knocked on a lot of doors and made a lot of calls, and my intuition was always something along the lines of what was stated, i.e., "Are we sure we aren't just annoying people?"
I literally had people tell me on the phone that if we called them again they weren't going to vote at all. There is something that feels a little icky and dystopian to me, though, that in a democracy we should be encouraging people to personally participate less and give money more. I'm not saying it's ineffective, or that working more to donate money to advance a cause you care for isn't *also* activism, but...I don't know.
If some enthusiastic high schooler came to me all bright-eyed and wanted to know how to best make a difference, I would feel a little gross being like, "Get a part-time job and start chucking that money at [organization X], kid."
I think if you took a group of random people and asked them to rethink land use they would end up with the same or more restrictive zoning. I understand the current process is frustrating but I think experts and most elected officials are ahead of most random residents on this who haven’t thought about the issue before, and the political dynamic of how people have an incentive to try to push development elsewhere is still real but held in check by activism and lobbying to some extent. Of course you and others have successfully educated many people but is it most? I’m not so sure.
Looking forward to "Mailbag: Tokyo Drift" on Japanese housing policy.
Anyone else have their own YIMBY red pill moments they want to share, now that Matt shared his?
Mine was about 15 years ago when a cool looking midrise condo building was being proposed right next to multiple buildings of similar height (thinking the proposed building was in the 8-10 story range) on the same side of a busy street. But oh boy, the neighborhood association on the opposite side of this busy street, a neighborhood that I spent my childhood living next to and spent plenty of time in, they completely lost their shit. They did stunts like tie balloons to a really long string to try to demonstrate the alleged horrors of the height of this building. When I talked to them in their community building effort, their reasoning for opposition was basically "if you approve this building, they'll approve many more like it in our neighborhood in the future!" And when I attended the P&Z meeting over this, that's when I got the full experience of hearing dumb NIMBY comments from people that had the privilege to raise hell in such meetings in person.
The project got reduced to 4 stories, which as far as outcomes go could have been far worse, but it sent me down the path of no return in this regard.
I'm shocked no one mentioned the truly shocking thing in that chart on the homeless...the homeless population went down almost 10% over the last 13 years! I trust the data comes from a reliable source, so maybe it's only my personal history of living in LA that makes that data so head-spinning.
I take MY's point that if drug addiction is increasing, the homeless data trend runs the opposite way. But it also runs counter to the trends in house prices and affordability! I don't doubt MY's main premise, that homeless is mostly about housing, but it's strange that this chart doesn't seem to support that connection. And since homelessness and housing affordability are not really correlating, you can hardly point out the same lack of correlation with drug abuse and say "see it can't be that!". At least not if you believe it's about affordability.
But also - I question the premise of Tim Lee's particularly question. I don't think we do know that drug addiction, is rising recently. It seems clear that prescription drug addictions and misuse rose through the early 2000s. But the rise of overdose over the last 10 years seems more about stronger opioids, a la fentanyl, than about the size of the addicted population. There's sadly a lack of reliable data on number of drug addicts, but the best I can find shows overall drug use as flat over the last ten years or so:
https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt35325/NSDUHFFRPDFWHTMLFiles2020/2020NSDUHFFR1PDFW102121.pdf
To clarify on fentanyl - it's not really a separate thing people get addicted to. Generally it's added to other opioids, and sometimes to other drugs like cocaine, to strengthen the dose. Imagine you're a dealer with a kg of heroin. Add a little fentanyl and suddenly you can sell 5 or 10 times the "high" with the same amount of product.
At the risk of rambling - I also don't know that fentanyl is associated with mental problems beyond addiction. My understanding is drugs like coke and meth are more likely to trigger violence or mental health disorders. The main "mental" problem with opioids is they are very addicting and that seems to push many people into lying, stealing, other forms of petty crime or other plain stupid things to feed their expensive habit.
Re: homelessness, I look forward to reading the results of your research into the various causes at work. An additional dimension might be recent changes in how governments/social workers/etc. address homelessness. To the extent those changes do or do not succeed at improving people's lives, they impact homelessness rates over time, too.
For example, Michael Shellenberger has been on the podcasting circuit lately, and he attributes SF's homelessness problem primarily to addiction and mental illness. He has an interesting take about how the incorporation of "victim ideology" (for lack of a better term, on my part) among social workers and other relevant institutions has led to ineffective and counterproductive services for homeless people. On his account, the new changes assume it's immoral to make people with addiction issues at least partly responsible for improving their own situation and to make certain social services contingent on concrete efforts to recover. (It's possible I'm misremembering his specific beliefs/arguments.)
I'm inclined to think something like his account is at least partly true for places like SF, but it'd be interesting to look at when specific changes were made and how that timeline fits with the data cited in this post. (Shellenberger might address this exact question in his new book, which I haven't read.) If you start to see big changes in approach in big cities around 2014, say, then that could be one factor contributing to the rise in unsheltered / chronically homeless since then.
One part of the country, New England, already has the sort of citizen-engaged democracy Kyle asks about in its town meeting form of government. (Towns, legally defined, have twice-a-year meetings in which any registered voter can vote and be heard on major questions facing the town.) The system has much to recommend it (if you’re patient and have a high tolerance for tedium, but maybe all government demands that). But I’m not sure it yields less caution than other forms; if anything, status quo bias seems greater (since older people and long-time residents disproportionately participate). Whether town meetings work and could be exported to the rest of the country might be an interesting topic for a future post.
"...the classic Unseld/Hayes frontcourt from the 1970s...."
Oh my god. How do you know about these guys? They retired before you were born. I'm amazed that people still talk about them.
But, yeah -- it was an awesome collaboration. Wes had the worst knees and the biggest heart in the business. He could block out guys a foot taller, and throw a rebound from under the defensive boards down to his guard at the other basket, easy as looking. Hayes was erratic, sometimes cold, but a solid scorer when he was on. They were both working-class heroes, not prima donnas.
I haven't thought about them in over forty years. Again, I'm amazed that they are remembered.
Citizens' assembly sounds cool except people will try to escape it like jury duty. California did put a lot of effort into making its redistricting commission representative of the population but there were many challenges.
+1 on Twitter being a great source of information. I'll even up the temperature on the take and say that I can also find the arguments informative at times, even if they can be tedious. The key is to limit your follows to arguers that you trust can be good at informing you through argument. (Matt of course is one of those follows for me.)
The other thing I'd say about Twitter is that it's best not to participate unless you have some really unique information to share. I registered for a Twitter account just a year or two after it got popular, but I never actually tweeted anything for years until I found a niche of information (that has nothing to do with subject material that would be familiar here at Slow Boring) that had yet to be filled, and once I did that I found a purpose to actually participate. People who use Twitter like any other social media site are the ones that for me are not worth following.
Long-time admirer, recent paid subscriber. The search function produced inconclusive results, so must ask: where are you at on “revenue-neutral tax reform to achieve progressive taxation on all income, regardless of source?” My financial-planner brother thinks that (if we include such arcana as eliminating the Step-up in Cost Basis) we could raise so much more from the capital-rich class that overall brackets would fall for pretty much anyone actually *earning* (payroll/bonus etc) income. Revenue neutrality, I’d like to hope, de-fangs or at least forstalls the fight over the proper size or scope of government. Thoughts?
The section that begins "Suppose that door-knocking" and ends "just as you would if you were knocking on strangers’ doors." was wonderful and could potentially be very impactful.
I'd humbly suggest Matt or others find a way to spread it on Twitter or FB. Maybe even as a pinned tweet (if that's what they're called).
I think the clearest answer to “how much demand is there for dense housing?” comes from places like Manhattan, where 1.5 million people live on the island and rents are still high because the demand outstrips the supply. It’s certainly not what everyone wants, but more people want it than can actually have it right now.
Interesting my experience with aphantasia seems to be slightly different in that I can't really recreate music in my head like that. I'm curious have you never had visual images come to your head? On rare occasion I can sort of briefly visualize a memory/photo though not on command and I'm certain I dream visually.