I'm a native Long Islander. The state has had a bipartisan governance crisis that goes back decades. It's relatively recent that it came under unified control.
Taxes in New York are too high. But there's two things you need to know: One is that property taxes went out of control under Republican local government. Nassau County spent decades being ruled by a GOP machine (that largely still exists, despite being temporarily exiled under Tom Suozzi and then Laura Curran). You still need a GOP vouch to get a county job. The other is that suburbanites in particular have resisted every change that would lower taxes. They refuse to rationalize or consolidate local government. On Long Island, you have the county, the city or town, and in many cases the incorporated village, and then special taxation districts on top, some of which primarily exist to provide patronage jobs. There are **127** school districts for Nassau and Suffolk counties, population 2.6M (compare to ONE school district for Fairfax County, VA, population 1.13M.) It's proven impossible to consolidate even the ones that are literally one-room schoolhouses. For much of the Island, district mergers would mean economic and racial integration, which are taboo. Villages' prime purpose is to control zoning, i.e. keep out poor people. Town boards resist pro-growth strategies, meaning no desperately needed apartments or higher density housing (because apartment tenants will "overload the schools"). Transit is a nonstarter and yet people complain about the traffic.
So I have cousins paying $20K+ in property taxes for a 3 bed split. It's absolutely absurd.
To other commentators, can’t upvote this comment enough. This nails so much of it; spent entire time just nodding my head.
The only thing I’ll do is add a few things. I don’t think we realize how much Long Island political culture is driven by actual contempt for New York City. Like we can get into the history of Levittown but post WWII Long Island was created very explicitly as an “escape” from NYC. I think people on here would be surprised to know the almost pride some people have that they live 35 min train ride from Manhattan and haven’t been to NYC in decades. Point being, even though congestion pricing would affect an extremely small number of Long Island residents. The idea that Long Islanders would have to commit even a cent more for the benefit of NYC residents is just catnip for the worst local culture war demagoguery.
“I think people on here would be surprised to know the almost pride some people ha e that they live 35 min train ride from Manhattan and haven’t been to NYC in decades.”
Is this an East Coast thing more broadly? I have met plenty of folks in the Philadelphia and Baltimore suburbs who have the same attitudes towards their metropolitan centers. I cannot for the life of me understand what the source of that almost-pride is.
I wonder how this all would have played out if the Knicks were in the nba finals and New York was just filled with good vibes all around. Probably the same, but kinda funny alternative universe
The Mets winning the World Series in 1969 probably helped John Lindsay, arguably the worst mayor in NYC's modern history, get re elected. Not that Procaccino would have been a great mayor, but it took decades to recover from Lindsay.
Suburban contempt for inner cities is to an extent probably a universal thing. We can get into some of the reasons why (including some of the very real uglier reasons).
However, I have family in NJ and have lived in CT. I can say pretty definitively that an anti-NYC attitude is pervasive in Long Island way beyond what you see even in other NYC suburban counties. Even just going to a deli and waiting for a breakfast sandwich, it's actually kind of amazing how anti-NYC attitudes just start coming up in regular conversations around me.
> Suburban contempt for inner cities is to an extent probably a universal thing.
It doesn't exist where I live (a southeast Asian megalopolis of 13 million), so while it is certainly widespread in the West I probably wouldn't go so far as to say it is universal.
People who live in the inner city here are seen an unfathomably rich while people in the suburbs are most certainly not that.
Compounding that, general infrastructure (roads, markets, etc) means living in the suburbs usually sucks.
We also aren't (yet) anywhere close to Western levels of "my home is my castle" and people are accustomed to being very, extremely social at cafes, restaurants, etc, etc.
That said, we are in the early days of a transition to suburbia as those rich inner city people are aging and going "I can sell our multigenerational family house for enough to buy a villa in the suburbs and have enough money for us and all our children to never work again?"
So it is possible in 10-20 years we will see the emergence of a similar dynamic.
I think this is where the history of post WWII suburban planning in America needs to come in. I should clarify and say suburban contempt for cities is universal across America and not a NYC thing. But yes, I think you're right to correct and say this is uniquely an American thing. In fact, in places like Paris, the suburbs are actually where the tower blocks are located and are often quite a bit poorer than central Paris. The situation in Paris is almost inverted.
But yes American suburban planning was conceived with exclusivity very much in mind. So so much of how suburbs were promoted and still promoted are as an "escape" from the city and yes this probably a very American way of thinking.
I'd guess that three very American factors also played a part.
America is very large, so there's actually a space for suburbs to exist. To take another extreme: having suburbs in Singapore is nonsensical. But lots of other smallish countries have similar problems to a lesser degree I imagine.
America had uniquely well developed transportation infrastructure thanks to the postwar Interstate Highway system that made living 30km away from your work even remotely viable.
America was extraordinary rich so people could actually afford cars. I have a feeling that if I compared car ownership in the US in 1950 to France or Germany or the UK it would be pretty different.
I think, especially with the latter two, it's also why we've seen other countries become more car centric as they've become rich enough to build the infrastructure and for families to afford cars (most people in Europe drive to work, after all).
It's just that due to path dependency different places got locked in at various times. If you visit Australia it doesn't feel substantially different than America, for instance
Even in Japan something like 75% of people have a car, after all.
In NY a big factor IMO is people who were all but forced to leave for economic reasons. In Philly or whatever I can imagine someone chilling in the suburbs, thinking the city is gross (and/or containing black people), but in NY it’s “oh yeah, you’re gonna price me out? Well all you fools paying $2m for a house in Queens or $3m for a condo in Manhattan are the real suckers! You walk outside and you see homeless people! Garbage everywhere! Filth! Well, I don’t, I haven’t been to the city more than 3 times since I moved here. I see it on the NY Post website. Anyone who stays there for those prices is just out of their minds! I’m not angry at all! I’m just completely baffled by how any human being unless they’re an IDIOT LIBERAL would be willing to stay in the city and pay those taxes to be surrounded by FILTH and HOMELESS PEOPLE and GARBAGE and CRIME and CRIMINALS! I’M NOT MAD!”
I’ll never forget, I went to a friend’s wedding and got stuck talking to this boomer who moved to Florida from NYC 30 years before. He spent the whole time railing about crime and filth in Brooklyn! When I told him that Downtown Brooklyn had completely transformed and that townhouses there were going for several million (not that I could afford one to be clear) I could see him visibly hurt.
It's got to be just racist Trump people. I grew up in Long Island and we went to the city all the time It was one of the entire benefits of being in Long Island. Why the hell are you paying so much money to be near one of the biggest cities in the world if you don't ever want to go near it?
We would go to Broadway shows, sports events, concerts, Just meet up with people around the state for dinner and drinks, etc
It's definitely partly that. I can say with confidence that Long Island Trump fans would a 1 seed in an NCAA tourney style bracket of most obnoxious Trump fans.
But I'll note again that my district is D+10 and is now represented by a Republican. The (hilarious) George Santos debacle sort of overshadowed how absurd the Democratic loss was for my House district. This is why Matt was being sympathetic to Hochul; my district should not be a GOP House district given demographics.
Which gets to your second point. There are plenty of people like me who commute to work and yes events in Manhattan. In fact, walking distance to the train is right near the top of the list of reasons my wife and I bought the house where we did. Plenty of people do actual use the train and love going to the city. Nassau and Suffolk County have just under 3 million people (should have more like 4 million if zoning wasn't so restrictive. The lack of any apartments near a number of LIRR stations is absolutely shameful). But this is where I push back against Matt. I think Matt (and Hochul) is wildly overestimating the number of people flipping their votes one way or another in November over this. If anything, it's going to lead to people like me wanting to primary Hochul in 2026.
When I was born, my folks lived in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn; we moved out to LI when I was 9 and I loved the space. When the wearher got warm, you could find half of my high school's Senior class hanging out at Jones Beach.
On weekends, I'd take the train into Manhattan and go to the museums. It was like living near the world's greatest theme park!
When I was a little older, however -- and wanted to stay out late in the City -- I'd go by car. ;-)
Baltimore and Philly are kind of famously unpleasant by reputation. Democrats love The Wire, and one clear takeaway from that show is “do not live in or near Baltimore if you have alternatives, it’s terrible.”
As a young person in the eastern corridor, who frequently sees many young people traveling to different cities in the corridor to live. Philly is viewed as dramatically more attractive than Baltimore.
Philly has improved a lot in the past decade or so, but I can say, growing up near there, it did/does have a bad reputation. High crime, a weirdly high amount of litter, and the job centers mostly being located in the inner suburbs instead of the CBD, have all contributed to the city's reputation as "Filthadelphia".
The city has improved quite a bit. It's one of the few big East Coast cities where you can build things. The city is investing in housing. Crime spiked, but is coming down. Even the litter is less bad now.
Have a good friend who lives in the Philly suburbs and I actually go to Philly a lot for work; can vouch for this. Don't think people realize that Vanguard is located kind of far out in the Philly suburbs near the "main line" (depending how you want to define "main line" neighborhoods).
But to your point, the transformation of places like "Fishtown" and Manayunk (not strictly Philadelphia, but very inner ring suburb for sure) is very real and speaks to how much Phiilly has gotten better over last 30 years.
But yeah crime is strikingly high given the median income, demographics and physical location. Like it really does seem like there is some Philadelphia specific reasons crime is higher than it should be and it's a real problem.
As someone who moved back to Philly in 2022 after several years in DC, I'm not sure the litter got any less bad. BUT we're early into a huge 13-wk citywide cleanup that was one of Mayor Parker's big initiatives during the campaign, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing what it looks like when they hit the bulk of Center City.
I'm one of these people who are almost-prideful about not visiting Philly, except I live about 6 hours away. (Meaning I think it does have a crummy reputation).
I used to work for a firm whose corporate was in the suburbs. I enjoyed my visits in-town. Big, interesting, walkable urban core with a lot of nice architecture and a great food scene.
I respectfully disagree re Philly but readily concede that I’d 100% need polling data to back that up with anything more than bar argument gut feeling and my own experiences with the city.
I’m not saying Philly is perfect, but Baltimore is another level. I was recently driving through a bad part of Baltimore and I couldn’t help thinking that I wouldn’t mind being in an armored vehicle. I’ve never felt that in Philly (although I can’t claim to have been in all of Philly’s sketchy areas).
It's definitely not an East Coast thing. Detroit is the same way, at least for certain species of Oakland County and Macomb County suburbanite. (I grew up in Oakland County.) It was seen as either a mark of pride that you didn't go into the city or (more commonly) a mark of weirdness that you would ever go at all, akin to going to, like, Kazakhstan ("you went to Detroit? Why would you do that?"). (Note: For our purposes, crossing the city on the way to the airport did not count so long as you stayed on the freeway.) It's changed a bit more recently, but that was how things were for a long time.
I'll say just from my own experiences that in makes way less sense to feel this way about NYC vs. Detroit. A lot of people's mental image of NYC was formed in the late 70s when NYC really was in bad shape; movies like "Taxi Driver" and "Death Wish". I would bet that NYC was probably a lot shabbier in the late 70s than Detroit.
Given the extent of urban decay in Detroit that continued into the 80s, 90s and 2000s I do at least have some sympathy for people living Oakland county to ask why you would be going into Detroit. NYC very very famously had quite the rebound and drop in crime. It's also what got me so exasperated in 2022 when crime rose in NYC. Yes there were far left commentators with lots of Twitter followers who probably downplayed this crime rise way too much. But when people like the mayor of NYC said crime had never been worse in all his years, this was truly insulting to my intelligence.
But kind of more tragically, I know people who are not particularly anti-NYC and are not at all big Fox watchers or New York Post readers who have real hesitancy about going into NYC even now because of how much coverage there was in 2022 about NYC becoming out of control.
I attended a PA House of Representatives committee hearing a couple years ago where at the end of the hearing the Republican chair (who was admittedly from the other side of the state) said “wow, I’ve never been to Philadelphia and now I’m never going.” Which is a crazy thing to say about the economic engine of the state you are a government leader in.
Not sure if it's pride, but my parents are a 30 minute train ride from Philly and never go. I've lived here almost a month and still no visit from them lol
As someone who knows more than 0 Long Islanders, particularly any over 40: trust me I know. 10x this if the Long Islander in question is a nurse, teacher, or cop working for the city. And while I think the attitude is unhealthy and immature and kind of pathetic, I understand where it comes from.
A lot of those teachers likely commute from the suburbs by car. The "hilarious" part is most of these teachers teach at schools unaffected by the congestion pricing plan!. It's only for commuters going below 59th street in Manhattan. The vast majority of NYC public schools are located above 59th street and in the outer boroughs. It's insane.
Also, NAACP coming out against is kind of shameful to me. Again, this is part of the political pressure that Hochul can't ignore given demographics. But another case (I suspect) where particular high up officials in NAACP NYC chapters may drive to their job and are letting their personal annoyance guide what is a dumb stance.
Hot Take: Despite its long, proud history and the liberal pretenses of its contemporary rhetoric, the NAACP has mostly devolved into one of the last redoubts of conservatism and reactionism within the Democratic party. It basically serves to represent the interests of the right wing of the elder Black middle class.
In my city, the local chapter spends all their time basically as foot soldiers for harrassing the local Republicans (who play their part by mostly earning it!) and keeping them in their place of submission to the reigning Democratic machine.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of actual people of color here are suffering from a deep housing crisis and the chapter hasn't lifted a single finger.
But they don’t, though? Why would anyone, let alone people who take the LIRR, let alone people defined bu their contempt for NYC, drive into Lower Manhattan if they had alternatives? What dog do Long Islanders even have in this fight? Driving into downtown Manhattan routinely from LI may not quite be Not A Thing, but it’s pretty close.
One of the things that is true about LI is that it is basically totally cut off from the rest of the country by the location of NYC--which is a traffic nightmare 24 hours a day and takes an hour to traverse no matter what. In NJ or Westchester you can just drive the opposite direction from the city and end up in plenty of places that you might want to be. But Long Islanders are trapped, which has (IMO) driven them all insane--I'm not clear on the mechanism for this, maybe if they living in a different suburb they are the people who would have moved further out into the exurbs by now but they can't because there are no exurbs? It's a weird culture.
Yes, we sometimes say that no one goes in and no one goes out of long Island. When we plan statewide conferences, it is difficult to get long Islanders to attend, but when we hold one on Long Island, it is even harder to get anyone from other parts of the state to go. (I am speaking on Long Island in the fall and already dreading getting there.)
"One of the things that is true about LI is that it is basically totally cut off from the rest of the country by the location of NYC--which is a traffic nightmare 24 hours a day and takes an hour to traverse no matter what."
If you're trying to exit LI for the rest of the country, you avoid Manhattan for the traffic anyways. I don't think the Verrazzano Narrows bridge (I-278) or the Cross-Bronx Expressway (I-95) were included in the congestion pricing, so I don't understand the opposition.
EDIT: Alexis (nearby) has the answer: all the non-Manhattan bridges are tolled.
It didn't include the FDR either! You could cross the Brooklyn Bridge and drive up the East Side without paying the toll as long as your destination wasn't in Manhattan. But no one actually knows or cares what the rules are, it's all just vibes until it goes into effect and people try it out.
All those roads are heavily congested now. Imagine the traffic when they get the additional slice of traffic trying to avoid the congestion toll. It would screw up everyone's travel whether they are going to Manhattan or not. There was a brief flap in the environmental review process when the models revealed a massive increase in traffic and air pollution on the Cross-Bronx expressway (one of the worst highways in the nation). This is going to happen all over.
Not really. There is a ferry from Port Jeff to Bridgeport but it's expensive. Robert Moses' original plan was to have 135 Continue to oyster bay and then a bridge linking it to 287 at Rye, but the rich people blocked that. And even if a ferry were feasible, residents would block any traffic increase leading to the ferry.
Trust me. They do. And if they don’t, they want to be able to. It’s principle. Long islanders resent how much it costs to drive off the island. Congestion pricing cuts off the only toll free route.
I feel like if you can afford to live on Long Island and you’re adding 40 minutes to your commute to avoid a $6.50 toll on the Throg’s Neck or whatever you’re Doing It Wrong.
Look at how much effort people put in to avoid taxes or how many business try to lower their tax bill and end up making poor business decisions as a result. For example, moving to a location that actually doesn't make much business sense long term even if short term you're lowering tax bill.
Point being, I feel like there is some PH.D paper to be written about how any government fee, whether taxes or tolls or..a fee has a very particular effect on personal behavior. The amount of time and effort to avoid small taxes I feel like very often is so not worth it as you allude to. And yet it seems to a very common American phenomenon. I feel like there is a very particular American sensibility that finding a way of avoiding a tax or a fee is like some weird psychological victory that influence so much behavior. Even if the actual remunerative victory is often not worth it.
Is there a way to get from west of the Hudson to Long Island without a toll? I guess you could drive up to the Bear Mountain Bridge, then take the Taconic south, then take a non-Henry Hudson bridge into Manhattan, then take the 59th St. Bridge into Queens? At a certain point it gets ridiculous. There are a lot of tolls in NY.
Fear of the train and fear of the subway. It’s more than that, but it’s a big one.
I noted back in November, 2022 that every single day and I mean every single day, the New York Post had a blaring headline about crime on the subway being out of control. So you say to yourself, well how many people read the Post who are swing voters? Not many. But those news papers are the first thing you see at any 7/11, any bodega, any cvs and any convenience store. Which is where the Post’s famous giant headlines are so important. Everyone just living their daily lives sees those headlines.
To back up with data. A datapoint I’ve brought up before. There is one PA district in 2022 that shifted right from 2020 to 2022. It’s the one district in PA located in the NYC media market. Just a striking natural experiment in the power of unearned media. And one of the datapoints as to why I am so furious that leadership of the Times has put its thumb on the scale against Biden at apparent personal pique that Biden won’t do an interview. I think we really underrate the second and third order effects of news coverage beyond the direct effect of people actually watching a tv news show or reading an article.
"I am so furious that leadership of the Times has put its thumb on the scale against Biden at apparent personal pique that Biden won’t do an interview."
I keep seeing this repeated, but I don't understand why Biden won't just do the interview?
Everyone acknowledges that the NYT is the premier newspaper in the US, and is one of the most important journalist outlets in the country. 99.999% of every other Democratic politician in the country would love to get a sit down interview with the NYT - but while Biden will go on Howard Stern, he won't do a sit down with the NYT? You can be outraged by the NYT's leadership, but shouldn't you be at least a bit outraged by Biden being so foolish?
(Oops hit enter) -- no amount of data from me can convince him, or the other long islanders I know. THIS is why bail reform failed. It wasn't progressives. There may have been some tweaks needed, but reform worked in NJ. In New York, the PBA and SBA came out swinging and the Post was right there to back them up. Dermot Shea even admitted to the legislature that bail reform hasn't caused a crime wave. I have my own gripes with DSA and Justice Dems, but contrary to the radical centrist takes they're not always wrong.
You're fooling yourself if you think it's all media. Crime is not even the most important thing. The subway is just slow. I live in New York City itself, and it takes more than an hour to get to and from the theatre district from where I live, including a bus transfer, and probably 20 minutes more late at night when the buses run infrequently. I'm getting on in years, and I'm not going to do that trip after getting out of theatre at 10:30pm. I just won't go. Many people like me will do the same, and the impact will be devastating on the cultural life of the city, which relies on people like me to pay the bills so they can create edgy art.
1) no one in Long Island wants to admit to themselves that they’re not a New Yorker anymore. Even if they’ve gotten lazy and only show up to a Manhattan restaurant twice a year, they want to tell themselves that any day now they’re going to get back into things and go out more, etc. The congestion fee is too on the nose in that regard (of course these people have convinced themselves that only lower Manhattan is “The City”, and really have no reason to be offended more than someone like me living in Brooklyn - but this whole train of thought is irrational enough already.)
2) the elephant in the room is cops and nurse and teachers and state bureaucrats who live in the suburbs and commute to the city. I don’t think many cops at all actually live in NYC. (Note that Eric Adams was living in NJ.) These people get all manner of parking carveouts too, ranging from legal but questionable (dedicated signed sidewalk parking for teachers in front of schools) to blatantly illegal (cops who stick a placard in their windshield and park on the sidewalk itself, taking up the entire block.) Congestion fee will hit them directly - in fact they may be the primary group it extracts revenue from. I don’t know the numbers for certain, but based on the lack of carveouts for them, I lean towards that guess.
It may be worth just a thought that many of the people who live on Long Island are the children and grandchildren of people who were driven out of a collapsing New York City in the 1970's, for which (with considerable justification) they blame on urban liberal politicians. It should not surprise anyone that they don't want to see that happen to them a second time, and the failure to see that coming is simply political malpractice. That they don't like the soup is the fault of those who cooked it.
My wife is fond of using the phrase Long Island has "too much government". But what she means is exactly this; there's just too many districts, municipalities etc. You have maps of school districts, but I can't tell you how much these leads to way too many cops. I know Matt is fond of noting that more cops on the street really is probably a key to keeping crime under control; a general principle I can agree with. But Long Island is the place where you can see how like anything else this can go too far.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out a very underrated key to Long Island that my wife will emphasize. So, so much of development in Long Island is centered around whether or town has a sewer system or if a sewer system can be implemented.
My hometown of STL has this same problem. 100 municipalities in a county that refuses to merge back with the city. Constantly cannibalizing each other.
Just spent two years in STL recently (came from and returned to NYC with my partner, who is from Webster) and man, the differences in public services, and a million other things, between where we lived—in Shaw, by the Botanical Gardens—and her mom’s neighborhood in Webster were wild. We had multiple snowstorms followed by deep, sub-0°F freezes, and the City simply did not plow secondary residential streets (y’know, the ones people live on), so they turned to skating rinks *fast*. Meanwhile back in Webster—in fact, noticeably on I-44 as soon as you cross the City/County border—the roads were pristine by comparison, even on little cul-de-sacs like her mom lives on. And at the same time as *that*, the roads in, say, U City or a similar suburb, were somewhere in between. And not just the roads: every aspect of life varied in quality based on what patch of jurisdiction it took place on, in a more noticeable way than I’ve experienced elsewhere.
Now, though, the thing I’ve become fascinated with in STL is the extent to which St. Charles is cannibalizing St. Louis County. Covid just absolutely murdered downtown STL, and it’s kind of an open question (I think?) how much it will ever come back from that hit—which then raises the question of whether it really matters that living in St. Charles County means you’re halfway to the friggin’ boonies, because what are you going to the City for anyway? Even things like hospitals and so on are being built/have long existed out in West County, so it just looks kinda grim for the City of St. Louis, especially when you consider that unlike NYC, it really *does* have a massive crime problem. I loved a lot of things about Shaw—especially Tower Grove Park, which I still miss even though I live in a part of Queens with a nice park in it—but I’d be hesitant to plunk down money on a house there, because even a nice neighborhood like that had real crime problems (property crime and some amount of violent crime, though the latter was more concentrated south of the park).
Anyway, not to bang on endlessly here but man, I became very very fond of the people of St. Louis, and it bothers me that they’re having to sit there with that level of dysfunction. I sincerely hope, and on good days believe, that there’ll be a big post-Covid comeback—maybe not downtown, but other parts of the City are doing better already and will continue to improve. Downtown does seem like a problem, though.
Matt wrote a post a while back making the argument that the cities that will struggle most post Covid would be Midwest cities that were already in decline. Reason being is commercial office rents will likely decline everywhere as some aspect of WFH will be permanent. Long term this could be a boon for places like NYC as more firms will be able to locate to places like Midtown Manhattan or FiDi.
But precisely because rents will likely drop, it means a lot of cities with already low rents may lose a lot of office tenants and as result exacerbate an already steady decline. Reality is a lot companies have “back office” jobs in cities away from “superstar” cities precisely because these jobs are not worth the high rent. But if rents drop then the reason to locate certain “back office” jobs in smaller cities kind of disappear.
I think unfortunately for Matt, he used this as a jumping off point to title a post “Chicago is doomed” and his message got lost. I suspect because Chicago is the 3rd biggest city still (though Houston seems poised to overtake it) and Chicago has more cultural cache than any other midwestern city, he focused his argument on Chicago. For a variety of reasons I think focusing on Chicago was a mistake (I feel like Matt underestimates how rich Chicago really is. Take a look its GDP compared to other cities). But is underlying argument I thought had merit and I suspect your description of St. Louis makes for a much more compelling example of Matt’s point (see also a good WSJ article about office space vacancies in St. Louis).
Yeah, I hate having to agree, but I always thought Matt's Chicago take was more apt for STL, too.
However, I think a lot still hinges on both the *differential* rates of rent drops and the current absolute levels. STL is already at a really low level, which still makes it a good "back office" city. Right now, though, the county is having a construction boom, which will KEEP the rents ever lower, even as other cities are struggling to keep up and seeing their rents rise.
The biggest contradiction right now is that the city itself still has PLENTY of cultural cachet, but the county is where the stability is and where the construction is happening. Conversely, the county is a cultural hellhole, while the city is basically deserted and dangerous.
So, there's no real reason BESIDES cheapness for an outside company to relocate into STL county. And no company wants to locate to the city.
What the county needs is an actual industry to attract companies. And right now, the fastest-growing industry is the construction business itself! But that's the ONLY one, really. STL basically has JUST THIS ONE SHOT to take advantage of the local and national construction booms and try to turn that into an actual engine that will rescue them from the "doom". And the only thing really going for them right now is that the county has this oddly libertarian bent that is somehow keeping the NIMBYs *juuuuuuust* enough at bay that MAYBE they could pull off a hard pivot to some Strong Towns action and make it all work out.
But that's a 1-in-1000 shot. I'm not holding my breath.
My BFF back home works for one of the big contractors that's putting up 5-over-1's, and he says STL has among the highest construction rates of those in the country. It's also the HQ for his company, which is THE largest in the country at like 20% of the 5-over-1 market.
I think *that* is the sliver of hope to hang our (hard!) hats on here. STL could essentially build itself out of a housing crisis that was never all that deep there to begin with, densifying its suburbs into prosperity, and then eventually that prosperity would bleed back into the city.
And what I mean by that last bit is, if you get enough growth out in the county, eventually all those people get sick of having a handful of relatively nice things so far away in the city. At that point, they face a choice: either (A) pour county resources back into the city, or (B) cannibalize the city and start building big attractions and shit in the county.
I think that (B) is probably more likely for people to WANT to do, but also extremely difficult to actually do -- since the county will already be densified-up and have a lot of space that people won't want to ruin for things like a new honkin stadium -- so what ends up happening is that the county just muddles through (A): they exert a crap-ton of pressure on the city to clean up the touristy areas first, then once the city proves that it can do that, they tentatively start putting more county resources into expanding those "green zones" (so to speak).
Yep. I grew up in Huntington. No sewers in most of the town. And I’m convinced that the continued refusal to have them is about preventing any development. It’s a town of over 200K, for gods sake.
My city's NIMBYs are currently obsessed with blaming recent development for the fact that our treatment plant occasionally gets overwhelmed by storm surges. Nevermind that we're barely at 10% capacity most of the rest of the time, it's definitely all the durned apartments' fault.
Stormwater surges are a real issue in a lot of areas right now and they create infrastructure challenges and do quite a bit of ecological damage. Typically this isn't as simple as "we built too many apartments and now have stormwater surges so we should stop building apartments," but I think YIMBY activists should be prepared to address this.
As someone who is YIMBY because of the need for more affordable housing and someone who does a lot of enviornmental volunteer work that is directly impacted by stormwater surges, I think that there are a lot of solutions to this that don't require reducing density.
For the most part, increased storm water surges are being caused by two different problems interacting. First, climate change has frequently led to weather pattern changes where areas get more extreme weather events with fast heavy rain fall and drought rather than more frequent smaller rain storm that most systems were set up to handle. Second, there really are issues in many areas with too much of the area being made up of impervious surfaces that rain runs off of rather than soaking into the ground.
The results of this can be manifold. Groundwater supplies require recharging from rainfall and surface water that has time to soak in and these run off events led to reduced groundwater supplies that are problematic for longterm water supply. These surges often also dump chemicals in to surface water like lake and streams and will wash away stream beds in ways that can reduce wildlife survival, especially fish stocks. (In Seattle this is a huge challenge for Salmon recovery which is where I interact with it.) These rushes of water often also damage water systems and even surface infrastructure.
On one level, most multifamily building lots have a large percentage of impervious surfaces than your typical single family home. However, the largest percentage of impervious surface on almost any residential lot is going to be the roof of the primary dwelling and apartment dwellers typically have less roof per person than your average single family home so blaming them is a bit irrational unless you just want to move problematic storm surges farther out into the suburbs.
Apartment buildings can also do a lot of low cost things to reduce their impact. For example, adding a cistern to a building that collects rainwater during storms and the releases it slowing through drip houses to water landscaping typically is going to cost less than 10K and will likely pay for itself over the long run in water bill savings. A single family home could do something similar with a cistern but it would cost the same amount or use rain barrels which are less expensive but also less effective because of reduced volume. Building can also landscape with rain gardens and add green roofs which are are not always as easy to single family homes to incorporate. New buildings can also pave areas around the building with more pervious materials like pavers with gravel in between or pervious asphalt. This doesn't actually cost significantly more and it is more cost effective to put this in during initial construction that to have a bunch of individual dryways at single family homes pulled up and replaced.
As a general rule, a new multifamily building with reasonable low cost runoff mitigation is going to be better for the stormwater situation that infill on lots or expansion of single family home areas. If there is concern that these low cost mitigation efforts are going to curtail development, it could be that these are paid for with community grants given that it probably the best bang for your buck to do this with new large construction. Personally, I don't get the sense that these mitigation requirements actually do curtail development. Having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on building an underground parking garage or losing living space to having to have two exit hallway systems are huge ticket items but most folks getting ready to put up a few million to build a multifamily unit probably aren't going to be deterred by having to spend $10K on water mitigation as part of the construction, especially since these also reduce water intrusion issues for the building itself and save on water bills for the groundskeeping.
I think folks with legit storm water concerns should have those concerns addressed with regard to new construction but should also have their focus redirected at changing the way they and their fellow single family home neighbors are managing their storm water. Unless they all have installed at least rain barrels for all downspouts they really need to shut the fuck up about what anyone else is doing particularly folks looking to build more housing.
Even if they do have rain barrels, there are tons of things they could be doing with their landscaping decision for themselves and with their neighbors that are more useful that NIMBY input at meetings.
If they are super concerned they could nerd out like me and join the volunteer core of the city or state department of wildlife and fisheries and spend their weekends setting up "energy disruptors" along paths to water systems and during beaver habitat restoration work in green spaces.
In the long run, for most places in North America outside of extreme deserts, reintroducing beavers and allowing them to recreate the natural water systems that captured storm surges and redirect them to ground water is the most impactful thing they could be encouraging their communities to do and hanging out with Beavers is a way more satisfying way to spend your evening that bitching at community meetings.
Thanks for the cistern idea! I'm going to put that in the ears of the local chattering class, not that they listen to me anyways. It's probably the best solution for our town, since it'd be low-cost and they're currently casting about for ways to mitigate surges.
It's striking to me the difference between town center of Huntington and Huntington Station. Love the town center of Huntington; awesome place for restaurants. But that's what Huntington Station should look like. The lack of apartments and small business around Huntington Station is astonishing; like they exist but nowhere near the numbers they should. Huntington station should look like Huntington town center.
I remember this. It was batshit insane. And people refuse to believe they're pricing their own kids off the island. The history of Huntington forcing all rentals into Huntington station is long and gross, and so is how people react to the area.
Yeah that difference is quite shocking, as a Queens resident who visits Huntington to see friends who live there. They live about halfway between the two, walking distance to the train and to Huntington town center, and yeah, you’re absolutely right. I’m not actually sure which hamlet they live in, but they’re in an apartment, so maybe HS? I dunno, it’s a perfectly pleasant spot, and Huntington is easily one of the nicest towns I’ve been to on LI, but yeah, the anti-apartment sentiment out there causes crazy distortions. I really don’t relate to it, but your and others’ various comments in this thread do an excellent job of outlining the historical and sociological motivations behind it.
Some assemblyman-type of local political figure had a booth at a festival a while back, and I tried to tactfully say “hey, why don’t we build more housing on Long Island?” He brought up the sewer/septic issue, which honestly I had never heard of or considered before in other places I’ve lived. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that so much of LI is “old suburbia” that dates back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, while other places I’ve lived (Northern Virginia, North Carolina) have boomed and developed more recently and don’t have the same infrastructure issues.
I live in NC in a county with a huge school system spread across a large land area. This leads to a different set of logistical challenges (school bus rides to magnet schools - generally used for voluntary integration - can be over an hour, weather events in one part of the county close all the schools even when some are not affected, transportation is inefficient and budget is too high, too few bus drivers to meet demand), but the upside is we don't have the crazy house price inflation related to being in the one tiny district with a good school (we do have some "better" schools with houses that cost somewhat more than others). People who come here from up north want to replicate their many small township/village districts to solve our big-county problem. I think that would be disastrous. However, we could probably stand to be two districts for practical reasons, but the political fight over how that would be allocated would be epic.
Nope, the other huge county. And I grew up in Florida in another such county. Same issue. I still think it's better than the micro school districts of the NE, but that's only by reputation.
I live in Pennsylvania now and while our districts are dumb, they got nothing on Long Island. At least most Pennsylvania districts follow borough or township boundaries. On Long Island someone just drew a line through a potato field. I know some cases where the boundary literally goes through people’s houses. Back in the day the only way to know where the line was was to buy a Hagstrom map. There are actually people who get to decide which district to attend because their property straddles the line.
But you can definitely see it in house prices. I'd argue (and curious if Alexis agrees), the most infamous town boundary in Long Island is the one separating the "town" of Hempstead with the "village" of Garden City*. There is absolutely a traffic light on Clinton Street that might be best visual represenation of "other side of the tracks" I've ever seen; one side houses going for north of $1MM minimum (likely more), other side edge of the poorest neighborhoods in Nassau County.
My point being, this "town" of Hempstead has houses way way way more expensive than other Hempstead houses because technically they are located in the Garden City school district. It's really stunning to witness in front of you the change from one street to the next.
* So the "town" of Hempstead also refers to an amalgamation of towns that total over 750,000 people in population and makes in the largest "town" in America. Another example of the absurdity of government functions in Long Island.
Towns on Long Island are more equivalent to midwestern townships. In New York State, every place not in an incorporated city is in a town. The state would be well served by city town amalgamation and mergers imo.
I don’t know if I have them ranked, but if I did, that boundary would be up near the top. Incredibly stark racial and economic segregation. Pretty sure Garden City code enforcement still harass Black people too.
This also reminded me of way back in the day when Bill O'Reilly described himself as being from Levittown, while others said he was really from Westbury, as I see those towns just due east.
Re: “There are **127** school districts for Nassau and Suffolk counties, population 2.6M (compare to ONE school district for Fairfax County, VA, population 1.13M.)”
Economic research does *not* support the idea that large school districts are more efficient.
If you dig in to the research on district size vs. costs per student, what you generally see is that after adjusting for a bunch of demographic and geographic factors, there’s a U-shaped cost curve in which both tiny and large districts cost more per student and there’s an efficiency “sweet spot” in the middle.
But the “sweet spot” is at a much smaller point than you might think!
A different study on PA says: “Findings from this study suggest the optimal school district size in Pennsylvania is between 6000 and 7000 students” https://www.jstor.org/stable/48642625
Each study or meta-analysis out there has slightly different numbers, but all of them are on this magnitude of smallness.
Districts like Fairfax County (or NYC!) almost certainly suffer from significant diseconomies of scale. For Long Island, there absolutely may be some tiny districts that would see cost benefits from consolidation, but many are likely just fine and would become more inefficient if merged. Caution is needed with this stuff. Also, a lot of efficiency gains can be gotten through shared-services agreements rather than needing full consolidation.
Point two: Long Island has incredibly high levels of residential and educational segregation, and the small district boundaries mean districts "tip" and go into white flight very quickly. In my opinion, district mergers are needed to smooth this out. You have districts that are 90% Black and Latino across the street from ones that are 90% white/asian. Of course, racial equity is exactly why many long islanders do not want mergers. "Local control" is the euphemism for racial control.
I was just talking about economic efficiency. I totally agree with you that there are other relevant things to consider too, and that residential segregation (and school segregation) is a problem!
I don’t think county level districts would be ideal — I’m using them as a contrast. But 127 is really too high. I’m a little skeptical of those numbers to be honest, simply from figuring out how few students you’d have in the high school with a student population of 2,000. I live in one of the largest districts in PA and we still have only about 10,000 students — and one of the lowest per student expenditures in the state. From experience I can tell you that you start having issues with special education when you get small, too.
Yes, but this might reflect affluence. You need to get really detailed with data to try to distill the effect of the schools themselves from advantages conferred by intake. In recent years FCPS is considered to be outperforming MCPS for various reasons. I don't have data (or expertise) to discuss economic efficiency. I will say that a good friend of mine moved from Cobb County (GA) -- considered one of the best districts in GA, and quite affluent -- to Fairfax... and soon learned that Cobb had managed to let her kid get to 7th grade with undiagnosed dyslexia. FCPS figured it out within the year, and during the pandemic at that. But when you get into special education, everything changes. I will say that FCPS is able to offer a spectrum of programs I could only dream about.
I don't think hyper local government is the problem so much as *redundant* local government.
I live in Connecticut, where we also have hyper local government in the form of the Town. But it's just one, simple town government. There's no county gov, separate "village," etc. I think it is ideal. Town level is the perfect size government to accomplish meaningful goods like public safety, parks, and schools but still small enough for people to feel like they have a real voice and stake for their money. We pay 10k a year in Newtown on a 4brdroom colonial. I think it's worth it - and we send our kids to private school. I don't mind paying taxes to the public schools because these are my neighbors, I know the schools are well run, and the quality of the public schools brings us all up.
I would absolutely NOT be ok with paying taxes like that to a consolidated "Fairfield County" government where the money got sucked up by a bunch of crooks and patronage jobs in Bridgeport and where my vote and voice matters much less.
I can see the appeal of consolidating hyper local government, but I think one of the reasons New England has so much more buy in compared to the South when it comes to public services is the town system (combined with a history of relative racial homogeneity) facilitates much more trust in local government than a large county (with high levels of racial diversity). It's a lot easier to convince people to give money to government officials they personally know and socialize with and have commonalities with than to get people to hand over money and power to a distant bureaucracy whose community loyalties might be less certain.
And yes, this has a racial / socio economic element to it. I'm not saying that racial aspect is good or bad, just saying it is what it is, and all these Good White New England Liberals take for granted that they would hold the same politics even if they didn't live in very white states with folksy, responsive local governments.
"On Long Island, you have the county, the city or town, and in many cases the incorporated village, and then special taxation districts on top, some of which primarily exist to provide patronage jobs."
I’m pretty pro decent amount of taxes to pay for more services; trains, good schools and yes even pensions.
But the poster actually compliments Matt’s main point; it’s really hard to defend high taxes when it’s going to places I can’t even see and to the commentator’s point, going to fix the mistakes of decades of GOP misgovernance.
Can’t emphasize this enough; on Presidential level, Long Island has become swingy and may now lean a bit left. But locally GOP still has way more power and control. We associate machine politics with Democratic Party given history of Chicago and NYC; but it’s actually a pretty universal phenomenon across both parties.
Indeed, and although people get annoyed whenever I bring this up, I think that the poster also unwittingly highlights one of the arguments Strong Towns makes about the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme.
Those suburbs have high taxes because they're among the most mature in the country, and they were built on debt without a realistic model for paying for ongoing maintenance. This reality gets hidden from them because the whole thing collapses if people actually understand that their white picket fences are financially unsustainable. It's easier to let them believe that their huge tax bills are from some distant, unaccountable, alien government that is robbing them.
Is the issue locally that no one pays attention to local elections? Traditionally “the taxes are too damn high!” is a popular pitch, and on Long Island / Westchester it seems like it’s probably *right* as a matter of substance. Surely not everyone in town can be o the county payroll taking in each others’ laundry, right?
So politicians talk about lower taxes but don’t do it. The biggest segment of taxes is the school tax. You can vote the budget down and sometimes that happens. But then the state law kicks in. You get the mandated austerity budget (which might still have a tax increase, because the contracts don’t change). Then everyone screams about no sports and limited busing and they put the budget up for a revote and it usually passes.
IMO it's mostly actually the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme at work.
And before you dismiss me, consider this: We KNOW that the homevoters who hate the taxes are the ones who are the MOST overrepresented in the local elections!
So, WHY in the WORLD would these governments continue doing the ONE thing they are the MOST painfully aware that their MOST active constituents hate the MOST?
[Addendum: I mean, we both know that municipal government is fundamentally broken, but we're talking about the LEAST broken part here! It just doesn't make sense for the least broken part to have the most glaringly obvious contradiction -- it'd be like seeing a shitty McDonald's run by an absolute tyrant of a manager, except none of the employees were afraid of him. Sure, it's a shitty McDonald's, so everything in it is shitty to SOME extent, but there's still just GOT to be a reason why no one's afraid of the big asshole manager, because employees at every OTHER company in the world are ALWAYS afraid of asshole managers.]
The only explanation that makes sense is "because they know they HAVE to do it anyways". The SGPS means they have no other choice than to stick their constituents with a huge tax bill. But it also means they're MAXIMALLY incentivized to obfuscate the true reasons for the huge tax bill; if they admit that it's the SGPS, well, their constituents don't want to hear that because they paid for *suburban* housing. It's easier to blame some distant government and generalized "waste".
I don't think this entirely explains the school tax problem, though. The increases in costs here are much easier to analyze. And on Long Island, reason #1 is that teachers are very well paid, with average salaries in many districts in six figures. Also, NYSTRS is fully funded, unlike some states with unfunded pension liabilities, though the most recent class (youngest teachers) got screwed by the formula. You also have constantly increasing healthcare costs.
The salaries, pension, and healthcare costs are ultimately driven by NIMBYism. If you don't build enough housing, teachers' and healthcare workers' costs go up.
Very locally, if you have moved there for the schools you are probably not trying to cut the school budget. Your village budget is probably pretty small in comparison, and of course you want some cops, garbage collection, etc.
As you get up to the county and state level, the party allegiance kicks in. Heck, the GOP voters are sometimes discouraged just because they know they have such an uphill battle in NY.
I know more than one person who worked out that it would be cheaper to pay income tax in Queens than property taxes in Nassau. All depends on your income bracket and house, of course.
To be fair this makes Westchester and Nassau county tax rates even more insane. I want to basically shake whoever is in charge of setting them by the lapels and just shout repeatedly “Selection Effects Are Doing All the Work! You Don’t Need High Taxes!”
I’m pretty sure that housing prices alone + higher minimum lot size and lower density is doing all the work. A 2% property tax is insane but you’re not going to lose selection effect benefit by catering to nine hunred fifty thousand-aires instead of just millionaires.
bit of a tangent, but how magical are the selection effects versus "this is how the selection effects operate"?
Like obviously there is a benefit to getting my kid into a school that is very safe and has plenty of AP classes and lots of other smart peers for them to engage with. I don't believe you can just say it's irrelevant where my kid goes to school.
It’s pretty irrelevant where your kid goes to school as long as they are with peers with parents who care.
I bet you Yung Wing school in Chinatown, with 51% low income student body and a 9/10 rating doesn’t do much in the way of special resources compared to any average New York City public school.
You should definitely not consider the Fairfax county system to be good. It's insane that an entire giant county of over a million people are in one school system and the entire school system shuts down because one random kid on a farm can't access the bus that day.
It seems good everyone is in the school system together. The saner thing is to not do snow days for everyone just because a single rural resident can’t get to school that day.
Nelson Rockefeller and George Pataki were the biggest spending governors of my lifetime. And while I know that people in LI love to bash the MTA, the only reason it exists at all is that Nelson Rockefeller needed a vehicle to fix the then notoriously unreliable Long Island Rail Road - and he did, using toll revenue from NYC.
New York City is one school district for a population of over eight million. One high school in Brooklyn has six thousand students. There are actual economies of scale in running larger schools and larger school districts. We also aren't as allergic to development here in NYC. As a result, property taxes for homeowners in NYC (I am one of them) are much lower than in the suburbs.
"New York City is one school district for a population of over eight million. One high school in Brooklyn has six thousand students. There are actual economies of scale in running larger schools and larger school districts."
NYC has some of the most expensive public schools in the country spending more than double, budgeting over 38k per student next year compared to national average of 15k.
Actually NYC isn't even close to the highest per pupil expenditures in New York State! The really expensive ones are typically the smallest.
In addition to the high cost of living that requires higher salaries for teachers, there is also the issue that pension fund contributions in NY get charged to the per pupil expenses. In many other states, the politicians simply reallocate what should be the pension fund contributions to their pet projects or to tax cuts. That doesn't happen in New York. The unions make sure that any politician irresponsible enough to suggest such has his political career terminated at the next election. Would that were the case everywhere in the US.
I'm not saying there aren't other more expensive districts in NY, just that the economies of scale run into some real hard problems when its more than TWICE the national average in the densest city with the largest school district in the US. Nor can you assign the blame primarily to pensions since pension and benefits make up less than 20% of the budget. That wouldn't *double* the cost.
Pensions and benefits are 19% -- those don't get accounted for in most other places (in part because most states simply don't bother to fund the pensions, and in part because in some places they come out of a completely separate non-education budget). Charter and nonpublic school funding is 15%. In most places that also doesn't get accounted for in the local school budgets. (And in some places those expenses do not exist at all.) Pre-K services are 5%. Those programs aren't publicly funded in most places. Debt payments are 9%. In many places, that doesn't appear in the school district budget at all because the obligation to pay off the bonds isn't with the school district but with some other government body that actually has taxing power (unlike the NY City school system). Also not accounted for in most places.
Basically you are comparing apples to a fruit basket. NY gets trashed a lot but the budgets really do cover all the costs.
Now add in the fact that salaries are 50% or more higher. Try paying NYC teachers what they make in Mississippi. It doesn't work.
You can deny the economies of scale but they are real. The dozens and dozens of school districts in NY State that have much higher per pupil expenditures are all smaller, mostly much smaller, than New York City.
Does Long Island even have any cities or is it just towns? Yonkers is the second largest city in New York State portion of Metro NYC (and #3 in the state after Buffalo), but the town of Hempstead is much larger and, I believe, the second largest municipality in NY State.
I don't know anything about Long Island but I "liked" this comment because I've never seen a comment hit triple digit likes here before and I had to join in.
I think what you’re missing here is that a big part of New York’s governance failures are downstream of stunts like the one Hochul pulled. It’s much harder to retain good civil servants, contract with a wide range of non-corrupt private sector companies, and indeed convince constituents that you are serious about policy when your top governmental officials act like this.
Obviously New York’s governance has been failing since before 2021 (and Cuomo before her did even worse stuff) but I think you have to oppose moves like this as prima facie bad for governance even if you disagree with the policy itself.
Matt's implying that the Hochul's thought process is mostly just cynical politicking. But I think he's underrating the possibility that she just has bad policy preferences.
If Hochul actually quietly liked congestion pricing all she had to do was... Nothing.
Same with Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoing a good YIMBY bill. Which, again, for good things to happen, all she had to do was nothing.
Maybe we're just underrating their bad policy preferences.
It’s notable that neither Hobbs nor Hochul is a wild-eyed leftist. Valence-wise, they code as the sort of moderate Yglesian technocrats who should be defending YIMBY and congestion pricing!
The fact that they don’t, speaks to the institutional party’s deep shittiness. Moderation does not actually equate to Yglesianism in this party. Instead, it tends to mean a sort of cynical and blinkered overreliance on conventional liberalism — the sort that might say “Just run on abortion everywhere!!” without ever questioning the limits of such a strategy or trying to think outside or beyond that single box. (And then wallow in shock and despair at the state of democracy and our citizenry when it falls flat on its face -- OR do senseless victory laps when it succeeds out of sheer luck or for reasons that were unrelated or which they never examined in all that much depth.)
I wish Matt would recognize this problem more! Because, to reiterate, his brand of popularism calls for a moderate-ish stance, but the actual current moderates are not Yglesian in the slightest. We need actual change in who the moderates are and what they believe, not just to elect more moderates.
I tend to think SBer's, Matt included, pretty substantially overrate the extent to which cynical triangulators like Hochul and Biden actually overlap with the moderate technocrats they prefer. This sort of football pull is exactly what should be expected.
I think he means overrate. Dave's critique is that there's less overlap than SB's "popularist" ethos would suggest between "optimized for winning elections by eschewing commitments to partisan ideology where it doesn't play well in Dodge" versus "adopting technocratically sound policy," and that Matt's endorsement of the former often comes at the expense of the latter. This being an example of the rubber hitting the road as to that tension -- Hochul's position is "moderate" in the sense of reflecting a form of wishy-washy status-quo bias (which is what is actually being politically selected for, in a kind of Goodhart's Law version of being a "moderate") but it's also totally at odds with what mild-mannered economists would tell you makes sense to do with respect to scarce public resources (i.e., charge for them).
More succinctly, sometimes the Baileys are wrong about what makes good policy.
Hochul even screwed up the running on abortion thing! During the election she sent me dozens and dozens of mailers about how we need to protect choice in New York and one of her very first acts as governor was to appoint a judge to our highest court that was opposed by every major abortion rights group and digging in on the choice until the legislature refused to confirm. Her being an absolutely terrible politician is very much part of what's going on here.
Why I always bring up that having Joe Lieberman as my senator is always going to impact my thinking about what "moderation" really means in practice. In theory, it means being a little more right of center on showy culture war stuff while being left of center (though not full on lefty) on economics. Think this is what Fetterman is trying to do.
Sinema in some ways is an especially egregious example that serves a point. I don't think Matt is properly remembering how many Sinema like figures existed in the Democratic party circa 2000-2010 and how much they sucked.
While I broadly agree, the counterpoint I’ll offer up is that as an Obama convert, it always stuck out to me how much liberals hate moderates like Sinema, Manchin, and Lieberman.
It’s not that I can’t see the betrayals or don’t personally mourn them myself, it’s just that the rage over them seems disproportionate and personal.
To someone deeply steeped in historical concepts like the Entropy of Victory, I struggle to get so upset about them. And I think it’s emblematic of how liberals’ emphasis on policy means they get so emotionally attached to their policy preferences that these betrayals don’t ever get filed under “politics as usual” - or worse, there’s a deep hatred OF seeing politics as anything that CAN go through “usual” setbacks.
I’m no fan of idiots like Sinema, but I also understand that if we had a rotating cast of 12 more of her as a permanent fixture of a Senate supermajority, we’d get a lot more of the big policy wins than we’ve ever gotten in my lifetime.
For a technocrat, congestion pricing was REALLY poorly thought out. If the idea was simply to raise money, there are better taxes to raise. If the idea was to get cars off the streets, there would have been increased transit capacity, which basically means many more buses and bus lanes on major arteries. Here in the Bronx there are no bus lanes on the expressways and the MTA has been trying to cut bus service for years -- and there are no plans to increase subway capacity at any time in the forseeable future.
Per Charlie's point, it's quite obvious that a billion dollars spent on buses and more subway trains would improve capacity a LOT more efficiently per-dollar than the same billion spent on building entirely new subway lines or stops.
Ehh, I think the radical centrism stuff is unwittingly descriptive of the average centrist voter -- who indeed tends to have a mix of radical positions from either side -- while also being an absolutely naive and feckless exercise in intellectual masturbation.
Because regardless of all their talk about "not taking averages", the radical center's supposed thought leaders basically have ZERO control over their own putative movement and constituents. Like the No Labels fetishists, they fantasize that mass discontent with the two-party system means there's a mass public ready and willing to accept their own ideas, and they live in a constant state of confusion about why this apotheosis perpetually refuses to magically, spontaneously happen -- often casting about for various idiotic theories that lead them down dead-end rabbit holes of even WORSE self-delusion than they started with. But the reality is, the mass public of centrists are mostly either (A) a bunch of deeply confused morons who don't read these thought leaders' high-falutin' manifestoes, or (B) a smaller handful of moderate and deeply ideological partisans who aren't actually centrist but just have a couple major disagreements with the party they lean closest to, and thus already have an information and thought-leadership environment they're quite satisfied with -- and aren't looking for some new philosophy of radical centrism, but really just want to win whatever intraparty debate/grievance they're currently on the wrong side of.
Also, the supposed thought-leaders' centrist stance basically requires they intentionally and very studiously ignore the very real asymmetries between the two parties as they actually exist. Most people are under the mistaken impression that you can't borrow ideas from a party that is so deeply morally compromised as the GOP, and so in order to indulge their desperate desire to virtue-signal their self-image of even-handed centrism, these radical-centrist ideologues pretend there's nothing *that* wrong with the GOP. Just because they're "not taking averages" doesn't mean they aren't engaging in an immoral both-sides-ism out of intellectual vanity.
So yeah, not to act like I'm the coolest kid at the party or anything here, but the radical centrists make me cringe. I'll take bog-standard basic-bitch Yglesianism any day of the week and twice on Sunday over them.
I didn’t know there were so many self-described radical centrists in the US for someone to have such a strong opinion of them. As a non-American I don’t have that association nor do I see Yglesianism as some wildly different political philosophy. In my mind both strive to be carefully analytical, aware of trade-offs, contradictions and second-order effects and willing to take bold policy positions when warranted. If I were American I *would* worry about a third party helping the GOP win for sure.
Bad policy preferences is far too charitable. She’s just not competent. This was literally optimal with respect to creating as much political damage with as little policy benefit as possible.
She was surprisingly more competent than I was expecting from whatever party hack would succeed Cuomo, but less competent than the state actually needs.
Are we feeling nostalgic for Cuomo yet? New York state politics is not a game of pattycake: there are advantages to having a ruthless asshole to balance the fecklessness and corruption of the Legislature.
Cuomo is the guy who, vis a vis the MTA specifically, fired Andy Byford basically out of jealousy of his popularity, in addition to killing a bunch of care home residents and generally being a corrupt, sexually-harassing asshole. So, no -- either in general or specifically as it relates to this specific mess.
Fuck Cuomo. And while we're at it get the Tappan Zee its original name back instead of stroking the Cuomo family ego.
Hochul has bad policy preferences and she's astonishingly bad at politics. If she wanted to kill congestion pricing for political reasons she did it the worst way. Cuomo was much worse in many ways, but he was way more competent at being bad.
My sense is that Hochul saw some polls and got some calls from Jeffries and felt like she had no choice. Congestion pricing was, good idea or not (it was in fact mostly a good idea), unpopular, and it had lost too much support from Democratic elected officials in the suburbs to succeed.
Hochul seems responsive to evidence that a truck is bearing down on her politically. When Zeldin came close to beating her in the governor's race, she got religion on the crime issue and got more active with the Legislature generally (I found this very gratifying). I suspect congestion pricing is the same thing.
I also doubt Hochul is routinely hanging out with very many people who take the train around NYC, but you bet she knows a few rich Hudson Valley types who like to drive in to the city every now then pretending that the toll would "force" them to reconsider their trips (they won't)
If a Rockefeller Republican type shows up in the 2026 race? I will not only vote for them, I will volunteer for them. The only thing worse than service cuts to fund tax cuts is service cuts to fund tax hikes. That’s all we get from Albany, going back at least a decade.
Rockefeller Republicans only exist as New England Republican Governors. Mitt Romney, Charlie Baker or Phil Scott. You'll notice the National Republican party mostly tries to ignore them when they talk.
If the GOP would like to get reasonable any time soon, that would be the best freaking news ever. I worry the normal folks can't get through their primaries anymore though.
Just to play Devil's Prophet here, let me tell you how a Bigly Loss will deepen the asinine vitriol.
First, Trump leads a series of second insurrections at the state capitols, enough to create several EC delegation controversies. Everything fails to throw the election to the House, but the controversy itself creates a brand new Big Lie for him to submit as the latest loyalty test for the entire party.
With the black hole of Trump's ego pulling the GOP "Triangle of Doom" (media + elite pols + base) ever closer to him, the party simply can't process losses as anything but a conspiracy against him. There's no way for the party to reject him; it just slowly shrinks as the steady trickle of fed-up moderates and occasional high-profile apostates (like Hogan) continue getting ejected by each round of loyalty tests -- in an unintentional analogy to my black hole metaphor, it's a lot like Hawking Radiation.
So, the whole party just keeps getting more asinine and more vitriolic with each loss, until he either dies or the party's no longer electorally viable.
Hawking Radiation essentially IS evaporative cooling for black holes. It's literally how they cool off and lose mass, and why if the LHC ever accidentally made a really tiny one, it'd evaporate in nanoseconds.
This is fundamentally the root cause though - if you aren't going to vote for the opposition no matter how bad they fuck up, what is the incentive to not fuck up?
With politics this polarized though, there isn't much choice. A blue politician has to be more than a bit incompetent for me to consider voting for someone on the other side who shares almost none of my policy preferences though. But I do think that we need to start viewing excellence in governance as an important progressive value in and of itself since almost all progressive policy preferences require a relatively high level of trust in government and government competence. Folks who do a bad job getting the pot holes filled in blue cities actually make it harder for us to get things like universal health care because they make government look shitty. I am all about the Left having more competative primaries focused on who would actually do a good job of implimenting progressive policies. I think it is actually probably better for our elective brand overall than just looking for moderation for its own sake. (Pragmatic folks who run stuff well frequently are a bit more moderate that incompetent extremists but there are also plenty of moderate folks who are incompetent too and some fairly left folks who are good managers.
The most effective method for centrist Democrats to improve the governance in Blue Cities is to invest in building a competitive GOP landscape. Nothing focuses the mind quite like defeat.
May in some places but where I live the GOP would have to transform very radically to have any impact. I would generally like to see the definition of what makes someone progressive change from "person who say the most leftist talking points to person who actually achieves or has the skills and plans to achieve a possible progressive outcome." I do think that matters more than progressives think. We had a big swing in the Seattle City Council in the last election from very left democrats to centrist democrats because people we upset about poor governance (which is really more of a mayor thing than the council in many ways given the limited power of the council but folks who are mad don't really differentiate.) It is still all Dem but more Blue Dog. Of the two progressive who survived, one was my council person who I am pretty sure won, not because he was more moderate but because he was a very service focused guy who actually held regular office hours and had his staff get into the weeds about specific pot holes and needed crosswalks and high crime spots etc and actually harassed whatever city agency was involved to do something so people felt like he had actually done something useful for them or their neighborhood. I think that suggests that getting folks on our side to do more of that would make it easier to keep people with progressive values in charge.
Vote for Democrats, sure we raise your taxes and provide bad services but sometimes we get cold feet and don’t do it at the last minute! Heck of a brand, plays great in Suffolk County.
Like if there was another plan on the table and she switched from a lefty plan to a centrist plan at the last minute then that might be a worthwhile political stunt but switching from ready-to-go plan to…nothing…I don’t think is even helpful politically!
I mean sure, a coherent moderate Republican agenda would probably stand a real chance in the state - maybe even in nationally. But that's not the GOP we have today. There's no Larry Hogan equivalent trying to get elected governor of NY, to the best of my knowledge.
I can tell you it's not paying dividends in Ontario transit circles at the moment. We've got an independent agency "Metrolinx" that built an LRT line across the city, with incredible delays and way over budget and all that, but they refuse to open it or say when it will open or identify why they can't open it. And there apparently exists no means to force them to do so.
Mass sort of had this, at least at the Governor level, until very recently. Unfortunately, Trump has activated the cultural right here with predictable results.
In view of Cambridge's ludicrous "ban math" debacle I'm not sure that it's fair to throw bad policy by way culture war polarization solely on one side of the aisle in Massachusetts (which I agree has probably been well-served by its historical willingness to elect competent centrist Republican governors).
Yeah Lee Zeldin was decidedly NOT a moderate. He happened to run in a midterm year (almost always better for the "out" party) with high inflation and unique to New York, he was able to take advantage of crime coverage in the press given how much of said coverage was slanted to stories about NYC given press concentration in NYC. So his peformance was actually quite good and explains A LOT of everything Hochul has done in past 18 months.
But go look at Zeldin's actual governing agenda. It's pretty right wing especially compared to the political lean of NY generally. I think if hew as elected we'd be talking about him same way we talk about Glenn Youngkin.
Zeldin made statements about not messing with abortion in NY; showing that he had some ability to realize he can't be super right wing in what's ultimately a blue state. But he previously voted for a 20 week abortion ban, is a 2nd amendment zealot and maybe most consequential of all is an election denier. Just a terrible vessel to assure left leaning moderates who may want somebody different to a Dem establishment governor.
That’s the thing: they can just show up on Jan 1 2026 saying “I’m running for governor, I don’t give a F about abortion, but I will cut your taxes”. Any rich ex-CEO has to realize the opportunity is there for the taking.
Larry Hogan is "moderate" only compared to the rest of the GOP. Otherwise he was a fairly ineffectual Tea Party inspired governor who seems to default to the dumbest GOP talking points (when he attempted to end expanded UI early, or when the FBI executed that search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and he defended Trump). I voted for the guy twice, I've never regretted votes like that before.
Texas has a far more effective state government than New York. If they actually wanted to help poor people, they wouldn’t need Danish levels of taxation to do it.
Everyone associated with Texas electric grid would like a word. Also, how are we defining effective with anything involving Ken Paxton given he’s clearly astonishingly corrupt zealot who should have been removed years ago.
I think it’s fair to say on particular topics like housing or infrastructure building, NY could learn a lot from Texas.
I think Matt has made a convincing case the Massachusetts is the best run state. But I also grew up in that state and can tell you some eye rolling issue (I’m halfway through the Big Dig podcast for example).
I think the better takeaway is to encourage state governments to actually look at other states of laboratories of democracy. A lot of state governance (like infrastructure) don’t really map at all into current left/right cultural war issues (or at least only do so tangentially). Taking ideas that seem to be working in “blue” state or “right” state isn’t some betrayal of values on unrelated issues.
None of the metro areas you listed are locked in geographically. They have plenty of developable land. They opted to mostly stop developing it, for environmental/anti-sprawl reasons. Fine. But to pull that off, they needed to be much better than the rest of America at legalizing infill housing. Which they weren't. So now they have a housing crisis. I think it's totally fair game to put 100% of the blame here on their governance.
Ken Paxton - that they _almost_ convicted on impeachment, and then not quite. And at least one of the people who voted against conviction has now changed his mind, but good luck getting it through AGAIN.
And it's not like he'd have been replaced with some Democrat.
As someone else who grew up in MA, I remember all the complaints and criticism of the big dig but when I visit Boston now I think it's mostly a success and it has made me reevaluate the cost benefit analysis of boondoggles (Specifically we typically underestimate the value that a completed project will bring over the long term and as we are now ~20 years past the completion I'm glad the people of MA of the 80s and 90s suffered for us)
The podcast is unimaginatively called "The Big Dig". Only four episodes in, but it's great so far. One takeaway I had from the first episode is that Matt doesn't talk nearly enough about one of the very understandable reasons why NIMBY has been so powerful for 50 years now; the headless chicken manner in which highways were built in the 50s and 60s. I know Matt has talked extensively about how terrible it was that highways were built through the heart of cities. But I think he's focused too much on the harms of 70s environmentalist thinking and not enough on how much highway construction likely impacted "normies" views of development generally. First episode of this podcast I think does a great job of capturing this in regard to East Boston.
There is a whole faction of the Democratic Party pretty obsessed with Washington operating its own bank just like it. There are some good arguments for it.
What are some areas in which the Texas state government is particularly effective? The Sun Belt states’ success seem to be mostly driven by luck and exogenous factors vs governance:
1. Much fewer legacy pension obligations, because the population growth is recent.
2. Cheap housing, because they haven’t run out of space for greenfield sprawl yet.
3. The American public generally seems to prefer living places with milder winters now that AC is cheap.
Texas has both good and bad governance like most states, but its primary advantage is that it regulates building far less than most blue states. So it can build housing of all types much easier than NY can. It can build green energy production and transmission much easier than California can. Given the importance of those, it gives Texas a huge lift despite otherwise mediocre government.
And yet California, despite those obstacles, is speeding quickly toward a renewables-based grid. But good on Texas in that regard, too. Healthy competition!
I really hope that succeeds. Its just been shocking to see Texas catch and pass California in renewables given California's lead. Its in large part because California makes it hard to build, though Texas having massive plains available for wind turbines definitely helps.
Texas' recent governments have done pretty much everything possible to squander a serendipitous legacy of never having had much in the way of housing regulation.
If you want people to give more but in to government, government has to work and be responsive
If you want government to be responsive, you have to give the people running it incentive to be so.
The heads of government offices that have significant public interface should be directly elected rather than appointed.
I'm originally from Michigan, and the best government office I ever had to deal with was Michigan's Secretary of State.
There's a branch in half the strip malls in the state. You walk in, like your local bank, do your business, and are done in about 15 minutes.
And I bet I know why it's so easy - Michigan's Secretary of State is an elected official whose name is on every branch door, so you know just who to blame for your we experience if it's not good.
I know Policy People hate direct democracy because it empowers the pleebs, but as a native Michigander living on the East Coast I think it makes for a much more responsive government and better public buy in.
Also a continuation of rule by Democrats, who desperately need and deserve an electoral spanking with eight years on the bench, but aren't going to get one because there is no functional opposition party.
Boy you are not kidding about contracting. I have had two projects, one in NYC and one in NYS. I loved the people I worked with on both projects and felt the projects themselves added tremendous value, but the contracting and associated issues with billing and just the general PITA of the entire process really turned me off. I have not taken any work in NY since then and would only do it as a favor to a client as opposed to actively trying to find work in the state.
I think this will hurt the state a bit in a difficult-to-see way (less supply of people willing to take on projects = higher prices) until they make working with the state/city less nightmarish. With as much work as is available right now, its easy to pick and choose projects. Even more, money has its limits when you realize that compliance/billing, resolving disputes, etc., is taking so much time that working for a less remunerative but more organized partner is a better use of time.
Oddly enough...this is not a huge left/right thing. I do a lot of work in Washington State, and it is a breeze. I have a really good anecdote about how nice Was. is to work with but won't boor folks with the details beyond saying I had an issue related to business taxes, called a real live person who, for free, helped explain what a I need to do, and resolved the issue in under an hour.
I have been impressed with the state's governance. When I semi-retired I really wanted to move to Walla Walla but couldn't for family reasons. Lots of beautiful places, a nice mix of geography (access to mountains, beaches, rain forests and high desert all in one state) and among the better governed states. I am surprised it is not a more popular destination.
Just to drill down on the 'retain good civil servants' point, I'd broaden it slightly. It can be either 'RETAIN good civil servants' or 'retain GOOD civil servants'. As a good civil servant who has been working a project for a long time, gotten to the eleventh hour on a project they believe in and gets summarily reversed with no warning may well quit...or may well decide 'ah, okay, caring and hard work are actively counterproductive, this office is looking for a seat filler. I can do that.'
I should flag though that this does happen more broadly and sometimes even 'should' happen, after all, elections have consequences. The one that jumps to mind for me is always DAPL, where the Corps of Engineers had issued all permissions except one, which gave the Obama administration the leverage it needed to block the action (in December 2016) only for that, of course, to be reversed when the Trump administration took over...
Like, if I'd been one of the employees working that project...well, I hope I'd have had the strength to just laugh about it and move on with my life, but...
Yeah, in particular a lot of the dumb things the MTA does is because of meddling by top state officials who exercise almost total control over the MTA. This of course also means that the people who rise to the top at the MTA are not the most competent transportation officials but those most adept and willing to please the state officials.
Could not agree more, and I think this applies in the city as well (possibly even more). I’m sad to be leaving the city/state, but grateful that I have the option to do so.
Matt writes: "At some level, [Hochul's] just trying to help House Democrats win races on Long Island, a worthy and important goal."
The problems begin with that statement, for helping House Democrats isn't part of the job of being the Governor of the State of New York. Her job is to lead the executive branch agencies of the state for the benefit of the people of New York, and work with the legislature on laws for the state. Helping House Democrats isn't her job.
Hochul isn’t really playing the same game as the national party, though. It’s not like she has personal incentives to do stupid things in the name of playing ball vis a vis chances at higher office, her literal job is “governor of New York” and this is about as clear cut a case of not doing said job as comes to mind in recent years.
The first day this was announced, I was like “there must be a ‘quo’ to this quid pro quo that we’re not aware of yet. Probably Hochul gets HUD in a Biden II cabinet or something.”
Watching it play out the following days made me realize a) this was not some carefully planned arrangement, this was the fumbling of an incompetent way in over her head; and b) no one in their right mind would give this person responsibility in the federal government. Hell no one in their right mind would make her a state senator, much less governor.
Meh, I don't think she's COMPLETELY incompetent, she's merely a run-of-the-mill party hack who accidentally rose WELL past her "level of failure" a lot faster than she could catch up to her circumstances.
If she'd served under Cuomo for another decade, she'd probably have made a decent successor to him.
The elected officials Hochul needs on her side to govern effectively are the NY state legislators who aren’t with her on this, evidenced by their refusal to bail her out of the mess she created.
I think this is wrong. In a country that’s heavily malapportioned and where Republicans gerrymander aggressively, among other hardball practices, it is part of Democratic officials’ role not to let the playing field become too uneven.
This also rankles me: "That said, what’s happened has happened and Hochul doesn’t have a time machine, so even though I’m mad, I do see where she’s coming from."
This could double as an apologia for Republicans' Trump-enabling.
I think a lot of the GOP’s Trump enabling has been understandable. Then a lot of it hasn’t. Jeff freaking Sessions, of all people, had the presence of mind to realize that a prosecution of Hillary crossed the line; sadly the rest of them haven’t figured that out with respect to, among other things, Jan 6.
Jan. 6th is notable for being the best opportunity that grin-and-bear it Republicans had to curbstomp the cancer that had taken over their party, and then instead of taking advantage of the Schelling point afforded them, McConnell opted to put party over country in the most short-sighted and indefensible, not to mention craven, manner possible.
Isn’t it? Like I mean I’m sure that’s not like hyper literally her job but like all the political science courses I took in college said presidents and governors took on a head of party job in addition to the formal parts
Of their jobs outlined in constitutions and these are prioritized by politics not law.
That’s unfortunately not really true. I think what you’re getting at is being a governor or senator means you both look out for the interests of your state AND act as a representative of your party. The difference is as governor, working for the best interests for your state is much more likely to be primary focus over being a loyal party apparatchik and in the senate is the other way around. But both still exist.
To give an example. Blue state senators in Massachusetts and New Jersey all the time seek to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies even though it would seem to run counter to very basic Democratic Party beliefs. On the opposite side, red state Republicans defend things like the “Jones Act” or farm subsidies even though they run counter GOP economic orthodoxy.
Point being is I think what’s actually happening (if we believe reports that Jeffries and Schumer leaned on Hochul) is this sort of dual mandate is a real universal friction in American politics. You’re both a chief executive and member of political party and those two functions can often conflict.
I understand the duality. I'm saying it is a problem when politicians favor national political considerations over their elected position's responsibilities. It is a disservice to their constituents.
So I'll state in this post (and probably others) that Matt is probably way too generous in his assessment of Hochul's political calculus here; if NY Dems think this last minute flip on congestion pricing is making the difference in my district (D+10 House seat that flipped to R in 2022) they're fooling themselves. As Hochul's ludicrous claim on Friday shows*, what's actually happening is it shows business owners have an ability to reach their governor, House Rep and senate rep directly way beyond the ability of most other voters and their esoteric concerns can often have a way of becoming policy.
But I think you're underrating the very rational calculus politicians make that sometimes you need to be a good loyal party member; whether it's governor, House or senate. Even if you have no aspirations beyond you're current position. Defying your party depending on the circumstance is often smart politics if you're Joe Manchin or John Fetterman. Manchin as Matt repeatedly notes is probably the best Dems will do in West Virginia. And at the end of the day, Manchin voted for items like IRA and for judges. So Schumer not only doesn't have much leverage over Manchin, he wouldn't want to use that leverage. To a certain degree this is true of Fetterman. PA is probably going to be the most important swing state in 2024. Fetterman ultimately benefits from crossover voters. Having a swing state Dem who has crossover appeal due to his rhetoric could be enormously beneficial in September and October if Biden makes campaign stops in PA and there's Fetterman singing his praises (and has been pointed out Fetterman's voting record is still solidly with Biden. As has been pointed out, Bibi's speaking to a join session of Congress partly at the behest of the Dem House majority leader and Dem senate majority leader. Fetterman's super pro Israel stance is hardly out of step with Dem establishment. He's just louder about it).
Point being though, Manchin and Fetterman are edge cases. Matt is fond (including in this post) of noting Dems could stand to be more supportive of moderate Dems in swing districts and states. I agree with this entirely! But at end of the day, almost by definition, these are edge cases. These edge cases can be the difference between a house majority or senate majority. So they're quite important! But they're still edge cases. For most politicians? They are in pretty "safe" D or "R" seats or states. Which means being a loyal party foot solider on a variety of issues is actually the better course of action as party leadership can actually destroy you if you want. For an especially vivid example; see Mitch McConnell and Madison Cawthorn.
*Kathy Hochul claimed on Friday that congestion pricing would harm people who like to drive to eat at Comfort Diner in Manhattan. I have eaten at this diner multiple times. I cannot emphasize to you how absurd it is to believe that anyone is driving to eat at this diner. We're not talking about a Michelin star restaurant, we're talking a dime a dozen diner of which there are probably hundreds in the NYC suburbs. The only person driving to this diner is the owner.
I suspect the Occam’s Razor explanation in both the short and long term here will be “Kathy Hochul did something incredibly stupid and should be called stupid for doing it.”
I think congestion pricing discourse is maybe the perfect example of where the personal interests of various leaders of a variety of organizations is often at cross purposes with the actual supposed agenda of said organization. Think we see this with unions being weirdly NIMBY; more construction should lead to more union jobs, but NIMBY can lead to higher wages for members who already have union jobs.
The NAACP being against congestion pricing and its subsequent funding of mass transit is maybe a "chef's kiss" example of where leadership's interests are at cross purposes with stated agenda given demographic realities of who does and doesn't take mass transit.
I'm not sure that national political considerations are not important to state officials qua state officials - Hochul no doubt believes that New York is better off with a democratic Congress and in particular with a democratic Congress with more New York democrats in it. NewYork is far more likely to get federal funding for transit projects under a Biden/Jeffries government than a Trump/Johnson one.
Corruption? Hochul's decision might be political cowardice. Or it might be savvy political opportunism. Or somewhere in between. But corruption seems a stretch.
I rather suspect that, if Hochul were a Republican, you'd be lauding her for standing up for the hard-pressed taxpayers of Long Island against the utopian schemes of liberal technocrats.
I agree with the sentiment but it's not "corruption"
(Also, for a second I thought she was helping _STATE_ Democrats and that's a least related to her job - but yes her job is not to help National Democrats other than by being a good role model)
For one, I don't see how anyone will ever have faith in an administration that changes its mind at the eleventh hour and abandons a law it had championed even though tons of work has been done to implement it. That's literally the worst of all worlds, signaling that Democrats can't govern even when implementing their own policies. It's completely unserious.
For two, this reads like the MTA is dysfunctional, but didn't Byford try to run it rationally and then got screwed at the state level, possibly by Cuomo? I don't remember enough about the minutiae of NY state politics at the time but all of this just suggests the state Democratic establishment is totally incompetent and/or shortsightedly self-interested rather than having any real policy lessons.
I don't think there is any need for qualifiers - the MTA IS dysfunctional. It costs 6x more than Paris and Berlin to build a mile of track per a recent NYU study. Their findings suggest that is most due to interagency squabbling and dumb rules and regs within their control, and very little to do with the regular Right leaning talking points complaining about unions.
When you see this type of stuff it easily stokes a ton of opposition when you know $.83 of every $1 of congestion tax you are spending is just going to be lit on fire...
Article for refence - think the study is embedded:
The *MTA* alone isn't dysfunctional, it's but one creation of our entire nightmarish NIMBYist vetocracy.
MTA would be more efficient and accountable without the egregious freaking mountains of "accountability" we've foisted on it. As would most of the rest of our society.
Byford was running MTA NYC Transit, the part of the MTA that does city subways and buses. There are other parts as well (MTA Metro-North Railroad, MTA Long Island Rail Road, MTA Bridges and Tunnels, etc.). I believe it is MTA headquarters that is managing congestion pricing (someone correct me if I’m wrong!). That said, friction between Cuomo and him was still the problem.
In any case, I think you’re totally right that this move on congestion pricing just generally paints the state government as unserious.
Good to know, thank you! I'm originally from Toronto so I insinctively think of the MTA as being like our transit agency, the TTC (which Byford also ran), but it's much more complicated than that.
Democrats doing 1 “putting our house in order” is worth 1 million telling Trump voters they’re bad people if they don’t switch their vote. Keir Starmer seems to be almost having fun now with how hard he can shaft his fringe, a huge expansion of prisons is his latest proposal, and he is on track to win a landslide and hopefully use that power for good.
Starmer enjoys the benefits of a party traumatized by being in the minority for nearly a decade. US dems operate under the belief that they’re a popular party that supports popular interests.
True. On the other hand, his opponent isn't saying he'll be a dictator on day one. Dems have a lot more reason to be focused on winning than Labour. I live in the UK and still, if I had to choose, I'd take Sunak winning and Trump losing over the reverse any day. In reality many Dems are busy campaigning against themselves.
1994 was the year the Democratic Party lost their 60-year Congressional supermajority because the last holdouts of the old, Southern segregationists flipped to the Republican Party. So it is a good starting point for the current party coalitional alignment.
I think the revenue aspect is under-discussed, and that killing congestion pricing is a zero interest rate phenomenon that happened because Hochul (and many other politicians) hasn't internalized the new reality. It's clear from the post announcement scrambling that there wasn't any serious thought to how to pay for the MTA capital plan otherwise, but also no suggestion that it should be cut. Instead, Hochul was just killing the revenue because it's unpopular to charge people money.
But the money is going to have to come from somewhere, and as everyone saw right away, all the alternatives are actually more unpopular.
Ongoing capital funding for the MTA needs to come from an ongoing state funding process. The distribution of incidence is balanced regionally and politically and the "usual sources" reflect that compromise. Congestion pricing just throws all of that out of the window, leaving a mess behind. The work is all to do again.
I feel like this is still operating in the same paradigm as Hochul. The question is what to tax, and who to tax. No one is going to like taxes, but to pay for the things we want they will be necessary. And taxing people who are doing something with high social cost who have good alternatives is exactly what we should want to tax, for the same reason that Matt has talked about bringing back carbon taxes.
>> That means a style of blue state moderate politics that is oriented toward actually fixing the problems of the blue states, rather than just a politics of merely saying “no” to the wildest leftist schemes.
I wish people would take this more to heart around here. We need less bitching about the left and more figuring out how to get the center-left’s work done.
I agree, except when the left poisons the well with crazy-ass ideas like "let's abolish the police" that poisons the well for center-left people who get lumped in with the crazy-ass left in the popular imagination, and then it's harder to get sensible stuff done.
Those ideas only poison the well because we literally just sit here bitching about them and waiting for them to get dropped in, instead of building our own well.
I agree as a general matter, but lots of center-left figures sealed their own fate when they leaned into the protest movements in June 2020. And the "progressive prosecutor" movement, which I think is rightly characterized as the "soft on crime" movement, has been enabled by figures at the local, state, and federal levels by elected officials who do not have a profile as "left wing."
This is a very banal point but the fact that cable companies have terrible customer service, government websites look like they've were designed in the 90s, and one-party states have serious governance issues all stem from the same thing: competition is good and we need more of it.
In many cases yes. But there are plenty of municipal services, for example, where competition isn't necessarily better than an efficient city or state-regulated or owned monopoly. For example, utilities that involve running physical infrastructure to every building, or trash trucks down every block.
Agree. That starts, I think, with local elected officials fearing the voters if municipal services aren't good.
National political party labels aren't that relevant to most of the nuts and bolts issues of local government, and probably get in the way more than help, except when it comes to asking for money from Congress.
Ok how does de-unionizing create this? Like I work in non-union education and it seems to me it just makes it easier to have cronyism.
Like we don’t see the leading schools in the country in the southeast where unions are basically a total non-factor in government positions.
Like if you could really guarantee high quality ethical and responsible leadership of these now very tenuous employees who can be fired for no reason id be a lot more supportive.
You have to be a bit sympathetic to the resentment that it really was not a congestion tax, but an entry toll. You pay the same if you drive in, park for 8 hours and drive out as if you drive in and drive around for 8 hours and drive out. And you pay the same (zero) if you drive around for 8 hours w/o driving in as if you just don't drive.
Add to that that people generally underestimate elasticities or think of them only in the very short term. This makes pricing anything feel more like an income transfer from A to B than something that benefits A albeit at a cost, a cost that in principle could be compensated with another transfer form B to A. And this is really where the trust comes in; if a transfer is promised will people believe it will be delivered? The NYC "congestion" tax could be demagogued as a pure transfer to rich Manhattanites from middle class commuters with no benefits to the commuters.
Add to this that historically Progressives have tended to try to do good by hiding or outright denying the cost: rent control minimum wages and more recently net CO2 emissions reduction.
Once congestion pricing or tolling is in place, a good phase two would be dynamically price it to reflect actual congestion. We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Appreciate you mentioning the elasticity piece. Matt cites the "surge tolling in Northern VA" and I was a perfect case study this weekend, where I opted to pay $15 to avoid ~30 minutes of traffic on the way to a wedding. The benefit was realized immediately vs the congestion pricing that you may or may not actually see in practice. Couple in all of the other points you make and you can start to see why practically the same tax evokes vastly different reactions.
You pinpointed the problem in the first line of the second paragraph. The problem is that NY and CA are one party states where the GOP has so discredited themselves that the Dems can afford to govern solely in the hope to perpetuate their power. Absent a plausible and responsible opposition party there will never be an incentive to take big swings to govern better. Why upset the apple cart when you already have everything electorally that you could want? Of course it won't last forever but no political party has ever seemed to grasp this problem.
The problem with one-party states is not that there is no electoral competition, its that all electoral competition is intra-party. This means one-party Dem states have electoral fights over who can give the most to unions and one-party GOP states have electoral fights over who can cut education and ban abortion the most.
>> there will never be an incentive to take big swings to govern better.
This flies in the face of the big swings that Hochul DID take -- chiefly, to wit, on crime IE bail reform.
The problem isn't that no one's taking big swings. It's that the intra-party competition Allan describes leads to shitty prioritizing. The ruling coalition SHOULD remain incentivized to appeal to swing voters, because even in a one-party state there's still the allure of wielding a supermajority.
But it doesn't, because the biggest coalition members are constantly threatening to tank the party if they aren't pacified with their pet projects -- after all, "We have a majority; what good is it if we aren't using it? You OWE us anyways!".
The coalition will always demand unpopular policies that couldn't be done when there was electoral competition. So the outcome will ALWAYS be suboptimal compared to the pure ideal of "always cater to the swing voters".
I mean, I definitely think it's a thing worth doing and not just a "soft on crime" measure like the screechiest voices around here constantly whine about.
And it's a TOTALLY valid use of political capital!
But it's kind of "flail-ey" to do one big thing you know is gonna piss off some swing voters, accept the hit, and then decide on some OTHER big thing that you're not willing to take the hit, and flip-flop on it in the most awkward and counterproductive fashion imaginable.
After all, Hochul has Streisand-Effect-ed this from a sop to swing voters into a huge backfire! Setting aside the backlash from technocrats like us, the main result of canceling the program has been to HIGHLIGHT that an astronomical $100M had already gone into it in the first place, AND that she's basically lighting that entire pile of cash on fire without even a fig leaf of "I'm StOpPiNg ThE wAsTe" to soften the blow!!
It's rank political malpractice. Instead of getting swing voters on her side, she will have convinced MORE swing voters to vote against Democrats than putatively would have rewarded her for canceling the program in the first place!
At this point, she's making even Eric Adams look smart.
And Jeffries... Jesus, man. Just because Hochul was dumb enough to go along with his little scheme doesn't mean he had any business cajoling her into it in the first place without properly thinking it out. This was a total consultant-brained move: "We have a problem with these voters in these House swing seats, they're angry about this one issue, so we should flip on this issue" is such a Do-Something-ist mistake it's not even funny. Jeffries' delegation is literally WORSE OFF today than it was a week ago, worse off than if they'd just let the policy go live and taken the hit.
[Ed: And I expected better of Jeffries than all that. Everyone has consultants, but the man seems to generally make savvier moves than the replacement-level-consultant-brain-politician-bot would. I'm not a superfan of his or anything, either; I just thought he had his head on relatively straight. To push an ally into such a dumb move out of panic, speaks to a lack of strategic thinking or an overall plan that is deeply concerning going forward, especially as the whole party ramps up for a "reverse coattails" strategy of dragging Biden through re-election on a supposedly strong downballot performance.]
Moreover, they lost the opportunity cost to do something ELSE that might have actually shored up a different constituency that might have been easier to woo than a bunch of LIers who literally hate the city with every fiber of their being.
"The other frustrating aspect is that in New York, a lot of time and money was sunk into winning Democrats a friendlier set of state court judges who would give them a freer hand in redistricting. But once that work was done, they didn’t use it to enact an aggressive gerrymander that would have eliminated these Long Island political concerns. Instead, they shored up a few incumbents and went home."
After reading this text written by a very centrist Democrat, we are supposed to believe that the Republicans are the threat to democracy.
I have many many many times fully endorsed a national ban on gerrymandering. Republicans unfortunately oppose it but I am optimistic that they will change their minds and this will get done.
Recent realignments make the GOP's new coalition less efficiently distributed in the House than it used to be. Less upshot for them from gerrymandering now.
Can you expound on that a bit? The massive urban/rural divide seems as massive as ever, a key element of making GOP gerrymanders not look as blatant as Democratic gerrymanders.
Gerrymanders will tend to erode over the course of a decade, due to population (and ideological) shifts, which is why they need to regerrymander in the next decade.
Historically, the upside of gerrymandering for the GOP has been limited by civil rights laws guaranteeing Democrats at least one House seat in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky. If the supreme court were willing to rule the remaining portions of the voting rights act unconstitutional, that would allow Republicans to give themselves every single seat in all of the above states at the next redistricting.
Meanwhile, Democrats are blocked from retaliating in states such as California and New York because liberal voters made the dumb mistake of taking the unilateral moral high ground in the 2010's, banning gerrymandering in their own state, while Republicans in red states didn't.
Just a reminder that California's "natural gerrymander" is more severe than Texas and Ohio's purposeful gerrymanders combined, netting Democrats 2 additional seats more than their voting % would indicate despite having similar population and number of congressional seats.
What is your proposal for choosing how to assign districts, in the absence of gerrymandering?
Anyone, please do share a link if Matt has written this up before - I only subscribed recently and so there may be a well-known piece that I don't know about.
Democrats are generally in favor of getting rid of gerrymandering, but, given that it's legal, Democrats should play by the actual rules, not by the rules that they want to see
Adhering to principles even when they don't help you politically is a sign of a responsible and sober organization. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are those things.
I am hugely sympathetic to the top level comment and had a similar reaction, but I think the argument against playing cooperate while your opponents play defect is, alas, a winning rejoinder.
I don't think the comparison works here. Augustine was only playing against himself, so to speak. Democrats are playing against Republicans and given that Republicans aren't backing redistricting reform it makes sense to not disarm only yourself.
This difference between Democrats and Republicans in this regard is not that Democrats do this and Republicans don’t. The difference is that Republicans ruthlessly press every legal advantage they have at hand in order to maximize their political outcomes even in the face of popular will.
Republicans invented this tactic. Democrats in New York tried to copy it, but then forgot to do the actual cheating bit. Republicans trip their opponents in a foot race and then run as fast as they can to try to win. Democrats learned that they should also trip their opponents, but then they help their opponents back up before they start running again.
Democrats gerrymandering states they control in response to Republicans gerrymandering even more is an example of "tit for tat with forgiveness", which is theoretically the optimal strategy in an iterated prisoners' dilemma.
While I like the idea of a ban on gerrymandering in principle, actually enforcing such a ban is very difficult, as political partisans will do everything they possible can to look for loopholes and make sure that the judges that decide the redistricting litigations are sympathetic to their side over the other side.
There's a strong part of me that feels like the entire concept of districts to begin is inherently flawed, too ripe for abuse, and that the premise of politicians representing voters in a geographic district has largely become a fiction anyway. For better or worse, the electoral college can't be gerrymandered because all elections are statewide and the "winner take all" system of the red states and blue states cancel each other out to produce a mostly fair overall result. If House elections were voted on like electors in the electoral college - a statewide vote for "D" and "R", with the winning party getting all of the seats in each state. Such a system would still be far from perfect (for example, the same handful of swing states that decide presidential races would also be the ones that decide House control), but still seems simpler and fairer than the mess we've got now, where different states play by different rules, all of the map drawing is subject to endless litigation, and House control being effectively decided by a handful state supreme court races that elect the judges that get to decide the redistricting battles.
This is why I don't care about gerrymandering. Drawing congressional districts has always been a political game, so I don't really care what Republicans or Democrats do. Plus, no one, not even appointed boards of "all-knowing experts," can articulate what the actual goal of drawing districts should be. Is it compact districts? Is it districts that follow pre-existing geography? Is it creating a 50-50 party balance within the state? Is it favoring some minority group at the expense of everyone else? Something else? These goals are contradictory, thus the only way to resolve them is through politics.
I would say that the main objective shouldn't be 50-50 balance, but proportionality.
The basic democratic feedback loop is to translate votes into representation, representation into policy outcomes, and policy outcomes back into votes.
It doesn't work if the representation is not roughly proportional to the votes.
Everything else is window dressing to this basic reality.
1) That is your preference, but other people have other preferences.
2) Your preference is overruled by Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act stipulations.
3) In some states (i.e. MA and OK) it is actually impossible to draw any "proportional" map.
4) What does "proportional" even mean, and who gets to decide what it means? Is a 1% difference ok? 3%? 5%? 10%? 20%?
5) A "proportional" map in like IL or CA would have some absolutely wild-shaped districts snaking out from Chicago and the Bay Area into farm country that would make the Tokyo subway map look like a square.
2. No, it's "overruled" by *specific interpretations* of those stipulations which are subject both to stare decisis AND the potential of being overturned. "One person, one vote" is interpreted law, not a constitutional amendment.
Moreover, you're making an "is-ought" conflation here. I wasn't talking about "IS", I was talking about the "OUGHT". My holding is that it's a dumb law! If the goal is for us to have a representative democracy -- which seems to be the overarching goal of the Constitution -- then interpreting "one person, one vote" to prohibit, say, parallel representation or a multiparty system is just... downright fucking stupid.
Representative democracy needs a working democratic feedback loop, otherwise, it's not. a. good. representative. democracy.
Representative democracy does NOT need an overly-constrained interpretation of a general principle like "one person, one vote" in order to work properly.
3. Care to expound on that?
4. I'd personally say 5% at the max -- it's the point where "sometimes funny results happen" tips into "OK this is bullshit". But as far as "who gets to decide what it means", I mean, I would have thought that was obvious... We The People. Like, duh? That's what democracy is all about, right?
5. Uhh maybe? I don't have any redistricting software sitting in front of me, so I can't make any definitive arguments here. Also, again, your overall mistake here is that you seem to think I'm making a series of *practical* arguments about implementation, despite the fact that I didn't even bother describing any implementation.
All I was talking about was the *theoretical* level. A democratic feedback loop without proportionality between votes and representation is fundamentally broken. Period. This is not some controvertible statement, it's literally the equivalent of "2+2=4" for the concept of democracy. There are MILLIONS of different ways to accomplish a working democratic feedback loop; asking me to delineate some specific implementation of it is putting the cart before the horse.
The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act aren't about "one person, one vote." Those are the laws that mandate majority-minority districts, and essentially enforce gerrymandering to favor one racial group at the expense of other racial groups.
Because Republicans are spread so thin in MA and Democrats are spread so thin in OK, it is essentially impossible to draw any map that yields even one Republican district in MA and one Democratic district in OK.
And your answer on "who decides" doesn't make sense. You argue that elected majorities shouldn't draw congressional districts because those districts violate some principle of proportionality, but then argue that those same elected majorities should decide what "proportionality" means.
"Proportional" means that you cannot make it more closely match the statewide vote share by changing a seat.
If you have 9 seats and, statewide, D's got 40% of the vote and R's got 60, then statewide, 4 D and 5 R is proportional (44.4% of seats vs 55.6% of seats - 4.4% error). 5D and 4R would obviously match the share LESS, and 3D 6R would also match it less (6.7% error)
Democrats (just like Republicans) doing some gerrymandering when they have a chance -- Republicans storming the Capitol violently to try to overturn a free and fair election egged on by the party's leader with the quiescent or outright support of almost all high party officials.
Is there some problem with the non-partisan commission states actually being gerrymandered? I haven’t really looked too deeply into it since the big 538 deep dive into it like 8 years ago but that seemed like a real thing.
(1) I live in Manhattan (north of the congestion zone) and own a car, which someone in my family drives probably and average of once a week. We rarely drive anywhere in the congestion zone and drive a lot less than the average suburbanite, and somehow the EZ Pass bill still adds up fast. There are a lot of tolls here and you just fold it into the cost of car ownership if you choose to own a car. And as others have pointed out, it's hard to drive anywhere in the congestion zone (of blessed memory) without spending far more than $15 on parking.
(2) Speaking of parking, I think that's a huge missing piece to unlocking road capacity in Manhattan. There's an absurd amount of free street parking in Manhattan given the demand here and very few loading zones. That means you have a ton of double parked delivery trucks and cars doing some form of loading/unloading. This kills a traffic lane when it happens and massively increases traffic. My hypothesis is that charging more for street parking, creating more enforced loading zones, and then cracking down on double parking would create a huge benefit, and no one ever talks about trying that.
(3) I favor congestion pricing but don't understand why they didn't make it variable based on time of day/actual traffic conditions. A lot of the opposition (especially the astroturf "social justice" opposition) comes from people who argue that off hours commuting by transit is hard and people need to drive then. Fine. So why not make it cheaper when there's less demand and more expensive when there's more demand? Other cities do this, and surely the technology exists.
(4) Congestion pricing was proposed so long ago that its proponents kind of assumed it was just a matter of clearing court battles and environmental reviews and stopped focusing on political support (and as Matt notes burned political capital on other things like bail reform). That was huge mistake. It wasn't just LI Republicans who hated it, it was Normie Democrats in New Jersey. You have to constantly work the politics of an issue to make it politically palatable if you want it to succeed. My guess is that Hochul saw polls/talked to Hakeem Jeffries and realized it was too politically dangerous at this point. The way to fix that would've been to keep campaigning for congestion pricing as a political matter (not just in the courts) for the past several years. As Matt has noted, if democracy is truly the most important thing on the ballot, congressional seats are in fact more important than congestion pricing even if congestion pricing is/was a good idea.
(5) The the extent people argued for congestion pricing on the merits it was often framed as a climate argument. That was stupid because the marginal car trips to lower Manhattan are obviously completely trivial in the scheme of things to global climate issues. This reflects the larger failures of climate activists in the US.
(6) The MTA is bad with money and that's a huge problem. That said, its transit systems are very well-used and do need to be funded. Funding the MTA and reforming the MTA are related but still separate issues, and we need to do both. For all of its flaws, the subway/NYC commuter rail is still the US's best transit system.
(7) NY/NYC government in general expensive and inefficient, and taxes are high, but at the end of the day our public services are mostly good. The MTA is inefficient but the subway is still the US's best transit system. NYC has very low crime for a major city, but that comes with a very well-staffed NYPD (I've seen a dozen officers standing around when one person is being arrested for a disturbance in a store -- but at least the person is being arrested and there aren't tents on the sidewalk). There's much less street homelessness than you see in other cities. The parks are extensive and well-maintained. The schools are relatively good given the population and complexity of the system. At the end of the day NYers are generally okay paying high taxes because at the end of the day we do get good public services for those taxes. But it's sad because some efficiency improvements could make our public services a lot better for the money we spend (and we could also generate a lot more tax revenue for free if we just loosened land use restrictions and unlocked land value).
(8) In conclusion, it's sad that congestion pricing went down the way it did, but I don't really blame Hochul, and blaming her misses all the important mistakes NY has made along the way. A moderate-liberal reformist movement that isn't beholden to the left/unions/Groups or to the suburban anti-density types could do great things here, but I don't know quite how to go about building it, which is why I'm not a political professional I guess.
This is all true (and NY is a particularly egregious example; I like the "governor and legislature have a negative WAR" analogy) but it naturally leads to another discussion: in places with one party rule, how do we best encourage good governance? Minnesota is the counterexample here -- a D trifecta with slim majorities, but are actually using those majorities to enact solid D priorities like more abundant housing. So how do we push places like NY to do better?
For that matter I suppose, you could make the flip side of the argument (how do we get R controlled states to govern effectively). Mike DeWine was one of the few R governors who actually seemed interested in governing, but even he had to capitulate somewhat to a wacko legislature. State government workings naturally get less attention than the federal government, which can be both good (less scrutiny means less chance at extremists fanning the flames) or bad (less scrutiny means more opportunities to pander to lobbyists who don't have the public's interest in mind). So what's the solution?
To speak to Minnesota in particular, blue trifecta-ism is a very new experience. This rot takes time to set in. I'm actually *very* worried that the Minnesota GOP has recently become totally unserious and will not present a remotely palatable alternative to the DFL.
Illinois is a great example of a blue state that has a positive WAR Governor. I don't know whether he has a particular schtick beyond having an instinct to not wade into hot button issues, remedying the truly dreadful corruption taint that IL Dems have had fit years, and occasionally picking a fight with Chicago's mayor in broadly popular ways. You fix the civil service talent attracting issues downstream of that. So... Get lucky and hope someone ambitious but not cravenly so becomes the executive, I guess?
Yeah, seems like an outlier. Machines run on party hacks. You can't lifehack your way out of that problem by getting altruistic billionaires to run longshot candidacies and then competently govern for a decade or so.
IMO we're barking up the wrong tree here. The problem of one-party states is downstream of the fact that a nationalized two-party system is fundamentally incompatible with a federal structure. So, sure, change is incremental, there's no way to magically replace the 2PS with a multiparty democracy overnight; but we're already like 4-5 kludges downstream of a kludgy-ass system in the first place.
There simply *is no* magical 6th kludge that will make one-party states not be machines that run on hacks. Period.
So, I'm happy to game it out with you all, but the whole thing feels pretty futile to me. We already know the answer: Alaskan-style RCV+Top 4 is the most viable pathway towards loosening polarization and a multiparty future.
I hate to be that asshole in the corner saying that only extreme solutions will work... but when everyone else is trying to make "fetch" happen, I don't know what the hell else to do.
Is this kind of governance challenge greater in states with a single, dominant population center? I’m in Chicagoland and our dynamics are similar. The majority, centered in the city, tends toward patronage politics. The minority and non-urban members of the majority can lean towards obstructionism both because their constituents want it and for cultural reasons.
Off the top of my head, states where, like IL and NY, roughly 2/3 of the population lives in a single metro area would be Washington State, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Georgia.
It's probably worth noting that while 57% of Colorado's population lives in the "DRCOG" counties (Denver Regional Council of Governments), that's split across numerous different municipal governments. Only 12% of the population actually lives in the City and County of Denver (Denver being a combined city/county).
Yes. Although it’s true of all virtually all metro areas that the population of the city doesn’t really capture the population of what people think of as the city. And the split between the center city and the suburbs is somewhat arbitrary.
It's officially three metro areas of Ogden/SLC/Provo, but they are so close to each other on the Wasatch Front that I think Utah needs at least an honorable mention here.
Democrats would win more elections if they ditched their urbanist fetish and embraced the suburbs. It’s election time and yet, just last week, the Biden administration announced rigid new fuel economy standards that will require an average of 65 mpg by 2031. Is this what swing voters crave? Does the Biden administration know more about what kinds of cars suburban drivers want than GM, Toyota and Volkswagen? No. They are trying to socially engineer our lives even as they claim Trump will end freedom.
Democrats can be trusted to maintain the existing safety net and little else. The only issue on which they show any real initiative is climate— an issue on which virtually any plausible reduction in US emissions will have no visible effect.
Even if that's true most places, it's not true in *New York City*. It's a fraction of a percent of the country's land mass, 2.5% of the population. We can have one urban area for the people in the US that actually want to live in a city. Except apparently we can't, because the people that govern the city hate it.
I’m quite happy with my Honda Accord. When my son turns 16, In five years, I’ll give it to him and buy a plug in electric. But I’m not normal. Red blooded Georgia men of my class drive $60-70k trucks or SUVs. I’m sort of a suburban hippie. Sort of.
Also you're giving up the two things I like most about my actual minivan - sliding doors and separate seats ("Dad, he's touching my half of the seat") is less of a concern.
No one cares about fuel economy standards. This isn’t government social engineering. It’s not like a congestion charge that touches people’s daily life. If you think there’s a point to managing externalities, then this is a better way to do it than many.
The courts will likely neuter the fuel economy standards. But if this shit were a risky enforced, there would totally be electoral consequences.
The courts also saved Biden from trying to ban new federal leases for petroleum extraction. Conservative jurists appear to be the only adults in the room. Sad.
I’m not the first to mention this (nods to Ross Barken and Nick Rafter) but the political problem here is less of Long Island suburbanites - who have access to the continent’s best commuter railway system- but outer borough NYC residents living in transit deserts. In places like Utica Ave, your current transit option is a crappy bus - or even two- connecting to the subway. Of course a car looks a lot more appealing to that and congestion pricing was a slap in your face without any benefits. The IBX is a good plan, but even that is really for people who already have subway access. Failing to continue to expand the system with things like the Utica Ave subway or other expansions ins eastern Queens leads to predictable political problems like this, and it comes down to the MTA’s ridiculous costs which means that only things that benefit Manhattan make sense.
I think this is correct policy-wise but not politically. It’s not clear to me that anyone living near Utica Ave cares much, even while they’re affected. By contrast, people I talk to from Long Island really have drunk their own kool aid about how often they drive to “the city”.
But ultimately the same story holds because the LIRR is perhaps the worst-managed medium-sized transit agency ever, we just spent $11bm on East Side Access and got literally nothing for it, and it sure would help to be able to tell people “just take these perfectly functional, fast, comfortable LIRR trains instead of driving, you’ll even save time”.
What percentage of people there commute by bus? At least bus commutes will be improved, they don’t have to be crappy.
Also, I checked a random spot near the end of Utica Ave and the commute time both by car and bus+subway is showing around 1:10 right now. It is not a true transit desert if you have frequent buses.
As a sometimes bus rider (although not usually from Utica Ave), I support congestion pricing with the hope that it will make buses faster. The traffic makes buses excruciatingly slow.
"A larger issue here is that I continue to think most Democrats are excessively blasé about the crisis in blue state governance quality. Precisely because New York City and California feature such a high cost of living, they are populated almost exclusively by extreme outliers in terms of the value placed on the unique lifestyle amenities provided by those places. But when New Yorkers tell me they could never move to the suburbs of Raleigh, they’re not saying they would miss the high quality public services provided by their state government. New York State has more people than the Netherlands, a GDP per capita nearly as high as Qatar, and the same combined top state and federal income tax rate as Denmark. What are residents getting for that?"
This paragraph captures the core problem at hand. Calling for higher taxation without any accountability to deliver better services simply reeks of politics of envy and corruption (MTA purchase highlighted by NYPost, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/the-nonprofit-industrial-complex-and-the-corruption-of-the-american-city/). I hope Democrats take note else the marginal voter will stomach a crazy GOP who may not improve services, but will definitely keep the same/ reduce taxation.
The lack of accountability is huge. As a resident of Seattle, I'm very frustrated with the whole homelessness situation. We keep giving money to the same nonprofits that either don't measure their result or have really low success rates. When the public gets annoyed and demands to know why it doesn't seem to be getting better, we get scolded on how we're just not spending enough money. I have no problem spending more money, but it needs to be spent on stuff that works, not some politically-connected nonprofit.
In the end, the thing that seems to have helped the most is doing more sweeps. Activists complain that it disrupts people's lives, but the number of murders in these encampments has gone down significantly since we started sweeping more frequently. Honestly, more disruption in return for a significantly lower chance of getting murdered seems like a an acceptable tradeoff.
Seattle is covered in detail in the article I linked to above. It shows, and makes sense, that the nonprofits have a vested interest in keeping the problem alive. It ensures they get funded.
The low point has to be that initiative to eliminate visible homelessness downtown and at their first followup they'd only housed 13 people. Nobody thought they'd achieve the goal anytime soon, but 13 is just embarrassing.
There actually are quite a few more people getting housed than there were 2 years ago. We have finally gotten a significant number of units open in Long Term Supportive Housing that are taking folks off the street, usually the most visible. But because the system prioritizes folks who are part of sweeps and sweeps happen most frequently in wealthy neighborhoods that complain a lot, it isn't making much of a visible difference in poorer places and is actually concentrating areas of extreme poverty.
For example, we just opened up 300 units of long term supportive housing on Aurora just a few blocks from the day shelter where I work. You might think that would lead to less visible homelessness on Aurora which is one of the areas with extreme levels of homelessness and dangerous conditions. But only 25 of those units went to people who were previously homeless near Aurora. Instead, the King County Homelessness Authority gave those beds to folks caught up in sweeps in Magnolia, Ballard, Greenlake, etc. So it actually just brought another 275 folks in extreme poverty with significant behavioral health issues to an area which already had some of the highest levels.
Our day shelter and medical clinic have had an almost 75% increase in people accessing our services because most of these 275 people now have a roof but still need food, medical care, access to addiction treatment, counseling, social work service and still seek community and emotional support. It is more than we can handle and the moment and we are scrambling to figure out how to expand the space and/or hours to accommodate this population. I think similar things are happening downtown and other areas where these units are going up.
I'm a native Long Islander. The state has had a bipartisan governance crisis that goes back decades. It's relatively recent that it came under unified control.
Taxes in New York are too high. But there's two things you need to know: One is that property taxes went out of control under Republican local government. Nassau County spent decades being ruled by a GOP machine (that largely still exists, despite being temporarily exiled under Tom Suozzi and then Laura Curran). You still need a GOP vouch to get a county job. The other is that suburbanites in particular have resisted every change that would lower taxes. They refuse to rationalize or consolidate local government. On Long Island, you have the county, the city or town, and in many cases the incorporated village, and then special taxation districts on top, some of which primarily exist to provide patronage jobs. There are **127** school districts for Nassau and Suffolk counties, population 2.6M (compare to ONE school district for Fairfax County, VA, population 1.13M.) It's proven impossible to consolidate even the ones that are literally one-room schoolhouses. For much of the Island, district mergers would mean economic and racial integration, which are taboo. Villages' prime purpose is to control zoning, i.e. keep out poor people. Town boards resist pro-growth strategies, meaning no desperately needed apartments or higher density housing (because apartment tenants will "overload the schools"). Transit is a nonstarter and yet people complain about the traffic.
So I have cousins paying $20K+ in property taxes for a 3 bed split. It's absolutely absurd.
Fellow resident of Long Island.
To other commentators, can’t upvote this comment enough. This nails so much of it; spent entire time just nodding my head.
The only thing I’ll do is add a few things. I don’t think we realize how much Long Island political culture is driven by actual contempt for New York City. Like we can get into the history of Levittown but post WWII Long Island was created very explicitly as an “escape” from NYC. I think people on here would be surprised to know the almost pride some people have that they live 35 min train ride from Manhattan and haven’t been to NYC in decades. Point being, even though congestion pricing would affect an extremely small number of Long Island residents. The idea that Long Islanders would have to commit even a cent more for the benefit of NYC residents is just catnip for the worst local culture war demagoguery.
“I think people on here would be surprised to know the almost pride some people ha e that they live 35 min train ride from Manhattan and haven’t been to NYC in decades.”
Is this an East Coast thing more broadly? I have met plenty of folks in the Philadelphia and Baltimore suburbs who have the same attitudes towards their metropolitan centers. I cannot for the life of me understand what the source of that almost-pride is.
I wonder how this all would have played out if the Knicks were in the nba finals and New York was just filled with good vibes all around. Probably the same, but kinda funny alternative universe
The Mets winning the World Series in 1969 probably helped John Lindsay, arguably the worst mayor in NYC's modern history, get re elected. Not that Procaccino would have been a great mayor, but it took decades to recover from Lindsay.
Suburban contempt for inner cities is to an extent probably a universal thing. We can get into some of the reasons why (including some of the very real uglier reasons).
However, I have family in NJ and have lived in CT. I can say pretty definitively that an anti-NYC attitude is pervasive in Long Island way beyond what you see even in other NYC suburban counties. Even just going to a deli and waiting for a breakfast sandwich, it's actually kind of amazing how anti-NYC attitudes just start coming up in regular conversations around me.
> Suburban contempt for inner cities is to an extent probably a universal thing.
It doesn't exist where I live (a southeast Asian megalopolis of 13 million), so while it is certainly widespread in the West I probably wouldn't go so far as to say it is universal.
People who live in the inner city here are seen an unfathomably rich while people in the suburbs are most certainly not that.
Compounding that, general infrastructure (roads, markets, etc) means living in the suburbs usually sucks.
We also aren't (yet) anywhere close to Western levels of "my home is my castle" and people are accustomed to being very, extremely social at cafes, restaurants, etc, etc.
That said, we are in the early days of a transition to suburbia as those rich inner city people are aging and going "I can sell our multigenerational family house for enough to buy a villa in the suburbs and have enough money for us and all our children to never work again?"
So it is possible in 10-20 years we will see the emergence of a similar dynamic.
I think this is where the history of post WWII suburban planning in America needs to come in. I should clarify and say suburban contempt for cities is universal across America and not a NYC thing. But yes, I think you're right to correct and say this is uniquely an American thing. In fact, in places like Paris, the suburbs are actually where the tower blocks are located and are often quite a bit poorer than central Paris. The situation in Paris is almost inverted.
But yes American suburban planning was conceived with exclusivity very much in mind. So so much of how suburbs were promoted and still promoted are as an "escape" from the city and yes this probably a very American way of thinking.
I'd guess that three very American factors also played a part.
America is very large, so there's actually a space for suburbs to exist. To take another extreme: having suburbs in Singapore is nonsensical. But lots of other smallish countries have similar problems to a lesser degree I imagine.
America had uniquely well developed transportation infrastructure thanks to the postwar Interstate Highway system that made living 30km away from your work even remotely viable.
America was extraordinary rich so people could actually afford cars. I have a feeling that if I compared car ownership in the US in 1950 to France or Germany or the UK it would be pretty different.
I think, especially with the latter two, it's also why we've seen other countries become more car centric as they've become rich enough to build the infrastructure and for families to afford cars (most people in Europe drive to work, after all).
It's just that due to path dependency different places got locked in at various times. If you visit Australia it doesn't feel substantially different than America, for instance
Even in Japan something like 75% of people have a car, after all.
In NY a big factor IMO is people who were all but forced to leave for economic reasons. In Philly or whatever I can imagine someone chilling in the suburbs, thinking the city is gross (and/or containing black people), but in NY it’s “oh yeah, you’re gonna price me out? Well all you fools paying $2m for a house in Queens or $3m for a condo in Manhattan are the real suckers! You walk outside and you see homeless people! Garbage everywhere! Filth! Well, I don’t, I haven’t been to the city more than 3 times since I moved here. I see it on the NY Post website. Anyone who stays there for those prices is just out of their minds! I’m not angry at all! I’m just completely baffled by how any human being unless they’re an IDIOT LIBERAL would be willing to stay in the city and pay those taxes to be surrounded by FILTH and HOMELESS PEOPLE and GARBAGE and CRIME and CRIMINALS! I’M NOT MAD!”
I’ll never forget, I went to a friend’s wedding and got stuck talking to this boomer who moved to Florida from NYC 30 years before. He spent the whole time railing about crime and filth in Brooklyn! When I told him that Downtown Brooklyn had completely transformed and that townhouses there were going for several million (not that I could afford one to be clear) I could see him visibly hurt.
Lol yeah you nailed it. Anyone, just go read the NY Post comments and I sweartagod the top couple dozen of them are just this guy’s first paragraph.
It's got to be just racist Trump people. I grew up in Long Island and we went to the city all the time It was one of the entire benefits of being in Long Island. Why the hell are you paying so much money to be near one of the biggest cities in the world if you don't ever want to go near it?
We would go to Broadway shows, sports events, concerts, Just meet up with people around the state for dinner and drinks, etc
It's definitely partly that. I can say with confidence that Long Island Trump fans would a 1 seed in an NCAA tourney style bracket of most obnoxious Trump fans.
But I'll note again that my district is D+10 and is now represented by a Republican. The (hilarious) George Santos debacle sort of overshadowed how absurd the Democratic loss was for my House district. This is why Matt was being sympathetic to Hochul; my district should not be a GOP House district given demographics.
Which gets to your second point. There are plenty of people like me who commute to work and yes events in Manhattan. In fact, walking distance to the train is right near the top of the list of reasons my wife and I bought the house where we did. Plenty of people do actual use the train and love going to the city. Nassau and Suffolk County have just under 3 million people (should have more like 4 million if zoning wasn't so restrictive. The lack of any apartments near a number of LIRR stations is absolutely shameful). But this is where I push back against Matt. I think Matt (and Hochul) is wildly overestimating the number of people flipping their votes one way or another in November over this. If anything, it's going to lead to people like me wanting to primary Hochul in 2026.
You should primary her because she's basically solely responsible for Democrats losing the house two years ago
When I was born, my folks lived in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn; we moved out to LI when I was 9 and I loved the space. When the wearher got warm, you could find half of my high school's Senior class hanging out at Jones Beach.
On weekends, I'd take the train into Manhattan and go to the museums. It was like living near the world's greatest theme park!
When I was a little older, however -- and wanted to stay out late in the City -- I'd go by car. ;-)
Long Island Rail Road?
Dat's LAWN Guyland to you, buddy! ;-)
Baltimore and Philly are kind of famously unpleasant by reputation. Democrats love The Wire, and one clear takeaway from that show is “do not live in or near Baltimore if you have alternatives, it’s terrible.”
As a young person in the eastern corridor, who frequently sees many young people traveling to different cities in the corridor to live. Philly is viewed as dramatically more attractive than Baltimore.
But does Philly have a trashwheel?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-03/a-hitchhiking-canadian-robot-is-destroyed-in-philadelphia
We murdered Hitchbot.
Baltimore is famously unpleasant (although it in fact has nice areas). However, Philly doesn’t have that type of reputation.
Philly has improved a lot in the past decade or so, but I can say, growing up near there, it did/does have a bad reputation. High crime, a weirdly high amount of litter, and the job centers mostly being located in the inner suburbs instead of the CBD, have all contributed to the city's reputation as "Filthadelphia".
The city has improved quite a bit. It's one of the few big East Coast cities where you can build things. The city is investing in housing. Crime spiked, but is coming down. Even the litter is less bad now.
Have a good friend who lives in the Philly suburbs and I actually go to Philly a lot for work; can vouch for this. Don't think people realize that Vanguard is located kind of far out in the Philly suburbs near the "main line" (depending how you want to define "main line" neighborhoods).
But to your point, the transformation of places like "Fishtown" and Manayunk (not strictly Philadelphia, but very inner ring suburb for sure) is very real and speaks to how much Phiilly has gotten better over last 30 years.
But yeah crime is strikingly high given the median income, demographics and physical location. Like it really does seem like there is some Philadelphia specific reasons crime is higher than it should be and it's a real problem.
As someone who moved back to Philly in 2022 after several years in DC, I'm not sure the litter got any less bad. BUT we're early into a huge 13-wk citywide cleanup that was one of Mayor Parker's big initiatives during the campaign, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing what it looks like when they hit the bulk of Center City.
I'm one of these people who are almost-prideful about not visiting Philly, except I live about 6 hours away. (Meaning I think it does have a crummy reputation).
6 hrs away is Pittsburgh. Throwing shade at your competitor city from across the state isn't the phenomenon people are trying to describe here.
I used to work for a firm whose corporate was in the suburbs. I enjoyed my visits in-town. Big, interesting, walkable urban core with a lot of nice architecture and a great food scene.
I respectfully disagree re Philly but readily concede that I’d 100% need polling data to back that up with anything more than bar argument gut feeling and my own experiences with the city.
I’m not saying Philly is perfect, but Baltimore is another level. I was recently driving through a bad part of Baltimore and I couldn’t help thinking that I wouldn’t mind being in an armored vehicle. I’ve never felt that in Philly (although I can’t claim to have been in all of Philly’s sketchy areas).
Baltimore is not that bad. Annapolis has pushed bad policies (made it impossible to prosecute and punish juvenile crime.)
It's definitely not an East Coast thing. Detroit is the same way, at least for certain species of Oakland County and Macomb County suburbanite. (I grew up in Oakland County.) It was seen as either a mark of pride that you didn't go into the city or (more commonly) a mark of weirdness that you would ever go at all, akin to going to, like, Kazakhstan ("you went to Detroit? Why would you do that?"). (Note: For our purposes, crossing the city on the way to the airport did not count so long as you stayed on the freeway.) It's changed a bit more recently, but that was how things were for a long time.
I'll say just from my own experiences that in makes way less sense to feel this way about NYC vs. Detroit. A lot of people's mental image of NYC was formed in the late 70s when NYC really was in bad shape; movies like "Taxi Driver" and "Death Wish". I would bet that NYC was probably a lot shabbier in the late 70s than Detroit.
Given the extent of urban decay in Detroit that continued into the 80s, 90s and 2000s I do at least have some sympathy for people living Oakland county to ask why you would be going into Detroit. NYC very very famously had quite the rebound and drop in crime. It's also what got me so exasperated in 2022 when crime rose in NYC. Yes there were far left commentators with lots of Twitter followers who probably downplayed this crime rise way too much. But when people like the mayor of NYC said crime had never been worse in all his years, this was truly insulting to my intelligence.
But kind of more tragically, I know people who are not particularly anti-NYC and are not at all big Fox watchers or New York Post readers who have real hesitancy about going into NYC even now because of how much coverage there was in 2022 about NYC becoming out of control.
I attended a PA House of Representatives committee hearing a couple years ago where at the end of the hearing the Republican chair (who was admittedly from the other side of the state) said “wow, I’ve never been to Philadelphia and now I’m never going.” Which is a crazy thing to say about the economic engine of the state you are a government leader in.
Not sure if it's pride, but my parents are a 30 minute train ride from Philly and never go. I've lived here almost a month and still no visit from them lol
It’s a think wherever you had a heavily urban black population in the USA.
Actually we even have this in Central Florida - a loathing and hatred for Tampa, Orlando, Disney, etc.
As someone who knows more than 0 Long Islanders, particularly any over 40: trust me I know. 10x this if the Long Islander in question is a nurse, teacher, or cop working for the city. And while I think the attitude is unhealthy and immature and kind of pathetic, I understand where it comes from.
Matt (and a lot of coverage of this issue) is underrating how much the fact that Teacher's unions made noises about being congestion pricing is likely a huge part of the story here. https://www.nbcnewyork.com/traffic/transit-traffic/congestion-pricing-nyc-naacp-lawsuit/5249743/
A lot of those teachers likely commute from the suburbs by car. The "hilarious" part is most of these teachers teach at schools unaffected by the congestion pricing plan!. It's only for commuters going below 59th street in Manhattan. The vast majority of NYC public schools are located above 59th street and in the outer boroughs. It's insane.
Also, NAACP coming out against is kind of shameful to me. Again, this is part of the political pressure that Hochul can't ignore given demographics. But another case (I suspect) where particular high up officials in NAACP NYC chapters may drive to their job and are letting their personal annoyance guide what is a dumb stance.
Hot Take: Despite its long, proud history and the liberal pretenses of its contemporary rhetoric, the NAACP has mostly devolved into one of the last redoubts of conservatism and reactionism within the Democratic party. It basically serves to represent the interests of the right wing of the elder Black middle class.
In my city, the local chapter spends all their time basically as foot soldiers for harrassing the local Republicans (who play their part by mostly earning it!) and keeping them in their place of submission to the reigning Democratic machine.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of actual people of color here are suffering from a deep housing crisis and the chapter hasn't lifted a single finger.
But they don’t, though? Why would anyone, let alone people who take the LIRR, let alone people defined bu their contempt for NYC, drive into Lower Manhattan if they had alternatives? What dog do Long Islanders even have in this fight? Driving into downtown Manhattan routinely from LI may not quite be Not A Thing, but it’s pretty close.
One of the things that is true about LI is that it is basically totally cut off from the rest of the country by the location of NYC--which is a traffic nightmare 24 hours a day and takes an hour to traverse no matter what. In NJ or Westchester you can just drive the opposite direction from the city and end up in plenty of places that you might want to be. But Long Islanders are trapped, which has (IMO) driven them all insane--I'm not clear on the mechanism for this, maybe if they living in a different suburb they are the people who would have moved further out into the exurbs by now but they can't because there are no exurbs? It's a weird culture.
Yes, we sometimes say that no one goes in and no one goes out of long Island. When we plan statewide conferences, it is difficult to get long Islanders to attend, but when we hold one on Long Island, it is even harder to get anyone from other parts of the state to go. (I am speaking on Long Island in the fall and already dreading getting there.)
"One of the things that is true about LI is that it is basically totally cut off from the rest of the country by the location of NYC--which is a traffic nightmare 24 hours a day and takes an hour to traverse no matter what."
If you're trying to exit LI for the rest of the country, you avoid Manhattan for the traffic anyways. I don't think the Verrazzano Narrows bridge (I-278) or the Cross-Bronx Expressway (I-95) were included in the congestion pricing, so I don't understand the opposition.
EDIT: Alexis (nearby) has the answer: all the non-Manhattan bridges are tolled.
It didn't include the FDR either! You could cross the Brooklyn Bridge and drive up the East Side without paying the toll as long as your destination wasn't in Manhattan. But no one actually knows or cares what the rules are, it's all just vibes until it goes into effect and people try it out.
All those roads are heavily congested now. Imagine the traffic when they get the additional slice of traffic trying to avoid the congestion toll. It would screw up everyone's travel whether they are going to Manhattan or not. There was a brief flap in the environmental review process when the models revealed a massive increase in traffic and air pollution on the Cross-Bronx expressway (one of the worst highways in the nation). This is going to happen all over.
You can't get to the FDR directly from the Queensboro bridge though and I think that exit is tolled for CP
Would a car ferry service from like Port Washington to New Rochelle help?
Not really. There is a ferry from Port Jeff to Bridgeport but it's expensive. Robert Moses' original plan was to have 135 Continue to oyster bay and then a bridge linking it to 287 at Rye, but the rich people blocked that. And even if a ferry were feasible, residents would block any traffic increase leading to the ferry.
Hochul should trade congestion pricing for that often dreamed about bridge/tunnel to Westchester/ Connecticut.
Trust me. They do. And if they don’t, they want to be able to. It’s principle. Long islanders resent how much it costs to drive off the island. Congestion pricing cuts off the only toll free route.
I feel like if you can afford to live on Long Island and you’re adding 40 minutes to your commute to avoid a $6.50 toll on the Throg’s Neck or whatever you’re Doing It Wrong.
Look at how much effort people put in to avoid taxes or how many business try to lower their tax bill and end up making poor business decisions as a result. For example, moving to a location that actually doesn't make much business sense long term even if short term you're lowering tax bill.
Point being, I feel like there is some PH.D paper to be written about how any government fee, whether taxes or tolls or..a fee has a very particular effect on personal behavior. The amount of time and effort to avoid small taxes I feel like very often is so not worth it as you allude to. And yet it seems to a very common American phenomenon. I feel like there is a very particular American sensibility that finding a way of avoiding a tax or a fee is like some weird psychological victory that influence so much behavior. Even if the actual remunerative victory is often not worth it.
Looking this up on Google Maps, is it accurate that all of the non-Manhattan bridges are tolled, but multiple Manhattan ones are not?
Correct. The Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges are not tolled. All other crossings are.
All Hudson River crossings are toll, though the toll is only paid in one direction (entering Manhattan).
Is there a way to get from west of the Hudson to Long Island without a toll? I guess you could drive up to the Bear Mountain Bridge, then take the Taconic south, then take a non-Henry Hudson bridge into Manhattan, then take the 59th St. Bridge into Queens? At a certain point it gets ridiculous. There are a lot of tolls in NY.
Fear of the train and fear of the subway. It’s more than that, but it’s a big one.
I noted back in November, 2022 that every single day and I mean every single day, the New York Post had a blaring headline about crime on the subway being out of control. So you say to yourself, well how many people read the Post who are swing voters? Not many. But those news papers are the first thing you see at any 7/11, any bodega, any cvs and any convenience store. Which is where the Post’s famous giant headlines are so important. Everyone just living their daily lives sees those headlines.
To back up with data. A datapoint I’ve brought up before. There is one PA district in 2022 that shifted right from 2020 to 2022. It’s the one district in PA located in the NYC media market. Just a striking natural experiment in the power of unearned media. And one of the datapoints as to why I am so furious that leadership of the Times has put its thumb on the scale against Biden at apparent personal pique that Biden won’t do an interview. I think we really underrate the second and third order effects of news coverage beyond the direct effect of people actually watching a tv news show or reading an article.
"I am so furious that leadership of the Times has put its thumb on the scale against Biden at apparent personal pique that Biden won’t do an interview."
I keep seeing this repeated, but I don't understand why Biden won't just do the interview?
Everyone acknowledges that the NYT is the premier newspaper in the US, and is one of the most important journalist outlets in the country. 99.999% of every other Democratic politician in the country would love to get a sit down interview with the NYT - but while Biden will go on Howard Stern, he won't do a sit down with the NYT? You can be outraged by the NYT's leadership, but shouldn't you be at least a bit outraged by Biden being so foolish?
We all know why he isn't sitting for the interview.
My brother-in-law (who grew up in Queens, by the way) is absolutely convinced that NYC is a crime ridden hellscape. Because of the headlines.
(Oops hit enter) -- no amount of data from me can convince him, or the other long islanders I know. THIS is why bail reform failed. It wasn't progressives. There may have been some tweaks needed, but reform worked in NJ. In New York, the PBA and SBA came out swinging and the Post was right there to back them up. Dermot Shea even admitted to the legislature that bail reform hasn't caused a crime wave. I have my own gripes with DSA and Justice Dems, but contrary to the radical centrist takes they're not always wrong.
The Post didn't make up the revolving door stories. They just reported them, when it was beneath the notice of the other papers.
Ding, ding ding.
You're fooling yourself if you think it's all media. Crime is not even the most important thing. The subway is just slow. I live in New York City itself, and it takes more than an hour to get to and from the theatre district from where I live, including a bus transfer, and probably 20 minutes more late at night when the buses run infrequently. I'm getting on in years, and I'm not going to do that trip after getting out of theatre at 10:30pm. I just won't go. Many people like me will do the same, and the impact will be devastating on the cultural life of the city, which relies on people like me to pay the bills so they can create edgy art.
People are loss averse and see the loss of options, even those they would never take, negatively.
1) no one in Long Island wants to admit to themselves that they’re not a New Yorker anymore. Even if they’ve gotten lazy and only show up to a Manhattan restaurant twice a year, they want to tell themselves that any day now they’re going to get back into things and go out more, etc. The congestion fee is too on the nose in that regard (of course these people have convinced themselves that only lower Manhattan is “The City”, and really have no reason to be offended more than someone like me living in Brooklyn - but this whole train of thought is irrational enough already.)
2) the elephant in the room is cops and nurse and teachers and state bureaucrats who live in the suburbs and commute to the city. I don’t think many cops at all actually live in NYC. (Note that Eric Adams was living in NJ.) These people get all manner of parking carveouts too, ranging from legal but questionable (dedicated signed sidewalk parking for teachers in front of schools) to blatantly illegal (cops who stick a placard in their windshield and park on the sidewalk itself, taking up the entire block.) Congestion fee will hit them directly - in fact they may be the primary group it extracts revenue from. I don’t know the numbers for certain, but based on the lack of carveouts for them, I lean towards that guess.
It may be worth just a thought that many of the people who live on Long Island are the children and grandchildren of people who were driven out of a collapsing New York City in the 1970's, for which (with considerable justification) they blame on urban liberal politicians. It should not surprise anyone that they don't want to see that happen to them a second time, and the failure to see that coming is simply political malpractice. That they don't like the soup is the fault of those who cooked it.
I just looked at the maps of those school districts, and...my eyes want to bleed now.
https://u.realgeeks.media/nylongislandrealestate/Nassau-County-School-District-Map.jpg
https://u.realgeeks.media/nylongislandrealestate/Suffolk-County-NY-School-District-Map.jpg
My wife is fond of using the phrase Long Island has "too much government". But what she means is exactly this; there's just too many districts, municipalities etc. You have maps of school districts, but I can't tell you how much these leads to way too many cops. I know Matt is fond of noting that more cops on the street really is probably a key to keeping crime under control; a general principle I can agree with. But Long Island is the place where you can see how like anything else this can go too far.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out a very underrated key to Long Island that my wife will emphasize. So, so much of development in Long Island is centered around whether or town has a sewer system or if a sewer system can be implemented.
I've long thought that a counter to "we need less government" is "we need fewer governments".
Vote more often, for fewer positions!!
My hometown of STL has this same problem. 100 municipalities in a county that refuses to merge back with the city. Constantly cannibalizing each other.
Just spent two years in STL recently (came from and returned to NYC with my partner, who is from Webster) and man, the differences in public services, and a million other things, between where we lived—in Shaw, by the Botanical Gardens—and her mom’s neighborhood in Webster were wild. We had multiple snowstorms followed by deep, sub-0°F freezes, and the City simply did not plow secondary residential streets (y’know, the ones people live on), so they turned to skating rinks *fast*. Meanwhile back in Webster—in fact, noticeably on I-44 as soon as you cross the City/County border—the roads were pristine by comparison, even on little cul-de-sacs like her mom lives on. And at the same time as *that*, the roads in, say, U City or a similar suburb, were somewhere in between. And not just the roads: every aspect of life varied in quality based on what patch of jurisdiction it took place on, in a more noticeable way than I’ve experienced elsewhere.
Now, though, the thing I’ve become fascinated with in STL is the extent to which St. Charles is cannibalizing St. Louis County. Covid just absolutely murdered downtown STL, and it’s kind of an open question (I think?) how much it will ever come back from that hit—which then raises the question of whether it really matters that living in St. Charles County means you’re halfway to the friggin’ boonies, because what are you going to the City for anyway? Even things like hospitals and so on are being built/have long existed out in West County, so it just looks kinda grim for the City of St. Louis, especially when you consider that unlike NYC, it really *does* have a massive crime problem. I loved a lot of things about Shaw—especially Tower Grove Park, which I still miss even though I live in a part of Queens with a nice park in it—but I’d be hesitant to plunk down money on a house there, because even a nice neighborhood like that had real crime problems (property crime and some amount of violent crime, though the latter was more concentrated south of the park).
Anyway, not to bang on endlessly here but man, I became very very fond of the people of St. Louis, and it bothers me that they’re having to sit there with that level of dysfunction. I sincerely hope, and on good days believe, that there’ll be a big post-Covid comeback—maybe not downtown, but other parts of the City are doing better already and will continue to improve. Downtown does seem like a problem, though.
Matt wrote a post a while back making the argument that the cities that will struggle most post Covid would be Midwest cities that were already in decline. Reason being is commercial office rents will likely decline everywhere as some aspect of WFH will be permanent. Long term this could be a boon for places like NYC as more firms will be able to locate to places like Midtown Manhattan or FiDi.
But precisely because rents will likely drop, it means a lot of cities with already low rents may lose a lot of office tenants and as result exacerbate an already steady decline. Reality is a lot companies have “back office” jobs in cities away from “superstar” cities precisely because these jobs are not worth the high rent. But if rents drop then the reason to locate certain “back office” jobs in smaller cities kind of disappear.
I think unfortunately for Matt, he used this as a jumping off point to title a post “Chicago is doomed” and his message got lost. I suspect because Chicago is the 3rd biggest city still (though Houston seems poised to overtake it) and Chicago has more cultural cache than any other midwestern city, he focused his argument on Chicago. For a variety of reasons I think focusing on Chicago was a mistake (I feel like Matt underestimates how rich Chicago really is. Take a look its GDP compared to other cities). But is underlying argument I thought had merit and I suspect your description of St. Louis makes for a much more compelling example of Matt’s point (see also a good WSJ article about office space vacancies in St. Louis).
Yeah, I hate having to agree, but I always thought Matt's Chicago take was more apt for STL, too.
However, I think a lot still hinges on both the *differential* rates of rent drops and the current absolute levels. STL is already at a really low level, which still makes it a good "back office" city. Right now, though, the county is having a construction boom, which will KEEP the rents ever lower, even as other cities are struggling to keep up and seeing their rents rise.
The biggest contradiction right now is that the city itself still has PLENTY of cultural cachet, but the county is where the stability is and where the construction is happening. Conversely, the county is a cultural hellhole, while the city is basically deserted and dangerous.
So, there's no real reason BESIDES cheapness for an outside company to relocate into STL county. And no company wants to locate to the city.
What the county needs is an actual industry to attract companies. And right now, the fastest-growing industry is the construction business itself! But that's the ONLY one, really. STL basically has JUST THIS ONE SHOT to take advantage of the local and national construction booms and try to turn that into an actual engine that will rescue them from the "doom". And the only thing really going for them right now is that the county has this oddly libertarian bent that is somehow keeping the NIMBYs *juuuuuuust* enough at bay that MAYBE they could pull off a hard pivot to some Strong Towns action and make it all work out.
But that's a 1-in-1000 shot. I'm not holding my breath.
My BFF back home works for one of the big contractors that's putting up 5-over-1's, and he says STL has among the highest construction rates of those in the country. It's also the HQ for his company, which is THE largest in the country at like 20% of the 5-over-1 market.
I think *that* is the sliver of hope to hang our (hard!) hats on here. STL could essentially build itself out of a housing crisis that was never all that deep there to begin with, densifying its suburbs into prosperity, and then eventually that prosperity would bleed back into the city.
And what I mean by that last bit is, if you get enough growth out in the county, eventually all those people get sick of having a handful of relatively nice things so far away in the city. At that point, they face a choice: either (A) pour county resources back into the city, or (B) cannibalize the city and start building big attractions and shit in the county.
I think that (B) is probably more likely for people to WANT to do, but also extremely difficult to actually do -- since the county will already be densified-up and have a lot of space that people won't want to ruin for things like a new honkin stadium -- so what ends up happening is that the county just muddles through (A): they exert a crap-ton of pressure on the city to clean up the touristy areas first, then once the city proves that it can do that, they tentatively start putting more county resources into expanding those "green zones" (so to speak).
At least, that's the optimistic version!
Yep. I grew up in Huntington. No sewers in most of the town. And I’m convinced that the continued refusal to have them is about preventing any development. It’s a town of over 200K, for gods sake.
My city's NIMBYs are currently obsessed with blaming recent development for the fact that our treatment plant occasionally gets overwhelmed by storm surges. Nevermind that we're barely at 10% capacity most of the rest of the time, it's definitely all the durned apartments' fault.
Stormwater surges are a real issue in a lot of areas right now and they create infrastructure challenges and do quite a bit of ecological damage. Typically this isn't as simple as "we built too many apartments and now have stormwater surges so we should stop building apartments," but I think YIMBY activists should be prepared to address this.
As someone who is YIMBY because of the need for more affordable housing and someone who does a lot of enviornmental volunteer work that is directly impacted by stormwater surges, I think that there are a lot of solutions to this that don't require reducing density.
For the most part, increased storm water surges are being caused by two different problems interacting. First, climate change has frequently led to weather pattern changes where areas get more extreme weather events with fast heavy rain fall and drought rather than more frequent smaller rain storm that most systems were set up to handle. Second, there really are issues in many areas with too much of the area being made up of impervious surfaces that rain runs off of rather than soaking into the ground.
The results of this can be manifold. Groundwater supplies require recharging from rainfall and surface water that has time to soak in and these run off events led to reduced groundwater supplies that are problematic for longterm water supply. These surges often also dump chemicals in to surface water like lake and streams and will wash away stream beds in ways that can reduce wildlife survival, especially fish stocks. (In Seattle this is a huge challenge for Salmon recovery which is where I interact with it.) These rushes of water often also damage water systems and even surface infrastructure.
On one level, most multifamily building lots have a large percentage of impervious surfaces than your typical single family home. However, the largest percentage of impervious surface on almost any residential lot is going to be the roof of the primary dwelling and apartment dwellers typically have less roof per person than your average single family home so blaming them is a bit irrational unless you just want to move problematic storm surges farther out into the suburbs.
Apartment buildings can also do a lot of low cost things to reduce their impact. For example, adding a cistern to a building that collects rainwater during storms and the releases it slowing through drip houses to water landscaping typically is going to cost less than 10K and will likely pay for itself over the long run in water bill savings. A single family home could do something similar with a cistern but it would cost the same amount or use rain barrels which are less expensive but also less effective because of reduced volume. Building can also landscape with rain gardens and add green roofs which are are not always as easy to single family homes to incorporate. New buildings can also pave areas around the building with more pervious materials like pavers with gravel in between or pervious asphalt. This doesn't actually cost significantly more and it is more cost effective to put this in during initial construction that to have a bunch of individual dryways at single family homes pulled up and replaced.
As a general rule, a new multifamily building with reasonable low cost runoff mitigation is going to be better for the stormwater situation that infill on lots or expansion of single family home areas. If there is concern that these low cost mitigation efforts are going to curtail development, it could be that these are paid for with community grants given that it probably the best bang for your buck to do this with new large construction. Personally, I don't get the sense that these mitigation requirements actually do curtail development. Having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on building an underground parking garage or losing living space to having to have two exit hallway systems are huge ticket items but most folks getting ready to put up a few million to build a multifamily unit probably aren't going to be deterred by having to spend $10K on water mitigation as part of the construction, especially since these also reduce water intrusion issues for the building itself and save on water bills for the groundskeeping.
I think folks with legit storm water concerns should have those concerns addressed with regard to new construction but should also have their focus redirected at changing the way they and their fellow single family home neighbors are managing their storm water. Unless they all have installed at least rain barrels for all downspouts they really need to shut the fuck up about what anyone else is doing particularly folks looking to build more housing.
Even if they do have rain barrels, there are tons of things they could be doing with their landscaping decision for themselves and with their neighbors that are more useful that NIMBY input at meetings.
If they are super concerned they could nerd out like me and join the volunteer core of the city or state department of wildlife and fisheries and spend their weekends setting up "energy disruptors" along paths to water systems and during beaver habitat restoration work in green spaces.
In the long run, for most places in North America outside of extreme deserts, reintroducing beavers and allowing them to recreate the natural water systems that captured storm surges and redirect them to ground water is the most impactful thing they could be encouraging their communities to do and hanging out with Beavers is a way more satisfying way to spend your evening that bitching at community meetings.
I love the idea that beavers could save us all.
Thanks for the cistern idea! I'm going to put that in the ears of the local chattering class, not that they listen to me anyways. It's probably the best solution for our town, since it'd be low-cost and they're currently casting about for ways to mitigate surges.
It's striking to me the difference between town center of Huntington and Huntington Station. Love the town center of Huntington; awesome place for restaurants. But that's what Huntington Station should look like. The lack of apartments and small business around Huntington Station is astonishing; like they exist but nowhere near the numbers they should. Huntington station should look like Huntington town center.
Also, classic example of "other side of the tracks" which unfortunately is probably why this development and upzoning doesn't happen. I mean, look at some of the awful and asinine rhetoric here. https://nysfocus.com/2023/07/27/huntington-long-island-housing-new-york
I remember this. It was batshit insane. And people refuse to believe they're pricing their own kids off the island. The history of Huntington forcing all rentals into Huntington station is long and gross, and so is how people react to the area.
Yeah that difference is quite shocking, as a Queens resident who visits Huntington to see friends who live there. They live about halfway between the two, walking distance to the train and to Huntington town center, and yeah, you’re absolutely right. I’m not actually sure which hamlet they live in, but they’re in an apartment, so maybe HS? I dunno, it’s a perfectly pleasant spot, and Huntington is easily one of the nicest towns I’ve been to on LI, but yeah, the anti-apartment sentiment out there causes crazy distortions. I really don’t relate to it, but your and others’ various comments in this thread do an excellent job of outlining the historical and sociological motivations behind it.
Some assemblyman-type of local political figure had a booth at a festival a while back, and I tried to tactfully say “hey, why don’t we build more housing on Long Island?” He brought up the sewer/septic issue, which honestly I had never heard of or considered before in other places I’ve lived. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that so much of LI is “old suburbia” that dates back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, while other places I’ve lived (Northern Virginia, North Carolina) have boomed and developed more recently and don’t have the same infrastructure issues.
There is also a water issue, the aquifer is limited in size. Closer-in parts are on the city system, but the rest can only develop so much.
I live in NC in a county with a huge school system spread across a large land area. This leads to a different set of logistical challenges (school bus rides to magnet schools - generally used for voluntary integration - can be over an hour, weather events in one part of the county close all the schools even when some are not affected, transportation is inefficient and budget is too high, too few bus drivers to meet demand), but the upside is we don't have the crazy house price inflation related to being in the one tiny district with a good school (we do have some "better" schools with houses that cost somewhat more than others). People who come here from up north want to replicate their many small township/village districts to solve our big-county problem. I think that would be disastrous. However, we could probably stand to be two districts for practical reasons, but the political fight over how that would be allocated would be epic.
Is it CMS? Sounds like CMS…
Nope, the other huge county. And I grew up in Florida in another such county. Same issue. I still think it's better than the micro school districts of the NE, but that's only by reputation.
Yikes. Even PA had the guts to forcibly merge some school districts (although the results might still cause your eyes to bleed). Edit: https://williampennfoundation.org/what-we-are-learning/politics-educational-change-what-can-we-learn-school-consolidation-acts-1961
I live in Pennsylvania now and while our districts are dumb, they got nothing on Long Island. At least most Pennsylvania districts follow borough or township boundaries. On Long Island someone just drew a line through a potato field. I know some cases where the boundary literally goes through people’s houses. Back in the day the only way to know where the line was was to buy a Hagstrom map. There are actually people who get to decide which district to attend because their property straddles the line.
What taxes to which districts do the property straddlers pay?
I"ll just say, "loaded" question, lol.
But you can definitely see it in house prices. I'd argue (and curious if Alexis agrees), the most infamous town boundary in Long Island is the one separating the "town" of Hempstead with the "village" of Garden City*. There is absolutely a traffic light on Clinton Street that might be best visual represenation of "other side of the tracks" I've ever seen; one side houses going for north of $1MM minimum (likely more), other side edge of the poorest neighborhoods in Nassau County.
My point being, this "town" of Hempstead has houses way way way more expensive than other Hempstead houses because technically they are located in the Garden City school district. It's really stunning to witness in front of you the change from one street to the next.
* So the "town" of Hempstead also refers to an amalgamation of towns that total over 750,000 people in population and makes in the largest "town" in America. Another example of the absurdity of government functions in Long Island.
Towns on Long Island are more equivalent to midwestern townships. In New York State, every place not in an incorporated city is in a town. The state would be well served by city town amalgamation and mergers imo.
I don’t know if I have them ranked, but if I did, that boundary would be up near the top. Incredibly stark racial and economic segregation. Pretty sure Garden City code enforcement still harass Black people too.
Here's what I see on Zillow, with my likely poor attempt of drawing the school district boundary:
https://i.ibb.co/yVy4gqR/image.png
This also reminded me of way back in the day when Bill O'Reilly described himself as being from Levittown, while others said he was really from Westbury, as I see those towns just due east.
Re: “There are **127** school districts for Nassau and Suffolk counties, population 2.6M (compare to ONE school district for Fairfax County, VA, population 1.13M.)”
Economic research does *not* support the idea that large school districts are more efficient.
If you dig in to the research on district size vs. costs per student, what you generally see is that after adjusting for a bunch of demographic and geographic factors, there’s a U-shaped cost curve in which both tiny and large districts cost more per student and there’s an efficiency “sweet spot” in the middle.
But the “sweet spot” is at a much smaller point than you might think!
For example, a report from the Center for American Progress arguing for merging tiny districts is quick to note that “Research suggests that the optimal school-district size is around 2,000 students to 4,000 students.” https://www.americanprogress.org/article/size-matters-a-look-at-school-district-consolidation/
A different study on PA says: “Findings from this study suggest the optimal school district size in Pennsylvania is between 6000 and 7000 students” https://www.jstor.org/stable/48642625
Each study or meta-analysis out there has slightly different numbers, but all of them are on this magnitude of smallness.
Districts like Fairfax County (or NYC!) almost certainly suffer from significant diseconomies of scale. For Long Island, there absolutely may be some tiny districts that would see cost benefits from consolidation, but many are likely just fine and would become more inefficient if merged. Caution is needed with this stuff. Also, a lot of efficiency gains can be gotten through shared-services agreements rather than needing full consolidation.
Point two: Long Island has incredibly high levels of residential and educational segregation, and the small district boundaries mean districts "tip" and go into white flight very quickly. In my opinion, district mergers are needed to smooth this out. You have districts that are 90% Black and Latino across the street from ones that are 90% white/asian. Of course, racial equity is exactly why many long islanders do not want mergers. "Local control" is the euphemism for racial control.
I was just talking about economic efficiency. I totally agree with you that there are other relevant things to consider too, and that residential segregation (and school segregation) is a problem!
I don’t think county level districts would be ideal — I’m using them as a contrast. But 127 is really too high. I’m a little skeptical of those numbers to be honest, simply from figuring out how few students you’d have in the high school with a student population of 2,000. I live in one of the largest districts in PA and we still have only about 10,000 students — and one of the lowest per student expenditures in the state. From experience I can tell you that you start having issues with special education when you get small, too.
Yes, but this might reflect affluence. You need to get really detailed with data to try to distill the effect of the schools themselves from advantages conferred by intake. In recent years FCPS is considered to be outperforming MCPS for various reasons. I don't have data (or expertise) to discuss economic efficiency. I will say that a good friend of mine moved from Cobb County (GA) -- considered one of the best districts in GA, and quite affluent -- to Fairfax... and soon learned that Cobb had managed to let her kid get to 7th grade with undiagnosed dyslexia. FCPS figured it out within the year, and during the pandemic at that. But when you get into special education, everything changes. I will say that FCPS is able to offer a spectrum of programs I could only dream about.
I don't think hyper local government is the problem so much as *redundant* local government.
I live in Connecticut, where we also have hyper local government in the form of the Town. But it's just one, simple town government. There's no county gov, separate "village," etc. I think it is ideal. Town level is the perfect size government to accomplish meaningful goods like public safety, parks, and schools but still small enough for people to feel like they have a real voice and stake for their money. We pay 10k a year in Newtown on a 4brdroom colonial. I think it's worth it - and we send our kids to private school. I don't mind paying taxes to the public schools because these are my neighbors, I know the schools are well run, and the quality of the public schools brings us all up.
I would absolutely NOT be ok with paying taxes like that to a consolidated "Fairfield County" government where the money got sucked up by a bunch of crooks and patronage jobs in Bridgeport and where my vote and voice matters much less.
I can see the appeal of consolidating hyper local government, but I think one of the reasons New England has so much more buy in compared to the South when it comes to public services is the town system (combined with a history of relative racial homogeneity) facilitates much more trust in local government than a large county (with high levels of racial diversity). It's a lot easier to convince people to give money to government officials they personally know and socialize with and have commonalities with than to get people to hand over money and power to a distant bureaucracy whose community loyalties might be less certain.
And yes, this has a racial / socio economic element to it. I'm not saying that racial aspect is good or bad, just saying it is what it is, and all these Good White New England Liberals take for granted that they would hold the same politics even if they didn't live in very white states with folksy, responsive local governments.
"On Long Island, you have the county, the city or town, and in many cases the incorporated village, and then special taxation districts on top, some of which primarily exist to provide patronage jobs."
This is exactly how all of Illinois is.
Goddamn. In Brooklyn I pay half that in property taxes for, well, not a 3 bed split. Makes me feel better about my city income taxes.
I’m pretty pro decent amount of taxes to pay for more services; trains, good schools and yes even pensions.
But the poster actually compliments Matt’s main point; it’s really hard to defend high taxes when it’s going to places I can’t even see and to the commentator’s point, going to fix the mistakes of decades of GOP misgovernance.
Can’t emphasize this enough; on Presidential level, Long Island has become swingy and may now lean a bit left. But locally GOP still has way more power and control. We associate machine politics with Democratic Party given history of Chicago and NYC; but it’s actually a pretty universal phenomenon across both parties.
Indeed, and although people get annoyed whenever I bring this up, I think that the poster also unwittingly highlights one of the arguments Strong Towns makes about the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme.
Those suburbs have high taxes because they're among the most mature in the country, and they were built on debt without a realistic model for paying for ongoing maintenance. This reality gets hidden from them because the whole thing collapses if people actually understand that their white picket fences are financially unsustainable. It's easier to let them believe that their huge tax bills are from some distant, unaccountable, alien government that is robbing them.
I think it's a both-and
Is the issue locally that no one pays attention to local elections? Traditionally “the taxes are too damn high!” is a popular pitch, and on Long Island / Westchester it seems like it’s probably *right* as a matter of substance. Surely not everyone in town can be o the county payroll taking in each others’ laundry, right?
So politicians talk about lower taxes but don’t do it. The biggest segment of taxes is the school tax. You can vote the budget down and sometimes that happens. But then the state law kicks in. You get the mandated austerity budget (which might still have a tax increase, because the contracts don’t change). Then everyone screams about no sports and limited busing and they put the budget up for a revote and it usually passes.
IMO it's mostly actually the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme at work.
And before you dismiss me, consider this: We KNOW that the homevoters who hate the taxes are the ones who are the MOST overrepresented in the local elections!
So, WHY in the WORLD would these governments continue doing the ONE thing they are the MOST painfully aware that their MOST active constituents hate the MOST?
[Addendum: I mean, we both know that municipal government is fundamentally broken, but we're talking about the LEAST broken part here! It just doesn't make sense for the least broken part to have the most glaringly obvious contradiction -- it'd be like seeing a shitty McDonald's run by an absolute tyrant of a manager, except none of the employees were afraid of him. Sure, it's a shitty McDonald's, so everything in it is shitty to SOME extent, but there's still just GOT to be a reason why no one's afraid of the big asshole manager, because employees at every OTHER company in the world are ALWAYS afraid of asshole managers.]
The only explanation that makes sense is "because they know they HAVE to do it anyways". The SGPS means they have no other choice than to stick their constituents with a huge tax bill. But it also means they're MAXIMALLY incentivized to obfuscate the true reasons for the huge tax bill; if they admit that it's the SGPS, well, their constituents don't want to hear that because they paid for *suburban* housing. It's easier to blame some distant government and generalized "waste".
I don't think this entirely explains the school tax problem, though. The increases in costs here are much easier to analyze. And on Long Island, reason #1 is that teachers are very well paid, with average salaries in many districts in six figures. Also, NYSTRS is fully funded, unlike some states with unfunded pension liabilities, though the most recent class (youngest teachers) got screwed by the formula. You also have constantly increasing healthcare costs.
The salaries, pension, and healthcare costs are ultimately driven by NIMBYism. If you don't build enough housing, teachers' and healthcare workers' costs go up.
Very locally, if you have moved there for the schools you are probably not trying to cut the school budget. Your village budget is probably pretty small in comparison, and of course you want some cops, garbage collection, etc.
As you get up to the county and state level, the party allegiance kicks in. Heck, the GOP voters are sometimes discouraged just because they know they have such an uphill battle in NY.
I know more than one person who worked out that it would be cheaper to pay income tax in Queens than property taxes in Nassau. All depends on your income bracket and house, of course.
Yeah the savings comes from not paying private school tuition(s) though.
To be fair this makes Westchester and Nassau county tax rates even more insane. I want to basically shake whoever is in charge of setting them by the lapels and just shout repeatedly “Selection Effects Are Doing All the Work! You Don’t Need High Taxes!”
But the high taxes are a big driver of the selection effect…
I’m pretty sure that housing prices alone + higher minimum lot size and lower density is doing all the work. A 2% property tax is insane but you’re not going to lose selection effect benefit by catering to nine hunred fifty thousand-aires instead of just millionaires.
bit of a tangent, but how magical are the selection effects versus "this is how the selection effects operate"?
Like obviously there is a benefit to getting my kid into a school that is very safe and has plenty of AP classes and lots of other smart peers for them to engage with. I don't believe you can just say it's irrelevant where my kid goes to school.
It’s pretty irrelevant where your kid goes to school as long as they are with peers with parents who care.
I bet you Yung Wing school in Chinatown, with 51% low income student body and a 9/10 rating doesn’t do much in the way of special resources compared to any average New York City public school.
https://www.greatschools.org/new-york/new-york/2416-Ps-124-Yung-Wing/
Yes but you pay city income tax.
You should definitely not consider the Fairfax county system to be good. It's insane that an entire giant county of over a million people are in one school system and the entire school system shuts down because one random kid on a farm can't access the bus that day.
It seems good everyone is in the school system together. The saner thing is to not do snow days for everyone just because a single rural resident can’t get to school that day.
Nelson Rockefeller and George Pataki were the biggest spending governors of my lifetime. And while I know that people in LI love to bash the MTA, the only reason it exists at all is that Nelson Rockefeller needed a vehicle to fix the then notoriously unreliable Long Island Rail Road - and he did, using toll revenue from NYC.
New York City is one school district for a population of over eight million. One high school in Brooklyn has six thousand students. There are actual economies of scale in running larger schools and larger school districts. We also aren't as allergic to development here in NYC. As a result, property taxes for homeowners in NYC (I am one of them) are much lower than in the suburbs.
"New York City is one school district for a population of over eight million. One high school in Brooklyn has six thousand students. There are actual economies of scale in running larger schools and larger school districts."
NYC has some of the most expensive public schools in the country spending more than double, budgeting over 38k per student next year compared to national average of 15k.
Actually NYC isn't even close to the highest per pupil expenditures in New York State! The really expensive ones are typically the smallest.
In addition to the high cost of living that requires higher salaries for teachers, there is also the issue that pension fund contributions in NY get charged to the per pupil expenses. In many other states, the politicians simply reallocate what should be the pension fund contributions to their pet projects or to tax cuts. That doesn't happen in New York. The unions make sure that any politician irresponsible enough to suggest such has his political career terminated at the next election. Would that were the case everywhere in the US.
I'm not saying there aren't other more expensive districts in NY, just that the economies of scale run into some real hard problems when its more than TWICE the national average in the densest city with the largest school district in the US. Nor can you assign the blame primarily to pensions since pension and benefits make up less than 20% of the budget. That wouldn't *double* the cost.
Pensions and benefits are 19% -- those don't get accounted for in most other places (in part because most states simply don't bother to fund the pensions, and in part because in some places they come out of a completely separate non-education budget). Charter and nonpublic school funding is 15%. In most places that also doesn't get accounted for in the local school budgets. (And in some places those expenses do not exist at all.) Pre-K services are 5%. Those programs aren't publicly funded in most places. Debt payments are 9%. In many places, that doesn't appear in the school district budget at all because the obligation to pay off the bonds isn't with the school district but with some other government body that actually has taxing power (unlike the NY City school system). Also not accounted for in most places.
Basically you are comparing apples to a fruit basket. NY gets trashed a lot but the budgets really do cover all the costs.
Now add in the fact that salaries are 50% or more higher. Try paying NYC teachers what they make in Mississippi. It doesn't work.
You can deny the economies of scale but they are real. The dozens and dozens of school districts in NY State that have much higher per pupil expenditures are all smaller, mostly much smaller, than New York City.
Does Long Island even have any cities or is it just towns? Yonkers is the second largest city in New York State portion of Metro NYC (and #3 in the state after Buffalo), but the town of Hempstead is much larger and, I believe, the second largest municipality in NY State.
Yes. Cities of Glen Cove and Long Beach.
I don't know anything about Long Island but I "liked" this comment because I've never seen a comment hit triple digit likes here before and I had to join in.
It's happened before. One of my favorite triple digit upvoted comments was this one:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-amas-advancing-health-equity/comment/3653540
I had one! To be honest it wasn't a particularly interesting or great comment and I'm not sure it deserved three-digit likes, but hey, I'll take it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed?r=i2ydk&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=13203698
I think what you’re missing here is that a big part of New York’s governance failures are downstream of stunts like the one Hochul pulled. It’s much harder to retain good civil servants, contract with a wide range of non-corrupt private sector companies, and indeed convince constituents that you are serious about policy when your top governmental officials act like this.
Obviously New York’s governance has been failing since before 2021 (and Cuomo before her did even worse stuff) but I think you have to oppose moves like this as prima facie bad for governance even if you disagree with the policy itself.
That’s a fair point
Matt's implying that the Hochul's thought process is mostly just cynical politicking. But I think he's underrating the possibility that she just has bad policy preferences.
If Hochul actually quietly liked congestion pricing all she had to do was... Nothing.
Same with Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoing a good YIMBY bill. Which, again, for good things to happen, all she had to do was nothing.
Maybe we're just underrating their bad policy preferences.
And/or the party establishment as a whole.
It’s notable that neither Hobbs nor Hochul is a wild-eyed leftist. Valence-wise, they code as the sort of moderate Yglesian technocrats who should be defending YIMBY and congestion pricing!
The fact that they don’t, speaks to the institutional party’s deep shittiness. Moderation does not actually equate to Yglesianism in this party. Instead, it tends to mean a sort of cynical and blinkered overreliance on conventional liberalism — the sort that might say “Just run on abortion everywhere!!” without ever questioning the limits of such a strategy or trying to think outside or beyond that single box. (And then wallow in shock and despair at the state of democracy and our citizenry when it falls flat on its face -- OR do senseless victory laps when it succeeds out of sheer luck or for reasons that were unrelated or which they never examined in all that much depth.)
I wish Matt would recognize this problem more! Because, to reiterate, his brand of popularism calls for a moderate-ish stance, but the actual current moderates are not Yglesian in the slightest. We need actual change in who the moderates are and what they believe, not just to elect more moderates.
I tend to think SBer's, Matt included, pretty substantially overrate the extent to which cynical triangulators like Hochul and Biden actually overlap with the moderate technocrats they prefer. This sort of football pull is exactly what should be expected.
You mean underrate?
I think he means overrate. Dave's critique is that there's less overlap than SB's "popularist" ethos would suggest between "optimized for winning elections by eschewing commitments to partisan ideology where it doesn't play well in Dodge" versus "adopting technocratically sound policy," and that Matt's endorsement of the former often comes at the expense of the latter. This being an example of the rubber hitting the road as to that tension -- Hochul's position is "moderate" in the sense of reflecting a form of wishy-washy status-quo bias (which is what is actually being politically selected for, in a kind of Goodhart's Law version of being a "moderate") but it's also totally at odds with what mild-mannered economists would tell you makes sense to do with respect to scarce public resources (i.e., charge for them).
More succinctly, sometimes the Baileys are wrong about what makes good policy.
Hochul even screwed up the running on abortion thing! During the election she sent me dozens and dozens of mailers about how we need to protect choice in New York and one of her very first acts as governor was to appoint a judge to our highest court that was opposed by every major abortion rights group and digging in on the choice until the legislature refused to confirm. Her being an absolutely terrible politician is very much part of what's going on here.
Why I always bring up that having Joe Lieberman as my senator is always going to impact my thinking about what "moderation" really means in practice. In theory, it means being a little more right of center on showy culture war stuff while being left of center (though not full on lefty) on economics. Think this is what Fetterman is trying to do.
But in practice? Yeah, it leads to stuff like Kyrsten Sinema voting against $15 minimum wage and protecting the low carried interest taxes https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/09/how-wall-street-wooed-sen-kyrsten-sinema-and-preserved-its-multi-billion-dollar-carried-interest-tax-break.html.
Sinema in some ways is an especially egregious example that serves a point. I don't think Matt is properly remembering how many Sinema like figures existed in the Democratic party circa 2000-2010 and how much they sucked.
While I broadly agree, the counterpoint I’ll offer up is that as an Obama convert, it always stuck out to me how much liberals hate moderates like Sinema, Manchin, and Lieberman.
It’s not that I can’t see the betrayals or don’t personally mourn them myself, it’s just that the rage over them seems disproportionate and personal.
To someone deeply steeped in historical concepts like the Entropy of Victory, I struggle to get so upset about them. And I think it’s emblematic of how liberals’ emphasis on policy means they get so emotionally attached to their policy preferences that these betrayals don’t ever get filed under “politics as usual” - or worse, there’s a deep hatred OF seeing politics as anything that CAN go through “usual” setbacks.
I’m no fan of idiots like Sinema, but I also understand that if we had a rotating cast of 12 more of her as a permanent fixture of a Senate supermajority, we’d get a lot more of the big policy wins than we’ve ever gotten in my lifetime.
For a technocrat, congestion pricing was REALLY poorly thought out. If the idea was simply to raise money, there are better taxes to raise. If the idea was to get cars off the streets, there would have been increased transit capacity, which basically means many more buses and bus lanes on major arteries. Here in the Bronx there are no bus lanes on the expressways and the MTA has been trying to cut bus service for years -- and there are no plans to increase subway capacity at any time in the forseeable future.
The MTA is a money sink. They need congestion pricing just to bail themselves out, how could they ever increase capacity at the same time?
Per Charlie's point, it's quite obvious that a billion dollars spent on buses and more subway trains would improve capacity a LOT more efficiently per-dollar than the same billion spent on building entirely new subway lines or stops.
This is an excellent point about moderate politics and can perhaps also be described as dumb centrism (take the average position on any given issue) vs radical centrism https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-radical-centre-constitutional-conservatism-and-indigenous-re/10094802
Ehh, I think the radical centrism stuff is unwittingly descriptive of the average centrist voter -- who indeed tends to have a mix of radical positions from either side -- while also being an absolutely naive and feckless exercise in intellectual masturbation.
Because regardless of all their talk about "not taking averages", the radical center's supposed thought leaders basically have ZERO control over their own putative movement and constituents. Like the No Labels fetishists, they fantasize that mass discontent with the two-party system means there's a mass public ready and willing to accept their own ideas, and they live in a constant state of confusion about why this apotheosis perpetually refuses to magically, spontaneously happen -- often casting about for various idiotic theories that lead them down dead-end rabbit holes of even WORSE self-delusion than they started with. But the reality is, the mass public of centrists are mostly either (A) a bunch of deeply confused morons who don't read these thought leaders' high-falutin' manifestoes, or (B) a smaller handful of moderate and deeply ideological partisans who aren't actually centrist but just have a couple major disagreements with the party they lean closest to, and thus already have an information and thought-leadership environment they're quite satisfied with -- and aren't looking for some new philosophy of radical centrism, but really just want to win whatever intraparty debate/grievance they're currently on the wrong side of.
Also, the supposed thought-leaders' centrist stance basically requires they intentionally and very studiously ignore the very real asymmetries between the two parties as they actually exist. Most people are under the mistaken impression that you can't borrow ideas from a party that is so deeply morally compromised as the GOP, and so in order to indulge their desperate desire to virtue-signal their self-image of even-handed centrism, these radical-centrist ideologues pretend there's nothing *that* wrong with the GOP. Just because they're "not taking averages" doesn't mean they aren't engaging in an immoral both-sides-ism out of intellectual vanity.
So yeah, not to act like I'm the coolest kid at the party or anything here, but the radical centrists make me cringe. I'll take bog-standard basic-bitch Yglesianism any day of the week and twice on Sunday over them.
I didn’t know there were so many self-described radical centrists in the US for someone to have such a strong opinion of them. As a non-American I don’t have that association nor do I see Yglesianism as some wildly different political philosophy. In my mind both strive to be carefully analytical, aware of trade-offs, contradictions and second-order effects and willing to take bold policy positions when warranted. If I were American I *would* worry about a third party helping the GOP win for sure.
Bad policy preferences is far too charitable. She’s just not competent. This was literally optimal with respect to creating as much political damage with as little policy benefit as possible.
She was surprisingly more competent than I was expecting from whatever party hack would succeed Cuomo, but less competent than the state actually needs.
Are we feeling nostalgic for Cuomo yet? New York state politics is not a game of pattycake: there are advantages to having a ruthless asshole to balance the fecklessness and corruption of the Legislature.
Cuomo is the guy who, vis a vis the MTA specifically, fired Andy Byford basically out of jealousy of his popularity, in addition to killing a bunch of care home residents and generally being a corrupt, sexually-harassing asshole. So, no -- either in general or specifically as it relates to this specific mess.
Fuck Cuomo. And while we're at it get the Tappan Zee its original name back instead of stroking the Cuomo family ego.
Not Cuomo yet, but I think there's some Bloomberg nostalgia.
Hochul has bad policy preferences and she's astonishingly bad at politics. If she wanted to kill congestion pricing for political reasons she did it the worst way. Cuomo was much worse in many ways, but he was way more competent at being bad.
My sense is that Hochul saw some polls and got some calls from Jeffries and felt like she had no choice. Congestion pricing was, good idea or not (it was in fact mostly a good idea), unpopular, and it had lost too much support from Democratic elected officials in the suburbs to succeed.
Yeah, Matt is dead correct to stress that the Jeffries thing is a red herring.
The politicians in my outer-borough neighborhood didn't like it either. Which begs the question, who did like it?
Hochul seems responsive to evidence that a truck is bearing down on her politically. When Zeldin came close to beating her in the governor's race, she got religion on the crime issue and got more active with the Legislature generally (I found this very gratifying). I suspect congestion pricing is the same thing.
I also doubt Hochul is routinely hanging out with very many people who take the train around NYC, but you bet she knows a few rich Hudson Valley types who like to drive in to the city every now then pretending that the toll would "force" them to reconsider their trips (they won't)
I would like to add the whole "National Guard sent to the NYC Subway" debacle as part of this frustration over how the state is being governed.
I mean obviously I still won't vote for Republicans, but JFC people, get your sh*t together.
If a Rockefeller Republican type shows up in the 2026 race? I will not only vote for them, I will volunteer for them. The only thing worse than service cuts to fund tax cuts is service cuts to fund tax hikes. That’s all we get from Albany, going back at least a decade.
There are no Rockefeller Republicans. They are as extinct as the Passenger Pigeon.
All we need is one billionaire/ex-CEO to decide they want to get into politics.
Larry Hogan isn't far from this, right? Nor is the VT governor.
Rockefeller Republicans only exist as New England Republican Governors. Mitt Romney, Charlie Baker or Phil Scott. You'll notice the National Republican party mostly tries to ignore them when they talk.
Your lips to God's ears, as they say.
If the GOP would like to get reasonable any time soon, that would be the best freaking news ever. I worry the normal folks can't get through their primaries anymore though.
Maybe if they lose Bigly in 2024 the GOP will learn to actually offer something to people rather than asinine vitriol.
Don't count on it.
Just to play Devil's Prophet here, let me tell you how a Bigly Loss will deepen the asinine vitriol.
First, Trump leads a series of second insurrections at the state capitols, enough to create several EC delegation controversies. Everything fails to throw the election to the House, but the controversy itself creates a brand new Big Lie for him to submit as the latest loyalty test for the entire party.
With the black hole of Trump's ego pulling the GOP "Triangle of Doom" (media + elite pols + base) ever closer to him, the party simply can't process losses as anything but a conspiracy against him. There's no way for the party to reject him; it just slowly shrinks as the steady trickle of fed-up moderates and occasional high-profile apostates (like Hogan) continue getting ejected by each round of loyalty tests -- in an unintentional analogy to my black hole metaphor, it's a lot like Hawking Radiation.
So, the whole party just keeps getting more asinine and more vitriolic with each loss, until he either dies or the party's no longer electorally viable.
I love the Hawking Radiation reference, but I think in context this is probably a bit more like evaporative cooling.
Hawking Radiation essentially IS evaporative cooling for black holes. It's literally how they cool off and lose mass, and why if the LHC ever accidentally made a really tiny one, it'd evaporate in nanoseconds.
The water evaporates from the septic tank and all that is left is dry shit.
This is fundamentally the root cause though - if you aren't going to vote for the opposition no matter how bad they fuck up, what is the incentive to not fuck up?
With politics this polarized though, there isn't much choice. A blue politician has to be more than a bit incompetent for me to consider voting for someone on the other side who shares almost none of my policy preferences though. But I do think that we need to start viewing excellence in governance as an important progressive value in and of itself since almost all progressive policy preferences require a relatively high level of trust in government and government competence. Folks who do a bad job getting the pot holes filled in blue cities actually make it harder for us to get things like universal health care because they make government look shitty. I am all about the Left having more competative primaries focused on who would actually do a good job of implimenting progressive policies. I think it is actually probably better for our elective brand overall than just looking for moderation for its own sake. (Pragmatic folks who run stuff well frequently are a bit more moderate that incompetent extremists but there are also plenty of moderate folks who are incompetent too and some fairly left folks who are good managers.
My hot take is:
The most effective method for centrist Democrats to improve the governance in Blue Cities is to invest in building a competitive GOP landscape. Nothing focuses the mind quite like defeat.
May in some places but where I live the GOP would have to transform very radically to have any impact. I would generally like to see the definition of what makes someone progressive change from "person who say the most leftist talking points to person who actually achieves or has the skills and plans to achieve a possible progressive outcome." I do think that matters more than progressives think. We had a big swing in the Seattle City Council in the last election from very left democrats to centrist democrats because people we upset about poor governance (which is really more of a mayor thing than the council in many ways given the limited power of the council but folks who are mad don't really differentiate.) It is still all Dem but more Blue Dog. Of the two progressive who survived, one was my council person who I am pretty sure won, not because he was more moderate but because he was a very service focused guy who actually held regular office hours and had his staff get into the weeds about specific pot holes and needed crosswalks and high crime spots etc and actually harassed whatever city agency was involved to do something so people felt like he had actually done something useful for them or their neighborhood. I think that suggests that getting folks on our side to do more of that would make it easier to keep people with progressive values in charge.
There's no crime against centrist democrats running as a republican or joining the party in an attempt to temper leftist ambitions.
Exactly.
You know what else is bad for governance? GOP majorities.
Vote for Democrats, sure we raise your taxes and provide bad services but sometimes we get cold feet and don’t do it at the last minute! Heck of a brand, plays great in Suffolk County.
Like if there was another plan on the table and she switched from a lefty plan to a centrist plan at the last minute then that might be a worthwhile political stunt but switching from ready-to-go plan to…nothing…I don’t think is even helpful politically!
Whatever effective leadership looks like, this isn’t it.
Vote Replacement-Level Primary Challenger for Governor!
Can we spare a little criticism for the legislators who created the mess in the first place?
I mean sure, a coherent moderate Republican agenda would probably stand a real chance in the state - maybe even in nationally. But that's not the GOP we have today. There's no Larry Hogan equivalent trying to get elected governor of NY, to the best of my knowledge.
Canada’s system of local parties that are largely orthogonal to national partisan branding sounds more attractive every day.
I can tell you it's not paying dividends in Ontario transit circles at the moment. We've got an independent agency "Metrolinx" that built an LRT line across the city, with incredible delays and way over budget and all that, but they refuse to open it or say when it will open or identify why they can't open it. And there apparently exists no means to force them to do so.
Liked for the information content; frown for substance.
Mass sort of had this, at least at the Governor level, until very recently. Unfortunately, Trump has activated the cultural right here with predictable results.
In view of Cambridge's ludicrous "ban math" debacle I'm not sure that it's fair to throw bad policy by way culture war polarization solely on one side of the aisle in Massachusetts (which I agree has probably been well-served by its historical willingness to elect competent centrist Republican governors).
funny, I was just reminiscing about Governor Romney over the weekend
Yeah Lee Zeldin was decidedly NOT a moderate. He happened to run in a midterm year (almost always better for the "out" party) with high inflation and unique to New York, he was able to take advantage of crime coverage in the press given how much of said coverage was slanted to stories about NYC given press concentration in NYC. So his peformance was actually quite good and explains A LOT of everything Hochul has done in past 18 months.
But go look at Zeldin's actual governing agenda. It's pretty right wing especially compared to the political lean of NY generally. I think if hew as elected we'd be talking about him same way we talk about Glenn Youngkin.
Zeldin made statements about not messing with abortion in NY; showing that he had some ability to realize he can't be super right wing in what's ultimately a blue state. But he previously voted for a 20 week abortion ban, is a 2nd amendment zealot and maybe most consequential of all is an election denier. Just a terrible vessel to assure left leaning moderates who may want somebody different to a Dem establishment governor.
That’s the thing: they can just show up on Jan 1 2026 saying “I’m running for governor, I don’t give a F about abortion, but I will cut your taxes”. Any rich ex-CEO has to realize the opportunity is there for the taking.
He or she would need to win the Republican primary... which these days requires catering to those cultural grievance issues.
Cutting taxes in NY means harming a lot of Republican special interests.
Larry Hogan is "moderate" only compared to the rest of the GOP. Otherwise he was a fairly ineffectual Tea Party inspired governor who seems to default to the dumbest GOP talking points (when he attempted to end expanded UI early, or when the FBI executed that search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and he defended Trump). I voted for the guy twice, I've never regretted votes like that before.
I might have voted for Hogan. The Dems who ran against him would not have been successful governors.
In Long Island it is the Republicans who are responsible for the high taxes.
Texas has a far more effective state government than New York. If they actually wanted to help poor people, they wouldn’t need Danish levels of taxation to do it.
Everyone associated with Texas electric grid would like a word. Also, how are we defining effective with anything involving Ken Paxton given he’s clearly astonishingly corrupt zealot who should have been removed years ago.
I think it’s fair to say on particular topics like housing or infrastructure building, NY could learn a lot from Texas.
I think Matt has made a convincing case the Massachusetts is the best run state. But I also grew up in that state and can tell you some eye rolling issue (I’m halfway through the Big Dig podcast for example).
I think the better takeaway is to encourage state governments to actually look at other states of laboratories of democracy. A lot of state governance (like infrastructure) don’t really map at all into current left/right cultural war issues (or at least only do so tangentially). Taking ideas that seem to be working in “blue” state or “right” state isn’t some betrayal of values on unrelated issues.
Texans can live comfortable lives on middle class incomes. New Yorkers can’t. It’s really that simple.
None of the metro areas you listed are locked in geographically. They have plenty of developable land. They opted to mostly stop developing it, for environmental/anti-sprawl reasons. Fine. But to pull that off, they needed to be much better than the rest of America at legalizing infill housing. Which they weren't. So now they have a housing crisis. I think it's totally fair game to put 100% of the blame here on their governance.
Ken Paxton - that they _almost_ convicted on impeachment, and then not quite. And at least one of the people who voted against conviction has now changed his mind, but good luck getting it through AGAIN.
And it's not like he'd have been replaced with some Democrat.
What big dig podcast, I'd love to listen to it?
As someone else who grew up in MA, I remember all the complaints and criticism of the big dig but when I visit Boston now I think it's mostly a success and it has made me reevaluate the cost benefit analysis of boondoggles (Specifically we typically underestimate the value that a completed project will bring over the long term and as we are now ~20 years past the completion I'm glad the people of MA of the 80s and 90s suffered for us)
The podcast is unimaginatively called "The Big Dig". Only four episodes in, but it's great so far. One takeaway I had from the first episode is that Matt doesn't talk nearly enough about one of the very understandable reasons why NIMBY has been so powerful for 50 years now; the headless chicken manner in which highways were built in the 50s and 60s. I know Matt has talked extensively about how terrible it was that highways were built through the heart of cities. But I think he's focused too much on the harms of 70s environmentalist thinking and not enough on how much highway construction likely impacted "normies" views of development generally. First episode of this podcast I think does a great job of capturing this in regard to East Boston.
There is a whole faction of the Democratic Party pretty obsessed with Washington operating its own bank just like it. There are some good arguments for it.
What are some areas in which the Texas state government is particularly effective? The Sun Belt states’ success seem to be mostly driven by luck and exogenous factors vs governance:
1. Much fewer legacy pension obligations, because the population growth is recent.
2. Cheap housing, because they haven’t run out of space for greenfield sprawl yet.
3. The American public generally seems to prefer living places with milder winters now that AC is cheap.
Texas has both good and bad governance like most states, but its primary advantage is that it regulates building far less than most blue states. So it can build housing of all types much easier than NY can. It can build green energy production and transmission much easier than California can. Given the importance of those, it gives Texas a huge lift despite otherwise mediocre government.
And yet California, despite those obstacles, is speeding quickly toward a renewables-based grid. But good on Texas in that regard, too. Healthy competition!
I really hope that succeeds. Its just been shocking to see Texas catch and pass California in renewables given California's lead. Its in large part because California makes it hard to build, though Texas having massive plains available for wind turbines definitely helps.
New York is unusual among northeastern states in that the public pensions are mostly funded.
I'm guessing financial literacy is above-average for public officials in New York state.
Texas' recent governments have done pretty much everything possible to squander a serendipitous legacy of never having had much in the way of housing regulation.
In part, but that's mostly been Democrats doing it :(
If you want people to give more but in to government, government has to work and be responsive
If you want government to be responsive, you have to give the people running it incentive to be so.
The heads of government offices that have significant public interface should be directly elected rather than appointed.
I'm originally from Michigan, and the best government office I ever had to deal with was Michigan's Secretary of State.
There's a branch in half the strip malls in the state. You walk in, like your local bank, do your business, and are done in about 15 minutes.
And I bet I know why it's so easy - Michigan's Secretary of State is an elected official whose name is on every branch door, so you know just who to blame for your we experience if it's not good.
I know Policy People hate direct democracy because it empowers the pleebs, but as a native Michigander living on the East Coast I think it makes for a much more responsive government and better public buy in.
There are also SoS kiosks in Kroger stores in MI
Well, the Texas state government is really effective at pardoning cold-blooded racist murderers, so I'd say you have a point there, David.
Also a continuation of rule by Democrats, who desperately need and deserve an electoral spanking with eight years on the bench, but aren't going to get one because there is no functional opposition party.
Boy you are not kidding about contracting. I have had two projects, one in NYC and one in NYS. I loved the people I worked with on both projects and felt the projects themselves added tremendous value, but the contracting and associated issues with billing and just the general PITA of the entire process really turned me off. I have not taken any work in NY since then and would only do it as a favor to a client as opposed to actively trying to find work in the state.
I think this will hurt the state a bit in a difficult-to-see way (less supply of people willing to take on projects = higher prices) until they make working with the state/city less nightmarish. With as much work as is available right now, its easy to pick and choose projects. Even more, money has its limits when you realize that compliance/billing, resolving disputes, etc., is taking so much time that working for a less remunerative but more organized partner is a better use of time.
Oddly enough...this is not a huge left/right thing. I do a lot of work in Washington State, and it is a breeze. I have a really good anecdote about how nice Was. is to work with but won't boor folks with the details beyond saying I had an issue related to business taxes, called a real live person who, for free, helped explain what a I need to do, and resolved the issue in under an hour.
I have been impressed with the state's governance. When I semi-retired I really wanted to move to Walla Walla but couldn't for family reasons. Lots of beautiful places, a nice mix of geography (access to mountains, beaches, rain forests and high desert all in one state) and among the better governed states. I am surprised it is not a more popular destination.
Just to drill down on the 'retain good civil servants' point, I'd broaden it slightly. It can be either 'RETAIN good civil servants' or 'retain GOOD civil servants'. As a good civil servant who has been working a project for a long time, gotten to the eleventh hour on a project they believe in and gets summarily reversed with no warning may well quit...or may well decide 'ah, okay, caring and hard work are actively counterproductive, this office is looking for a seat filler. I can do that.'
I should flag though that this does happen more broadly and sometimes even 'should' happen, after all, elections have consequences. The one that jumps to mind for me is always DAPL, where the Corps of Engineers had issued all permissions except one, which gave the Obama administration the leverage it needed to block the action (in December 2016) only for that, of course, to be reversed when the Trump administration took over...
Like, if I'd been one of the employees working that project...well, I hope I'd have had the strength to just laugh about it and move on with my life, but...
Alon Levy made the same point at greater length on Saturday: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/06/08/quick-note-on-respecting-the-civil-service/
Yeah, in particular a lot of the dumb things the MTA does is because of meddling by top state officials who exercise almost total control over the MTA. This of course also means that the people who rise to the top at the MTA are not the most competent transportation officials but those most adept and willing to please the state officials.
That's true, but there's a lot more stuff wrong over there.
Could not agree more, and I think this applies in the city as well (possibly even more). I’m sad to be leaving the city/state, but grateful that I have the option to do so.
Matt writes: "At some level, [Hochul's] just trying to help House Democrats win races on Long Island, a worthy and important goal."
The problems begin with that statement, for helping House Democrats isn't part of the job of being the Governor of the State of New York. Her job is to lead the executive branch agencies of the state for the benefit of the people of New York, and work with the legislature on laws for the state. Helping House Democrats isn't her job.
That’s rather naive. A party whose high officials slit the throats of front line members is unlikely to win elections and govern effectively.
Hochul isn’t really playing the same game as the national party, though. It’s not like she has personal incentives to do stupid things in the name of playing ball vis a vis chances at higher office, her literal job is “governor of New York” and this is about as clear cut a case of not doing said job as comes to mind in recent years.
The first day this was announced, I was like “there must be a ‘quo’ to this quid pro quo that we’re not aware of yet. Probably Hochul gets HUD in a Biden II cabinet or something.”
Watching it play out the following days made me realize a) this was not some carefully planned arrangement, this was the fumbling of an incompetent way in over her head; and b) no one in their right mind would give this person responsibility in the federal government. Hell no one in their right mind would make her a state senator, much less governor.
Meh, I don't think she's COMPLETELY incompetent, she's merely a run-of-the-mill party hack who accidentally rose WELL past her "level of failure" a lot faster than she could catch up to her circumstances.
If she'd served under Cuomo for another decade, she'd probably have made a decent successor to him.
The elected officials Hochul needs on her side to govern effectively are the NY state legislators who aren’t with her on this, evidenced by their refusal to bail her out of the mess she created.
I think this is wrong. In a country that’s heavily malapportioned and where Republicans gerrymander aggressively, among other hardball practices, it is part of Democratic officials’ role not to let the playing field become too uneven.
Democrats are equal-opportunity offenders on the gerrymandering front.
This also rankles me: "That said, what’s happened has happened and Hochul doesn’t have a time machine, so even though I’m mad, I do see where she’s coming from."
This could double as an apologia for Republicans' Trump-enabling.
I think a lot of the GOP’s Trump enabling has been understandable. Then a lot of it hasn’t. Jeff freaking Sessions, of all people, had the presence of mind to realize that a prosecution of Hillary crossed the line; sadly the rest of them haven’t figured that out with respect to, among other things, Jan 6.
Jan. 6th is notable for being the best opportunity that grin-and-bear it Republicans had to curbstomp the cancer that had taken over their party, and then instead of taking advantage of the Schelling point afforded them, McConnell opted to put party over country in the most short-sighted and indefensible, not to mention craven, manner possible.
Indeed - I understand why the Ukraine impeachment was hard for them but January 6th...
Isn’t it? Like I mean I’m sure that’s not like hyper literally her job but like all the political science courses I took in college said presidents and governors took on a head of party job in addition to the formal parts
Of their jobs outlined in constitutions and these are prioritized by politics not law.
That’s unfortunately not really true. I think what you’re getting at is being a governor or senator means you both look out for the interests of your state AND act as a representative of your party. The difference is as governor, working for the best interests for your state is much more likely to be primary focus over being a loyal party apparatchik and in the senate is the other way around. But both still exist.
To give an example. Blue state senators in Massachusetts and New Jersey all the time seek to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies even though it would seem to run counter to very basic Democratic Party beliefs. On the opposite side, red state Republicans defend things like the “Jones Act” or farm subsidies even though they run counter GOP economic orthodoxy.
Point being is I think what’s actually happening (if we believe reports that Jeffries and Schumer leaned on Hochul) is this sort of dual mandate is a real universal friction in American politics. You’re both a chief executive and member of political party and those two functions can often conflict.
I understand the duality. I'm saying it is a problem when politicians favor national political considerations over their elected position's responsibilities. It is a disservice to their constituents.
So I'll state in this post (and probably others) that Matt is probably way too generous in his assessment of Hochul's political calculus here; if NY Dems think this last minute flip on congestion pricing is making the difference in my district (D+10 House seat that flipped to R in 2022) they're fooling themselves. As Hochul's ludicrous claim on Friday shows*, what's actually happening is it shows business owners have an ability to reach their governor, House Rep and senate rep directly way beyond the ability of most other voters and their esoteric concerns can often have a way of becoming policy.
But I think you're underrating the very rational calculus politicians make that sometimes you need to be a good loyal party member; whether it's governor, House or senate. Even if you have no aspirations beyond you're current position. Defying your party depending on the circumstance is often smart politics if you're Joe Manchin or John Fetterman. Manchin as Matt repeatedly notes is probably the best Dems will do in West Virginia. And at the end of the day, Manchin voted for items like IRA and for judges. So Schumer not only doesn't have much leverage over Manchin, he wouldn't want to use that leverage. To a certain degree this is true of Fetterman. PA is probably going to be the most important swing state in 2024. Fetterman ultimately benefits from crossover voters. Having a swing state Dem who has crossover appeal due to his rhetoric could be enormously beneficial in September and October if Biden makes campaign stops in PA and there's Fetterman singing his praises (and has been pointed out Fetterman's voting record is still solidly with Biden. As has been pointed out, Bibi's speaking to a join session of Congress partly at the behest of the Dem House majority leader and Dem senate majority leader. Fetterman's super pro Israel stance is hardly out of step with Dem establishment. He's just louder about it).
Point being though, Manchin and Fetterman are edge cases. Matt is fond (including in this post) of noting Dems could stand to be more supportive of moderate Dems in swing districts and states. I agree with this entirely! But at end of the day, almost by definition, these are edge cases. These edge cases can be the difference between a house majority or senate majority. So they're quite important! But they're still edge cases. For most politicians? They are in pretty "safe" D or "R" seats or states. Which means being a loyal party foot solider on a variety of issues is actually the better course of action as party leadership can actually destroy you if you want. For an especially vivid example; see Mitch McConnell and Madison Cawthorn.
*Kathy Hochul claimed on Friday that congestion pricing would harm people who like to drive to eat at Comfort Diner in Manhattan. I have eaten at this diner multiple times. I cannot emphasize to you how absurd it is to believe that anyone is driving to eat at this diner. We're not talking about a Michelin star restaurant, we're talking a dime a dozen diner of which there are probably hundreds in the NYC suburbs. The only person driving to this diner is the owner.
I suspect the Occam’s Razor explanation in both the short and long term here will be “Kathy Hochul did something incredibly stupid and should be called stupid for doing it.”
Yeah, it's bad enough when politicians triangulate to kill a good-but-unpopular policy.
It's WORSE when they do so on the basis of a wildly-and-obviously-incorrect theory of the electorate.
Amen.
I think congestion pricing discourse is maybe the perfect example of where the personal interests of various leaders of a variety of organizations is often at cross purposes with the actual supposed agenda of said organization. Think we see this with unions being weirdly NIMBY; more construction should lead to more union jobs, but NIMBY can lead to higher wages for members who already have union jobs.
In this case, I posted elsewhere, but NAACP and teacher unions being against congestion pricing is probably a bigger factor in this flip flop than people realize. https://www.chicagobusiness.com/crains-forum-safer-chicago/chicago-violence-problem-debate-safety-inequality
The NAACP being against congestion pricing and its subsequent funding of mass transit is maybe a "chef's kiss" example of where leadership's interests are at cross purposes with stated agenda given demographic realities of who does and doesn't take mass transit.
I'm not sure that national political considerations are not important to state officials qua state officials - Hochul no doubt believes that New York is better off with a democratic Congress and in particular with a democratic Congress with more New York democrats in it. NewYork is far more likely to get federal funding for transit projects under a Biden/Jeffries government than a Trump/Johnson one.
Country over party, state over party.
Next you'll be telling us you're shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Recognizing that corruption exists isn't the same as excusing it or lauding it, as Matt does with the "worthy and important goal" phrase.
Corruption? Hochul's decision might be political cowardice. Or it might be savvy political opportunism. Or somewhere in between. But corruption seems a stretch.
I rather suspect that, if Hochul were a Republican, you'd be lauding her for standing up for the hard-pressed taxpayers of Long Island against the utopian schemes of liberal technocrats.
I agree with the sentiment but it's not "corruption"
(Also, for a second I thought she was helping _STATE_ Democrats and that's a least related to her job - but yes her job is not to help National Democrats other than by being a good role model)
For one, I don't see how anyone will ever have faith in an administration that changes its mind at the eleventh hour and abandons a law it had championed even though tons of work has been done to implement it. That's literally the worst of all worlds, signaling that Democrats can't govern even when implementing their own policies. It's completely unserious.
For two, this reads like the MTA is dysfunctional, but didn't Byford try to run it rationally and then got screwed at the state level, possibly by Cuomo? I don't remember enough about the minutiae of NY state politics at the time but all of this just suggests the state Democratic establishment is totally incompetent and/or shortsightedly self-interested rather than having any real policy lessons.
I don't think there is any need for qualifiers - the MTA IS dysfunctional. It costs 6x more than Paris and Berlin to build a mile of track per a recent NYU study. Their findings suggest that is most due to interagency squabbling and dumb rules and regs within their control, and very little to do with the regular Right leaning talking points complaining about unions.
When you see this type of stuff it easily stokes a ton of opposition when you know $.83 of every $1 of congestion tax you are spending is just going to be lit on fire...
Article for refence - think the study is embedded:
https://www.curbed.com/2023/02/nyc-subway-overspending-second-avenue-nyu-transit-costs-project-goldwyn.html
The *MTA* alone isn't dysfunctional, it's but one creation of our entire nightmarish NIMBYist vetocracy.
MTA would be more efficient and accountable without the egregious freaking mountains of "accountability" we've foisted on it. As would most of the rest of our society.
Byford was running MTA NYC Transit, the part of the MTA that does city subways and buses. There are other parts as well (MTA Metro-North Railroad, MTA Long Island Rail Road, MTA Bridges and Tunnels, etc.). I believe it is MTA headquarters that is managing congestion pricing (someone correct me if I’m wrong!). That said, friction between Cuomo and him was still the problem.
In any case, I think you’re totally right that this move on congestion pricing just generally paints the state government as unserious.
Good to know, thank you! I'm originally from Toronto so I insinctively think of the MTA as being like our transit agency, the TTC (which Byford also ran), but it's much more complicated than that.
Democrats doing 1 “putting our house in order” is worth 1 million telling Trump voters they’re bad people if they don’t switch their vote. Keir Starmer seems to be almost having fun now with how hard he can shaft his fringe, a huge expansion of prisons is his latest proposal, and he is on track to win a landslide and hopefully use that power for good.
Starmer enjoys the benefits of a party traumatized by being in the minority for nearly a decade. US dems operate under the belief that they’re a popular party that supports popular interests.
True. On the other hand, his opponent isn't saying he'll be a dictator on day one. Dems have a lot more reason to be focused on winning than Labour. I live in the UK and still, if I had to choose, I'd take Sunak winning and Trump losing over the reverse any day. In reality many Dems are busy campaigning against themselves.
Democrats believe they are the majority party within the United States, yet have only won the House of Representatives in 4 of the past 15 elections.
1. 30-year timespan is a long timeframe, kind of odd to use
2. Should be 5 out of 15 by popular vote, possibly 6 out of 15
1994 was the year the Democratic Party lost their 60-year Congressional supermajority because the last holdouts of the old, Southern segregationists flipped to the Republican Party. So it is a good starting point for the current party coalitional alignment.
I think the revenue aspect is under-discussed, and that killing congestion pricing is a zero interest rate phenomenon that happened because Hochul (and many other politicians) hasn't internalized the new reality. It's clear from the post announcement scrambling that there wasn't any serious thought to how to pay for the MTA capital plan otherwise, but also no suggestion that it should be cut. Instead, Hochul was just killing the revenue because it's unpopular to charge people money.
But the money is going to have to come from somewhere, and as everyone saw right away, all the alternatives are actually more unpopular.
Ongoing capital funding for the MTA needs to come from an ongoing state funding process. The distribution of incidence is balanced regionally and politically and the "usual sources" reflect that compromise. Congestion pricing just throws all of that out of the window, leaving a mess behind. The work is all to do again.
I feel like this is still operating in the same paradigm as Hochul. The question is what to tax, and who to tax. No one is going to like taxes, but to pay for the things we want they will be necessary. And taxing people who are doing something with high social cost who have good alternatives is exactly what we should want to tax, for the same reason that Matt has talked about bringing back carbon taxes.
A nice civics lesson
>> That means a style of blue state moderate politics that is oriented toward actually fixing the problems of the blue states, rather than just a politics of merely saying “no” to the wildest leftist schemes.
I wish people would take this more to heart around here. We need less bitching about the left and more figuring out how to get the center-left’s work done.
I agree, except when the left poisons the well with crazy-ass ideas like "let's abolish the police" that poisons the well for center-left people who get lumped in with the crazy-ass left in the popular imagination, and then it's harder to get sensible stuff done.
Those ideas only poison the well because we literally just sit here bitching about them and waiting for them to get dropped in, instead of building our own well.
I agree as a general matter, but lots of center-left figures sealed their own fate when they leaned into the protest movements in June 2020. And the "progressive prosecutor" movement, which I think is rightly characterized as the "soft on crime" movement, has been enabled by figures at the local, state, and federal levels by elected officials who do not have a profile as "left wing."
Isn't that most of the YIMBY posts?
I was more thinking about the commentariat, not our host himself.
Superlike™️
This is a very banal point but the fact that cable companies have terrible customer service, government websites look like they've were designed in the 90s, and one-party states have serious governance issues all stem from the same thing: competition is good and we need more of it.
In many cases yes. But there are plenty of municipal services, for example, where competition isn't necessarily better than an efficient city or state-regulated or owned monopoly. For example, utilities that involve running physical infrastructure to every building, or trash trucks down every block.
You don't need two companies doing it at the same time. You need the consequences for doing it badly to be you are out of a job. Incentives matter.
Agree. That starts, I think, with local elected officials fearing the voters if municipal services aren't good.
National political party labels aren't that relevant to most of the nuts and bolts issues of local government, and probably get in the way more than help, except when it comes to asking for money from Congress.
Thus my opposition to government unions
Ok how does de-unionizing create this? Like I work in non-union education and it seems to me it just makes it easier to have cronyism.
Like we don’t see the leading schools in the country in the southeast where unions are basically a total non-factor in government positions.
Like if you could really guarantee high quality ethical and responsible leadership of these now very tenuous employees who can be fired for no reason id be a lot more supportive.
The unions basically make it impossible to hold employees accountable and/or effective.
The book "Not Accountable " does a great job of showing this with many many examples.
The authors been on a number of podcasts too if that's too long a read
https://www.amazon.com/Not-Accountable-Rethinking-Constitutionality-Employee-ebook/dp/B0BT4HDHV3/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=12TSRUX1R1VVM&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zTmOSSgZCYRBM40N2YrGcM2soZHpawQ-R4W4BCYhZO5yAnN5ZhIMaBjL2cxTA0PdICEkkaVwCXU20Gl3tdsgPOdGNWLLH7CnRcGM7B1PkpvqSNjXJiI_1H6Nuz9yFW2ffz0J9FV1y4pHBml5DYiubsQsJexVE065QzmsyJyzjfjyGfNfvi9ZdpoDsv5noSwmDoFvi30Xi_vNk10NSoJJ8g.IdXw5J_XuMhq_igyLeS1uepoKJ_vudEXz4BbbiAQwmI&dib_tag=se&keywords=not+accountable&qid=1718054589&sprefix=not+acc%2Caps%2C214&sr=8-1
You have to be a bit sympathetic to the resentment that it really was not a congestion tax, but an entry toll. You pay the same if you drive in, park for 8 hours and drive out as if you drive in and drive around for 8 hours and drive out. And you pay the same (zero) if you drive around for 8 hours w/o driving in as if you just don't drive.
Add to that that people generally underestimate elasticities or think of them only in the very short term. This makes pricing anything feel more like an income transfer from A to B than something that benefits A albeit at a cost, a cost that in principle could be compensated with another transfer form B to A. And this is really where the trust comes in; if a transfer is promised will people believe it will be delivered? The NYC "congestion" tax could be demagogued as a pure transfer to rich Manhattanites from middle class commuters with no benefits to the commuters.
Add to this that historically Progressives have tended to try to do good by hiding or outright denying the cost: rent control minimum wages and more recently net CO2 emissions reduction.
A toxic mix.
Once congestion pricing or tolling is in place, a good phase two would be dynamically price it to reflect actual congestion. We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Appreciate you mentioning the elasticity piece. Matt cites the "surge tolling in Northern VA" and I was a perfect case study this weekend, where I opted to pay $15 to avoid ~30 minutes of traffic on the way to a wedding. The benefit was realized immediately vs the congestion pricing that you may or may not actually see in practice. Couple in all of the other points you make and you can start to see why practically the same tax evokes vastly different reactions.
NY Progressives are trying to solve climate change on the backs of the poor and working class.
And they wonder why the working class is voting for Trump.
Congestion pricing has little to do with reducing net emissions of CO2 and methane.
Let's discuss climate change policy elsewhere.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-28-and-counting
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-risk-and-insurance
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change 1
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change 2
"The NYC "congestion" tax could be demagogued as a pure transfer to rich Manhattanites from middle class commuters with no benefits to the commuters."
Yes, it was demagogued that way, and still is being demagogued that way (in fact this was Hochul's script when she announced she was killing CP).
Which points to a design flaw and marketing flaw.
You pinpointed the problem in the first line of the second paragraph. The problem is that NY and CA are one party states where the GOP has so discredited themselves that the Dems can afford to govern solely in the hope to perpetuate their power. Absent a plausible and responsible opposition party there will never be an incentive to take big swings to govern better. Why upset the apple cart when you already have everything electorally that you could want? Of course it won't last forever but no political party has ever seemed to grasp this problem.
The problem with one-party states is not that there is no electoral competition, its that all electoral competition is intra-party. This means one-party Dem states have electoral fights over who can give the most to unions and one-party GOP states have electoral fights over who can cut education and ban abortion the most.
>> there will never be an incentive to take big swings to govern better.
This flies in the face of the big swings that Hochul DID take -- chiefly, to wit, on crime IE bail reform.
The problem isn't that no one's taking big swings. It's that the intra-party competition Allan describes leads to shitty prioritizing. The ruling coalition SHOULD remain incentivized to appeal to swing voters, because even in a one-party state there's still the allure of wielding a supermajority.
But it doesn't, because the biggest coalition members are constantly threatening to tank the party if they aren't pacified with their pet projects -- after all, "We have a majority; what good is it if we aren't using it? You OWE us anyways!".
The coalition will always demand unpopular policies that couldn't be done when there was electoral competition. So the outcome will ALWAYS be suboptimal compared to the pure ideal of "always cater to the swing voters".
Counterpoint:
Bail reform could be a politically worse but otherwise "better" thing worth doing instead of congestion pricing.
You might lose on swing voters but if the thing you get done is worth doing anyway, that's not necessarily a failure.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but "less popular" isn't strictly "worse".
I mean, I definitely think it's a thing worth doing and not just a "soft on crime" measure like the screechiest voices around here constantly whine about.
And it's a TOTALLY valid use of political capital!
But it's kind of "flail-ey" to do one big thing you know is gonna piss off some swing voters, accept the hit, and then decide on some OTHER big thing that you're not willing to take the hit, and flip-flop on it in the most awkward and counterproductive fashion imaginable.
After all, Hochul has Streisand-Effect-ed this from a sop to swing voters into a huge backfire! Setting aside the backlash from technocrats like us, the main result of canceling the program has been to HIGHLIGHT that an astronomical $100M had already gone into it in the first place, AND that she's basically lighting that entire pile of cash on fire without even a fig leaf of "I'm StOpPiNg ThE wAsTe" to soften the blow!!
It's rank political malpractice. Instead of getting swing voters on her side, she will have convinced MORE swing voters to vote against Democrats than putatively would have rewarded her for canceling the program in the first place!
At this point, she's making even Eric Adams look smart.
And Jeffries... Jesus, man. Just because Hochul was dumb enough to go along with his little scheme doesn't mean he had any business cajoling her into it in the first place without properly thinking it out. This was a total consultant-brained move: "We have a problem with these voters in these House swing seats, they're angry about this one issue, so we should flip on this issue" is such a Do-Something-ist mistake it's not even funny. Jeffries' delegation is literally WORSE OFF today than it was a week ago, worse off than if they'd just let the policy go live and taken the hit.
[Ed: And I expected better of Jeffries than all that. Everyone has consultants, but the man seems to generally make savvier moves than the replacement-level-consultant-brain-politician-bot would. I'm not a superfan of his or anything, either; I just thought he had his head on relatively straight. To push an ally into such a dumb move out of panic, speaks to a lack of strategic thinking or an overall plan that is deeply concerning going forward, especially as the whole party ramps up for a "reverse coattails" strategy of dragging Biden through re-election on a supposedly strong downballot performance.]
Moreover, they lost the opportunity cost to do something ELSE that might have actually shored up a different constituency that might have been easier to woo than a bunch of LIers who literally hate the city with every fiber of their being.
"The other frustrating aspect is that in New York, a lot of time and money was sunk into winning Democrats a friendlier set of state court judges who would give them a freer hand in redistricting. But once that work was done, they didn’t use it to enact an aggressive gerrymander that would have eliminated these Long Island political concerns. Instead, they shored up a few incumbents and went home."
After reading this text written by a very centrist Democrat, we are supposed to believe that the Republicans are the threat to democracy.
I have many many many times fully endorsed a national ban on gerrymandering. Republicans unfortunately oppose it but I am optimistic that they will change their minds and this will get done.
What has you optimistic about this? I'm not seeing it at all--by all appearances the GOP is all in on gerrymandering.
Recent realignments make the GOP's new coalition less efficiently distributed in the House than it used to be. Less upshot for them from gerrymandering now.
Can you expound on that a bit? The massive urban/rural divide seems as massive as ever, a key element of making GOP gerrymanders not look as blatant as Democratic gerrymanders.
Education polarization --> Democrats do a bit worse in cities and a good bit better in suburbs --> more efficient coalition.
E.g., the 2010 Texas gerrymander started to break by the end of the decade.
Gerrymanders will tend to erode over the course of a decade, due to population (and ideological) shifts, which is why they need to regerrymander in the next decade.
Thanks.
Historically, the upside of gerrymandering for the GOP has been limited by civil rights laws guaranteeing Democrats at least one House seat in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky. If the supreme court were willing to rule the remaining portions of the voting rights act unconstitutional, that would allow Republicans to give themselves every single seat in all of the above states at the next redistricting.
Meanwhile, Democrats are blocked from retaliating in states such as California and New York because liberal voters made the dumb mistake of taking the unilateral moral high ground in the 2010's, banning gerrymandering in their own state, while Republicans in red states didn't.
Just a reminder that California's "natural gerrymander" is more severe than Texas and Ohio's purposeful gerrymanders combined, netting Democrats 2 additional seats more than their voting % would indicate despite having similar population and number of congressional seats.
Which is ironic given that majority-minority districts were at first helpful for GOP legislatures to cram Democratic areas together in one district.
What is your proposal for choosing how to assign districts, in the absence of gerrymandering?
Anyone, please do share a link if Matt has written this up before - I only subscribed recently and so there may be a well-known piece that I don't know about.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/05/16/special-master-new-york-city-redistricting-maps/
Democrats are generally in favor of getting rid of gerrymandering, but, given that it's legal, Democrats should play by the actual rules, not by the rules that they want to see
Adhering to principles even when they don't help you politically is a sign of a responsible and sober organization. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are those things.
Unilateral disarmament is a luxury belief
I am hugely sympathetic to the top level comment and had a similar reaction, but I think the argument against playing cooperate while your opponents play defect is, alas, a winning rejoinder.
Saint Augustine said it best, over 1500 years ago: “Lord grant me chastity and temperance—but not yet!”
I don't think the comparison works here. Augustine was only playing against himself, so to speak. Democrats are playing against Republicans and given that Republicans aren't backing redistricting reform it makes sense to not disarm only yourself.
Tit for tat for the win.
One of the best pieces of political science research ever: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axelrod.pdf
This difference between Democrats and Republicans in this regard is not that Democrats do this and Republicans don’t. The difference is that Republicans ruthlessly press every legal advantage they have at hand in order to maximize their political outcomes even in the face of popular will.
Republicans invented this tactic. Democrats in New York tried to copy it, but then forgot to do the actual cheating bit. Republicans trip their opponents in a foot race and then run as fast as they can to try to win. Democrats learned that they should also trip their opponents, but then they help their opponents back up before they start running again.
Democrats gerrymandering states they control in response to Republicans gerrymandering even more is an example of "tit for tat with forgiveness", which is theoretically the optimal strategy in an iterated prisoners' dilemma.
Well you have to include the forgiveness bit too.
In this case I think instead of forgiveness it's a national ban on gerrymandering which is more like "let's stop iterating on this game"
While I like the idea of a ban on gerrymandering in principle, actually enforcing such a ban is very difficult, as political partisans will do everything they possible can to look for loopholes and make sure that the judges that decide the redistricting litigations are sympathetic to their side over the other side.
There's a strong part of me that feels like the entire concept of districts to begin is inherently flawed, too ripe for abuse, and that the premise of politicians representing voters in a geographic district has largely become a fiction anyway. For better or worse, the electoral college can't be gerrymandered because all elections are statewide and the "winner take all" system of the red states and blue states cancel each other out to produce a mostly fair overall result. If House elections were voted on like electors in the electoral college - a statewide vote for "D" and "R", with the winning party getting all of the seats in each state. Such a system would still be far from perfect (for example, the same handful of swing states that decide presidential races would also be the ones that decide House control), but still seems simpler and fairer than the mess we've got now, where different states play by different rules, all of the map drawing is subject to endless litigation, and House control being effectively decided by a handful state supreme court races that elect the judges that get to decide the redistricting battles.
As Matt has said before, the only way to truly ban gerrymandering is to implement proportional representation. And we know how daunting that will be.
Let's not let the best be the enemy of the good. There are things that can be done to make it better.
This is why I don't care about gerrymandering. Drawing congressional districts has always been a political game, so I don't really care what Republicans or Democrats do. Plus, no one, not even appointed boards of "all-knowing experts," can articulate what the actual goal of drawing districts should be. Is it compact districts? Is it districts that follow pre-existing geography? Is it creating a 50-50 party balance within the state? Is it favoring some minority group at the expense of everyone else? Something else? These goals are contradictory, thus the only way to resolve them is through politics.
I would say that the main objective shouldn't be 50-50 balance, but proportionality.
The basic democratic feedback loop is to translate votes into representation, representation into policy outcomes, and policy outcomes back into votes.
It doesn't work if the representation is not roughly proportional to the votes.
Everything else is window dressing to this basic reality.
1) That is your preference, but other people have other preferences.
2) Your preference is overruled by Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act stipulations.
3) In some states (i.e. MA and OK) it is actually impossible to draw any "proportional" map.
4) What does "proportional" even mean, and who gets to decide what it means? Is a 1% difference ok? 3%? 5%? 10%? 20%?
5) A "proportional" map in like IL or CA would have some absolutely wild-shaped districts snaking out from Chicago and the Bay Area into farm country that would make the Tokyo subway map look like a square.
1. Duh?
2. No, it's "overruled" by *specific interpretations* of those stipulations which are subject both to stare decisis AND the potential of being overturned. "One person, one vote" is interpreted law, not a constitutional amendment.
Moreover, you're making an "is-ought" conflation here. I wasn't talking about "IS", I was talking about the "OUGHT". My holding is that it's a dumb law! If the goal is for us to have a representative democracy -- which seems to be the overarching goal of the Constitution -- then interpreting "one person, one vote" to prohibit, say, parallel representation or a multiparty system is just... downright fucking stupid.
Representative democracy needs a working democratic feedback loop, otherwise, it's not. a. good. representative. democracy.
Representative democracy does NOT need an overly-constrained interpretation of a general principle like "one person, one vote" in order to work properly.
3. Care to expound on that?
4. I'd personally say 5% at the max -- it's the point where "sometimes funny results happen" tips into "OK this is bullshit". But as far as "who gets to decide what it means", I mean, I would have thought that was obvious... We The People. Like, duh? That's what democracy is all about, right?
5. Uhh maybe? I don't have any redistricting software sitting in front of me, so I can't make any definitive arguments here. Also, again, your overall mistake here is that you seem to think I'm making a series of *practical* arguments about implementation, despite the fact that I didn't even bother describing any implementation.
All I was talking about was the *theoretical* level. A democratic feedback loop without proportionality between votes and representation is fundamentally broken. Period. This is not some controvertible statement, it's literally the equivalent of "2+2=4" for the concept of democracy. There are MILLIONS of different ways to accomplish a working democratic feedback loop; asking me to delineate some specific implementation of it is putting the cart before the horse.
The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act aren't about "one person, one vote." Those are the laws that mandate majority-minority districts, and essentially enforce gerrymandering to favor one racial group at the expense of other racial groups.
Because Republicans are spread so thin in MA and Democrats are spread so thin in OK, it is essentially impossible to draw any map that yields even one Republican district in MA and one Democratic district in OK.
And your answer on "who decides" doesn't make sense. You argue that elected majorities shouldn't draw congressional districts because those districts violate some principle of proportionality, but then argue that those same elected majorities should decide what "proportionality" means.
"Proportional" means that you cannot make it more closely match the statewide vote share by changing a seat.
If you have 9 seats and, statewide, D's got 40% of the vote and R's got 60, then statewide, 4 D and 5 R is proportional (44.4% of seats vs 55.6% of seats - 4.4% error). 5D and 4R would obviously match the share LESS, and 3D 6R would also match it less (6.7% error)
Democrats (just like Republicans) doing some gerrymandering when they have a chance -- Republicans storming the Capitol violently to try to overturn a free and fair election egged on by the party's leader with the quiescent or outright support of almost all high party officials.
Same same. Not a whit of difference.
Have you done any reading indicating whether Republicans ever engage in gerrymandering?
Gerrymandering free democracy has been studied under laboratory conditions, but the wild form is rare.
Is there some problem with the non-partisan commission states actually being gerrymandered? I haven’t really looked too deeply into it since the big 538 deep dive into it like 8 years ago but that seemed like a real thing.
Gerrymandering is bad but it's a feature of the system as it's developed.
Good article. Some thoughts to add:
(1) I live in Manhattan (north of the congestion zone) and own a car, which someone in my family drives probably and average of once a week. We rarely drive anywhere in the congestion zone and drive a lot less than the average suburbanite, and somehow the EZ Pass bill still adds up fast. There are a lot of tolls here and you just fold it into the cost of car ownership if you choose to own a car. And as others have pointed out, it's hard to drive anywhere in the congestion zone (of blessed memory) without spending far more than $15 on parking.
(2) Speaking of parking, I think that's a huge missing piece to unlocking road capacity in Manhattan. There's an absurd amount of free street parking in Manhattan given the demand here and very few loading zones. That means you have a ton of double parked delivery trucks and cars doing some form of loading/unloading. This kills a traffic lane when it happens and massively increases traffic. My hypothesis is that charging more for street parking, creating more enforced loading zones, and then cracking down on double parking would create a huge benefit, and no one ever talks about trying that.
(3) I favor congestion pricing but don't understand why they didn't make it variable based on time of day/actual traffic conditions. A lot of the opposition (especially the astroturf "social justice" opposition) comes from people who argue that off hours commuting by transit is hard and people need to drive then. Fine. So why not make it cheaper when there's less demand and more expensive when there's more demand? Other cities do this, and surely the technology exists.
(4) Congestion pricing was proposed so long ago that its proponents kind of assumed it was just a matter of clearing court battles and environmental reviews and stopped focusing on political support (and as Matt notes burned political capital on other things like bail reform). That was huge mistake. It wasn't just LI Republicans who hated it, it was Normie Democrats in New Jersey. You have to constantly work the politics of an issue to make it politically palatable if you want it to succeed. My guess is that Hochul saw polls/talked to Hakeem Jeffries and realized it was too politically dangerous at this point. The way to fix that would've been to keep campaigning for congestion pricing as a political matter (not just in the courts) for the past several years. As Matt has noted, if democracy is truly the most important thing on the ballot, congressional seats are in fact more important than congestion pricing even if congestion pricing is/was a good idea.
(5) The the extent people argued for congestion pricing on the merits it was often framed as a climate argument. That was stupid because the marginal car trips to lower Manhattan are obviously completely trivial in the scheme of things to global climate issues. This reflects the larger failures of climate activists in the US.
(6) The MTA is bad with money and that's a huge problem. That said, its transit systems are very well-used and do need to be funded. Funding the MTA and reforming the MTA are related but still separate issues, and we need to do both. For all of its flaws, the subway/NYC commuter rail is still the US's best transit system.
(7) NY/NYC government in general expensive and inefficient, and taxes are high, but at the end of the day our public services are mostly good. The MTA is inefficient but the subway is still the US's best transit system. NYC has very low crime for a major city, but that comes with a very well-staffed NYPD (I've seen a dozen officers standing around when one person is being arrested for a disturbance in a store -- but at least the person is being arrested and there aren't tents on the sidewalk). There's much less street homelessness than you see in other cities. The parks are extensive and well-maintained. The schools are relatively good given the population and complexity of the system. At the end of the day NYers are generally okay paying high taxes because at the end of the day we do get good public services for those taxes. But it's sad because some efficiency improvements could make our public services a lot better for the money we spend (and we could also generate a lot more tax revenue for free if we just loosened land use restrictions and unlocked land value).
(8) In conclusion, it's sad that congestion pricing went down the way it did, but I don't really blame Hochul, and blaming her misses all the important mistakes NY has made along the way. A moderate-liberal reformist movement that isn't beholden to the left/unions/Groups or to the suburban anti-density types could do great things here, but I don't know quite how to go about building it, which is why I'm not a political professional I guess.
This is all true (and NY is a particularly egregious example; I like the "governor and legislature have a negative WAR" analogy) but it naturally leads to another discussion: in places with one party rule, how do we best encourage good governance? Minnesota is the counterexample here -- a D trifecta with slim majorities, but are actually using those majorities to enact solid D priorities like more abundant housing. So how do we push places like NY to do better?
For that matter I suppose, you could make the flip side of the argument (how do we get R controlled states to govern effectively). Mike DeWine was one of the few R governors who actually seemed interested in governing, but even he had to capitulate somewhat to a wacko legislature. State government workings naturally get less attention than the federal government, which can be both good (less scrutiny means less chance at extremists fanning the flames) or bad (less scrutiny means more opportunities to pander to lobbyists who don't have the public's interest in mind). So what's the solution?
To speak to Minnesota in particular, blue trifecta-ism is a very new experience. This rot takes time to set in. I'm actually *very* worried that the Minnesota GOP has recently become totally unserious and will not present a remotely palatable alternative to the DFL.
Illinois is a great example of a blue state that has a positive WAR Governor. I don't know whether he has a particular schtick beyond having an instinct to not wade into hot button issues, remedying the truly dreadful corruption taint that IL Dems have had fit years, and occasionally picking a fight with Chicago's mayor in broadly popular ways. You fix the civil service talent attracting issues downstream of that. So... Get lucky and hope someone ambitious but not cravenly so becomes the executive, I guess?
It probably helps that IL's governor doesn't have to personally rely on the state Democratic machine for money.
Yeah, seems like an outlier. Machines run on party hacks. You can't lifehack your way out of that problem by getting altruistic billionaires to run longshot candidacies and then competently govern for a decade or so.
IMO we're barking up the wrong tree here. The problem of one-party states is downstream of the fact that a nationalized two-party system is fundamentally incompatible with a federal structure. So, sure, change is incremental, there's no way to magically replace the 2PS with a multiparty democracy overnight; but we're already like 4-5 kludges downstream of a kludgy-ass system in the first place.
There simply *is no* magical 6th kludge that will make one-party states not be machines that run on hacks. Period.
So, I'm happy to game it out with you all, but the whole thing feels pretty futile to me. We already know the answer: Alaskan-style RCV+Top 4 is the most viable pathway towards loosening polarization and a multiparty future.
I hate to be that asshole in the corner saying that only extreme solutions will work... but when everyone else is trying to make "fetch" happen, I don't know what the hell else to do.
Mailbag question!
Is this kind of governance challenge greater in states with a single, dominant population center? I’m in Chicagoland and our dynamics are similar. The majority, centered in the city, tends toward patronage politics. The minority and non-urban members of the majority can lean towards obstructionism both because their constituents want it and for cultural reasons.
Off the top of my head, states where, like IL and NY, roughly 2/3 of the population lives in a single metro area would be Washington State, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Georgia.
It's probably worth noting that while 57% of Colorado's population lives in the "DRCOG" counties (Denver Regional Council of Governments), that's split across numerous different municipal governments. Only 12% of the population actually lives in the City and County of Denver (Denver being a combined city/county).
Yes. Although it’s true of all virtually all metro areas that the population of the city doesn’t really capture the population of what people think of as the city. And the split between the center city and the suburbs is somewhat arbitrary.
It's officially three metro areas of Ogden/SLC/Provo, but they are so close to each other on the Wasatch Front that I think Utah needs at least an honorable mention here.
Democrats would win more elections if they ditched their urbanist fetish and embraced the suburbs. It’s election time and yet, just last week, the Biden administration announced rigid new fuel economy standards that will require an average of 65 mpg by 2031. Is this what swing voters crave? Does the Biden administration know more about what kinds of cars suburban drivers want than GM, Toyota and Volkswagen? No. They are trying to socially engineer our lives even as they claim Trump will end freedom.
Democrats can be trusted to maintain the existing safety net and little else. The only issue on which they show any real initiative is climate— an issue on which virtually any plausible reduction in US emissions will have no visible effect.
Even if that's true most places, it's not true in *New York City*. It's a fraction of a percent of the country's land mass, 2.5% of the population. We can have one urban area for the people in the US that actually want to live in a city. Except apparently we can't, because the people that govern the city hate it.
You will eat the bugs, David, whether you want to or not.
I’m quite happy with my Honda Accord. When my son turns 16, In five years, I’ll give it to him and buy a plug in electric. But I’m not normal. Red blooded Georgia men of my class drive $60-70k trucks or SUVs. I’m sort of a suburban hippie. Sort of.
Any person who takes out a mortgage for a poorly disguised minivan for men deserves derision.
I too prefer cars I can parallel park.
Also you're giving up the two things I like most about my actual minivan - sliding doors and separate seats ("Dad, he's touching my half of the seat") is less of a concern.
Socially engineer your life by requiring better fuel economy in cars. Got it.
Curious what "average" means here. Can I produce an EV that consumes 0 gas and a truck that uses 33mpg, sell one of each, and average > 65mpg?
Even if we use eMPG some version of this math could work.
I believe it means average between city and freeway mpg for a single vehicle not an average of vehicles overall.
No one cares about fuel economy standards. This isn’t government social engineering. It’s not like a congestion charge that touches people’s daily life. If you think there’s a point to managing externalities, then this is a better way to do it than many.
The courts will likely neuter the fuel economy standards. But if this shit were a risky enforced, there would totally be electoral consequences.
The courts also saved Biden from trying to ban new federal leases for petroleum extraction. Conservative jurists appear to be the only adults in the room. Sad.
Won't somebody think of the suburbanites?
I’m not the first to mention this (nods to Ross Barken and Nick Rafter) but the political problem here is less of Long Island suburbanites - who have access to the continent’s best commuter railway system- but outer borough NYC residents living in transit deserts. In places like Utica Ave, your current transit option is a crappy bus - or even two- connecting to the subway. Of course a car looks a lot more appealing to that and congestion pricing was a slap in your face without any benefits. The IBX is a good plan, but even that is really for people who already have subway access. Failing to continue to expand the system with things like the Utica Ave subway or other expansions ins eastern Queens leads to predictable political problems like this, and it comes down to the MTA’s ridiculous costs which means that only things that benefit Manhattan make sense.
I think this is correct policy-wise but not politically. It’s not clear to me that anyone living near Utica Ave cares much, even while they’re affected. By contrast, people I talk to from Long Island really have drunk their own kool aid about how often they drive to “the city”.
But ultimately the same story holds because the LIRR is perhaps the worst-managed medium-sized transit agency ever, we just spent $11bm on East Side Access and got literally nothing for it, and it sure would help to be able to tell people “just take these perfectly functional, fast, comfortable LIRR trains instead of driving, you’ll even save time”.
What percentage of people there commute by bus? At least bus commutes will be improved, they don’t have to be crappy.
Also, I checked a random spot near the end of Utica Ave and the commute time both by car and bus+subway is showing around 1:10 right now. It is not a true transit desert if you have frequent buses.
As a sometimes bus rider (although not usually from Utica Ave), I support congestion pricing with the hope that it will make buses faster. The traffic makes buses excruciatingly slow.
"A larger issue here is that I continue to think most Democrats are excessively blasé about the crisis in blue state governance quality. Precisely because New York City and California feature such a high cost of living, they are populated almost exclusively by extreme outliers in terms of the value placed on the unique lifestyle amenities provided by those places. But when New Yorkers tell me they could never move to the suburbs of Raleigh, they’re not saying they would miss the high quality public services provided by their state government. New York State has more people than the Netherlands, a GDP per capita nearly as high as Qatar, and the same combined top state and federal income tax rate as Denmark. What are residents getting for that?"
This paragraph captures the core problem at hand. Calling for higher taxation without any accountability to deliver better services simply reeks of politics of envy and corruption (MTA purchase highlighted by NYPost, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/the-nonprofit-industrial-complex-and-the-corruption-of-the-american-city/). I hope Democrats take note else the marginal voter will stomach a crazy GOP who may not improve services, but will definitely keep the same/ reduce taxation.
The lack of accountability is huge. As a resident of Seattle, I'm very frustrated with the whole homelessness situation. We keep giving money to the same nonprofits that either don't measure their result or have really low success rates. When the public gets annoyed and demands to know why it doesn't seem to be getting better, we get scolded on how we're just not spending enough money. I have no problem spending more money, but it needs to be spent on stuff that works, not some politically-connected nonprofit.
In the end, the thing that seems to have helped the most is doing more sweeps. Activists complain that it disrupts people's lives, but the number of murders in these encampments has gone down significantly since we started sweeping more frequently. Honestly, more disruption in return for a significantly lower chance of getting murdered seems like a an acceptable tradeoff.
Seattle is covered in detail in the article I linked to above. It shows, and makes sense, that the nonprofits have a vested interest in keeping the problem alive. It ensures they get funded.
The low point has to be that initiative to eliminate visible homelessness downtown and at their first followup they'd only housed 13 people. Nobody thought they'd achieve the goal anytime soon, but 13 is just embarrassing.
There actually are quite a few more people getting housed than there were 2 years ago. We have finally gotten a significant number of units open in Long Term Supportive Housing that are taking folks off the street, usually the most visible. But because the system prioritizes folks who are part of sweeps and sweeps happen most frequently in wealthy neighborhoods that complain a lot, it isn't making much of a visible difference in poorer places and is actually concentrating areas of extreme poverty.
For example, we just opened up 300 units of long term supportive housing on Aurora just a few blocks from the day shelter where I work. You might think that would lead to less visible homelessness on Aurora which is one of the areas with extreme levels of homelessness and dangerous conditions. But only 25 of those units went to people who were previously homeless near Aurora. Instead, the King County Homelessness Authority gave those beds to folks caught up in sweeps in Magnolia, Ballard, Greenlake, etc. So it actually just brought another 275 folks in extreme poverty with significant behavioral health issues to an area which already had some of the highest levels.
Our day shelter and medical clinic have had an almost 75% increase in people accessing our services because most of these 275 people now have a roof but still need food, medical care, access to addiction treatment, counseling, social work service and still seek community and emotional support. It is more than we can handle and the moment and we are scrambling to figure out how to expand the space and/or hours to accommodate this population. I think similar things are happening downtown and other areas where these units are going up.