At both new bagel places and donut shops I always order at least one Plain. It's the real test for how good the rest of their products can be --- the foundation on which all other flavors must be built.
If you're actually at Mt. Sinai, your best bet is the H&H down on 2nd between 80th and 81st. The one on Columbus is about the same distance but you have to cross the park.
I don't know where in Orlando you live, but I can think of at least 4 places within a mile or two of where I live in Boise to get good quality onion bagels, and it's a much smaller metro that doesn't have any extraordinary claim to a history of bagel making.
Fair the thing about Orlando that's frustrating is it's incredibly dispersed. I was just Google Mapping to make sure I wasn't selling things short and any place to get bagels is a good trip out of the way. Even like an Einstein's adds like 20 minutes to my commute.
If I were really super wanting a bagel I could get one, probably via DoorDash or a trip out. But it's not like when I lived in Columbus or Cincinnati where it would be in the neighborhood on the way to the freeway. We have everything in the world here but it's always over there and when you get to work before 7 every minute is important.
This is completely accurate, everything in Orlando is always 20 minutes away. That said, just plugging that Toojay's has really good bagels, and Jeff's Bagel Run is also really good (though they don't do bagel sandwiches which is a shame).
I didn’t know about toojays. Jeff’s and bagel king have usually been my go to and Eola market but for a workday morning they may as well be on the moon.
Yeah toojays is an actual Jewish restaurant but they make their own bagels daily and they're very good. I just order ahead on my phone and pick it up at the to go counter. But I am realizing now that it opens at 8am which sounds like it's too late for you lol. Still worth keeping in mind for a weekend!
That makes sense, and I could certainly envision it. I just always run with being able to find good food of many kinds in any top 100 metros, even if more challenging in exurbia.
de Tocqueville in his keenly observed Democracy in America says he knows of "nothing that is more petty, more insipid, more crowded with paltry interests — in a word, more antipoetic" than life in the United States.
How, after all, having encountered a croissant, could one still prefer a bagel.
No one has to prefer a bagel to a croissant. They’re both good things, but not obvious rivals.
In my opinion— though this is a separate issue— it’s slightly easier to make a passable bagel than to make a passable croissant. The bagels you can find in Dubuque are closer to H&H than the croissants in Dubuque are to Parisian croissants.
The trouble with everything carbohydrate liberalism is it does not recognize there is a finite carbohydrate budget, and that difficult decisions need to be made.
"Speak to the children of Israel, saying, of the bagel thou mayest eat, of the salt and likewise of the sesame, yeah even of the bialy thou mayest eat, but of the Croissanwich and of the Cronut thou shalt not eat, for they are unclean; nor of any food that mixeth the bagel with the croissant, for it will be an abomination to you."
I agree that it doesn't make sense to compare bagels and croissants, they're just separate categories of good thing.
However, given that UChicago created a tradition of debating "Latke vs Hamantash", I think it is important that we establish once and for all that the correct answer to that is: Sufganiyot. By a mile.
Sadly it's not available online, AFAICT, but back in the late 1990s when bagels were first surging to national popularity, Daniel Pinkwater had a great rant on NPR against bagels with berries or (G*d forbid) jalapeños in them that had the great line, "A good bagel should sit in your stomach like a block of lead."
I enjoy the richness of a good egg bagel. It's just _enough_ of an indulgence, without going excessive or turning into dessert (like cinnamon raisin, chocolate chip, etc).
YIMBYism should rebrand as promoting construction jobs, which is obviously literally true. 'Getting rid of NIMBYism creates good-paying blue collar jobs locally' is a popular message- Americans love job programs. Construction can be OK paying, sometimes lucrative for skilled trades, but also can't be offshored, seems to have low automation potential, etc. It should be a great replacement for factory work. It's also a very willing employer of men from tough neighborhoods, men with criminal records, etc. You think a roofing crew cares if you have a felony?
If YIMBYs could get construction workers to testify in favor of building projects, it'd help sharpen their message and push on the class divide a little bit- it's usually the upper middle class that's *against* construction in their neighborhoods. OTOH, I can't imagine the average YIMBY I know or see online have an actual conversation with someone in the trades, so that alliance might need a little bit of work
This is kind of similar to the "siding with unions against environmentalists" formula Matt has alluded to before in cases where environmentalists stimy various projects.
Yes, but it's harder to replace the installers on a bespoke site. The men and women responsible for installing what some overeducated moron drew up in CAD without considering where it was getting installed are not easily replaced without building more advanced multipurpose robots.
*All love to those engineers, but as a welder *and*.a liberal arts major I've got to get my digs in.
Here in CA the various builder's unions (Carpenter's Union especially) have been very vocal pro-YIMBY on housing bills. This being California politics it comes with strings attached around union wage scales; but you're right that it's a natural coalition.
Well, the Carpenters _specifically_ have been good. The larger Building Trades Council has been difficult to work with and often taken positions that seem to benefit existing members at the expense of the possibility of growing the membership.
I think we've also peeled off a couple others on some particular bills. (Like I think the Laborers endorsed some stuff, last year?) It's an always an ongoing negotiation.
Say, it's still a minority of construction worker unions that are pro development in California. The majority still take the "restrict and rent-seek" model. Scratch the surface of housing politics in the state at all, and you will find this dynamic around every corner.
The challenge with this is that at element of Abundance is cost effectiveness and making something about jobs tempts policymakers to make things unnecessarily expensive
It's as if the Groups have unionized against policymakers. The risk of being a single issue group is that you can just get cut out. The omni-cause protects everyone. Unfortunately, the policymakers are then stuck with the worst 5% of the omni-cause ideas.
"the biggest difference between states like Maine, Washington, and Texas that are putting big wins on the board and those like New York and Maryland that aren’t, is bipartisanship."
Have to put in a shameless plug for New Hampshire. The wins might not be as big as other states, but YIMBYism seems to be doing ok here with a handful of laws just passed on a bipartisan basis and signed by a Republican governor:
1) single stairwell
2) statewide restrictions on excessive parking requirements
If I had to guess one New England state that would pick up YIMBY reforms it would be New Hampshire. Live free (in a single-stairwell apartment complex) or die!
I love NH, but the first image that comes to my mind is a 4 story apartment complex in the middle of an empty 3 acre lot with no sidewalks, a dirt driveway, and a gigantic leach field and fuel tank out back.
The second image that comes to mind is a historic main street with mixed use brick buildings on both sides.
The best reason for YIMBYs to be single issue and attempt bipartisanship is that the single party versions of these bills are usually much weaker.
A Democrat only pro housing bill is going to end up including a bunch of affordability requirements that may end up requiring inclusionary zoning that will backfire. It may also include a bunch of labor and environmental giveaways in order to get enough Democrats on board. Blue state Republicans should recognize that there is a lot of room for them to improve their states housing bills if they are willing to enter negotiations in good faith. Currently many Republicans in the northeast have decided it is more beneficial for them to criticize the bills from the sidelines in favor of local control.
There are not many examples of Republican only housing bills in the states, the Democratic party in red states has consistently come to the table to negotiate a bipartisan version of these bills. But Republican led housing bills tend to narrowly focus big cities where the Republicans have almost few legislators anyway. This does have the added benefit of reducing sprawl, but many of these concepts should also apply to suburban areas, and they prevent the creation of what could be new population centers.
I'm not always that distrustful, but anyone who is pushing for any type of restriction on housing needs to know that we'll get less of it, even if unintended.
It can be, but it is often well intentioned bad policy. I have seen many well intentioned truly pro-housing groups argue for harmful inclusionary zoning policies out of a misguided ideas. It is important to differentiate between the well intentioned from those acting in bad faith, as the well intentioned can be reasoned with.
Some of these groups have a stated goal of increasing the number of "affordable units" and they define affordable units as subsidized units where low income people only pay 30% of their income in rent. The easiest political pathway to building these units is through inclusionary zoning. Policy makers often see that as a "free", or off budget, way of making these affordable units. It is more effective to offer financial incentives to builders to voluntarily include these units, but that puts it on the government budget.
It is important to try and convince these groups that the more important goal is just increasing housing production overall and not focus on building new "affordable units". We can gain credibility with these groups by pairing YIMBY policies with calls for increasing state funding for housing vouchers and public housing.
Tangential question: will the outcome of Skrmetti make the ACLU reflect on its trajectory - or at least on the wisdom of allowing Chase Strangio to present his personal opinions as their official positions?
The ACLU so quickly throwing away its principles on free speech (its literal raison d’etre) shows it’s more interested in fundraising than producing specific legal outcomes.
I think that’s the broader point connected to this piece. The incentive structure for nonprofits is different than for-profits. For-profits succeed or they die. For nonprofits, success is completely orthogonal to existence (i.e. you can be effective but still shutter if funding dries up and you can be completely counter-effective in perpetuity if the funding is there). So if a non profit can get more donations by broadening its mission, it will likely do that even if it means it becomes less effective. That’s how you end up with, like, pro-choice groups saying things like “climate justice means trans black lives for Palestine.”
One of my favourite examples of this is the Congo Reform Association whose sole goal was (oversimplifying) to get King Leopold to give up personal ownership of the Congo. Which he did in 1908. But the organisation didn't actually disband until five years later when funding dried up.
King Leopold's Ghost, along with We Regret To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will We Killed, were my two "favourite" purchases from the US Holocaust Museum bookstore.
March of Dimes was killed by scope creep? It seems like they did a lot of good work on a variety of baby and children-related health issues. Why should they have disbanded after polio was defeated? Creating an effective organization is hard; why not keep it going to achieve new goals?
Now had they made a hard turn toward fighting for From the River to the Sea, that would have been a different thing, but they just kept on working things that were generally in their lane. That strikes me as a good thing.
They recalled all their grants they funded. They basically didn’t have a clear mission after polio and thus became unfocused and bloated. The leadership of their organization basically drew down their endowment and they weren’t able to generate sufficient donations to cover operation costs.
(I feel like this is where dysphemistic treadmill would quip how he sees more and more evidence that people introspect but that we shouldn’t trust it and hold fast in our belief that people would rather double down)
Some people receive more utility from the praise they receive for being bold and "speaking truth to power" than they do from achieving results. If they go down in flames, then that makes them even more praiseworthy as they proved themselves brave in the face of evil and unwilling to compromise with it.
I obviously don't agree with this point of view, but the reason why it appeals to a lot of people is that sometimes it's sort of right. If you live in a dictatorship (Soviet Union, Putinist Russia, take your pick), then it probably is more honorable to stand tall and go down in flames than it is to work within the system. In a mostly-functional democracy, however, things are different.
That's why exaggerating the hell out of the country's state of disrepair (and then working towards realizing it) has been such a core part of the MAGA movement.
If people had realized how actually-pretty-much-fine things were in 2016 then they wouldn't have started lashing out by voting for nonsense. We had a non-desperate electorate that voted with desperation... why?
Yeah, it's understandable why Russians turned to Putin exactly when they did, even if I disagree. 2016 America wasn't exactly post-Shock Therapy Russia.
One of the first political organizations I ever donated to was the ACLU. It was very disappointing to see how differently they acted from I expected based on the ACLU I learned about in my youth. I stopped donating years ago.
I think taking on that case could have consistently fit with the values of the ACLU of yore. The problem there was making a maximal argument against a hostile SCOTUS, and that should tell them that they'll have to trim their sails even on some of their traditional planks.
"The ACLU" can't do anything. The ACLU Board of Directors (a group of actual human beings with specific names) could consider imposing some message discipline on one of their employees.
We live in a world that erodes civil liberties and those liberties have to be guarded by organizations with lawyers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Ken Kovar? The ACLU have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Dobbs and Skrmetti and you curse the ACLU. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what the ACLU fights for; Ernesto Miranda, Jim Obergeffel, Mildred and Richard Loving -- that the losses in Dobbs and Skrmetti, probably saved lives; and the ACLU's existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about in Internet forums you want the ACLU -- you need the ACLU.
The ACLU have neither the time nor the inclination to explain themselves to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that they provide and then questions the manner in which they provide it.
Style points for the A Few Good Men parallelism, but a deduction for opening with Ernesto Miranda as among what the ACLU fights for in what appears to be a list otherwise enumerating sympathetic litigants. To all appearances Ernesto Miranda was an utterly vile person entirely guilty of the crimes to which he confessed.
Yes, but you see why the parallelism with the Lovings and Obergefell doesn't work in a rhetorical context because they're ostensibly being invoked in their personal capacities as litigants. I am aware of the adage that a corollary of defending civil rights in general (particularly for speech and essentially definitionally for Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule determinations) means that one is necessarily in the position of defending scoundrels.
If the Miranda case happened in 2025 you'd have people making murals of Ernesto Miranda.
I think less idiots were paying attention, so the ACLU didn't have to work very hard threading a needle of "yes this guy sucks but the principle matters. You can just re-try him on the other evidence."
True, although the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination is probably the least philosophically defensible in the entire Bill of Rights. It's a right that by its terms inures to the benefit of the guilty and not the innocent and is overwhelmingly in practical terms simply an expedient to avoid the courts being clogged with nakedly perjurious testimony.
"Again, while the other privileges accord with notions of decent conduct generally accepted in life outside the court room, the privilege against self-incrimination defies them. No parent would teach such a doctrine to his children; the lesson parents preach is that while a misdeed, even a serious one, will generally be forgiven, a failure to make a clean breast of it will not be."
Henry J. Friendly, (2d Circuit Judge and later Chief Judge), The Fifth Amendment Tomorrow: The Case for Constitutional Change, 37 U. CN. L. REv. 671, 680 (1968).
The problem is once you assert a right is the State to compel self incrimination, you get into the question of what can be done to people, and at what point you can be satisfied that they have been truthful.
It would make me so sad if it turned out this was written by ChatGPT.
The funniest bit is that "Ken Kovar" is not obviously a Jewish name and so flips the story from the Marines to the ACLU. (Imagine it being, "you, Weinberg?" here and the answer is, well, yes of course; check out my name.)
Yeah, but that's kind of my point - if he's sufficiently low down the totem pole, maybe reel in his social media activity a bit? Rightly or wrongly, he's perceived as a de facto spokesperson for the ACLU, and it doesn't seem to have served their mission to let him define their public image.
Yeah - I'm going to agree here. Telling one's employees what they can say *when they are representing your organization* is not a violation of free speech.
Were they? He's the "Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project," and this was a case on Trans Rights? I sort of assume he was a big part of the ACLU's decisionmaking on it? Can't find any org chart with a quick search and he's not listed in their senior leadership page, so maybe you're right?
It's not that he's unimportant. Obviously he's important enough to have represented the ACLU in the Supreme Court.
But he didn't make the decisions that everyone is complaining about. For instance, the decision Matt references regarding free speech cases came after Charlottesville, was made by a group of people led by Anthony Romero, and as far as I know Chase had no involvement in it at all. (And BTW, it's somewhat overstated--the ACLU still takes plenty of "right wing" coded free speech cases, including notably representing the NRA in the Supreme Court and winning.)
Even the major decisions on Skrmetti were made by Chase's superiors, although Chase obviously had significant input there. He makes a nice target for all sorts of reasons, but if you don't like the direction of the ACLU, it really isn't his doing.
Ok. Even though I lean against gender-affirming care for pre-pubescent children, it does feel like a case that’s within the ACLU’s bailiwick. They should err on the side of free speech, even when I want to suppress it, and individual rights and freedoms, including those of children at the expense of their parents, even when I don’t agree. It’s their purview.
Ah, yes, this is certainly true. I was assuming we were discussing the trans cases, not the ACLU's overall changes, to the extent they've occured, where Chase's behavior is obviously symptom not cause.
I prefer land tax to be framed as "not punishing productive uses."
Landowners shouldn't be punished for doing something productive with their land, be it planting an apple orchard or building a factory or putting up a triplex.
I wouldn't call it overly American. This blog is explicitly tilted toward American issues. Below is from https://www.slowboring.com/about
"Slow Boring is a daily newsletter from Matthew Yglesias (and occasionally others) about politics and public policy, mostly in the United States but occasionally elsewhere."
Crime is heavily concentrated in the poorest areas. For example despite its high crime reputation, most of the North Side of Chicago has a lower homicide rate than the national average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago. Sure, we should crack down on crime to make lives better for the poorest, but that’s a completely separate issue from building new housing.
There's a good distance between "crime" and "homicide." Every day on the L you'll see things that don't rise anywhere close to the level of homicide but still would make you nervous if you had small kids with you.
I guess the disconnect is probably more related to the difference between occurrences and rates. Like, north Chicago might have a lower rate of antisocial behavior than other places, but you're still likely going to see a lot more antisocial behavior there than in far less densely populated areas.
I think this blog made the argument that people care about how much crime they see not per capita, which means that lower-density areas feel safer because you just don’t see as many things even if they actually aren’t.
But it seems most people with this attitude are probably going to move to the suburbs anyway—if you encounter 10x more people on a regular day in the city you’d need to somehow get to a 10x lower crime rate which would be impossible, or at least impossible without extremely draconian measures that people wouldn’t like either.
yeah it does seem like we'd need draconian measures that very few people would accept, but then I look at Tokyo and it doesn't seem that authoritarian despite being 10x safer than American cities. So idk.
Yeah. I used to like the Urbanist, but they’ve become a progressive everything bagel site, which is made painfully obvious by their city attorney endorsement this year.
That fear doesn’t seem well-founded given how expensive new buildings are. Doesn’t seem like we can build anything for under $400,000/unit. Even the trickle down affordability theory envisions rich people moving into the newer buildings freeing up older ones for poorer people, not poor people moving into the new buildings.
Sure, but if crime were lower on the south side more people would move there. I lived in Pilsen in the nineties when crime was at it's peak. There was a small colony of artist types but the vast majority of people who lived there were working poor. It's blossomed quite a bit since then.
Just north of there, literally on the other side of the tracks, where Maxwell Street used to be, they redeveloped the area and called it University Village. That are used to be kind of bombed out and gross, but now it's quite nice.
St. Ignatius college prep is just a couple blocks further north and west, at Roosevelt and Blue Island. It used to be across from a ghastly housing project that I was scared to even drive by at night. Now that area has condos going for $350-450k.
This is just how succession works in urban transition. It’s very much like succession in a forest ecosystem.
When a fire or rockfall or highway construction tears down a lot of trees, the first species that succeed are ones that are fine with disturbed soil, and that climb quickly to shade their neighbors. But once there is a low shade canopy of shrubs and aspens, which keeps away grazers, the trees that take a long time to reach their full height start succeeding, and eventually shade out this first growth. There are often a couple more stages before you reach old growth forest that has something like a steady state.
You see the same thing when a neighborhood is industrial, or high crime, but becomes available for housing with easy transportation access. The first species that enter are things like artists, who take advantage of cheap real estate to buy big studios and lofts, or gay couples who don’t worry about schools (and as men don’t worry as much about street crime). Once the artists and gays have occupied a good chunk of the real estate, they have crowded out many of the problems - there is less heavy industry, less crime, and more tax base for a local school system. So others start moving in, and pretty soon the artists are priced out.
NIMBYism and crime concentration are correlated. NIMBYs don't want overbuilding to prevent the same people from infiltrating their neighborhoods. The reason families and middle class people moved to the suburbs is for lower crime and better QOL. Those who can't move are stuck in places of high crime.
Taxes and schooling are very close to zoning and construction. Crime and abortion are more distantly related. (Though crime is at least a place-based issue that is somewhat relevant.)
I can't imagine any unifying YIMBY values on education or taxes. Both school vouchers and mandatory comprehensive schooling are compatible with YIMBY, you can be a low or high tax YIMBY.
“The politics of rich people who live in cities” frequently includes NIMBYism so that doesn’t seem like a workable coalition.
The most YIMBY group is probably moderately rich young people who are hoping to be able to stay in the city once they have kids. Theoretically improving crime and education should be appealing to them but in practice in most cities crime is a low priority because it’s heavily concentrated in the poorest areas where they don’t live and education also is a low priority because they don’t see policy being able to improve public schools enough outside of cities like NYC that have the total resources to create Stuyvesants etc. and are resigned to having to pay for private schools anyway—96% of parents in rich parts of Chicago use private schools for example (https://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Gold-Coast-Chicago-IL.html). YIMBYism might lead to more moderate policies on crime and education because it will make it more affordable for the people who are most sensitive to these issues to stay in the city once they have kids but that’s the way causation would run and not the reverse.
Using the gold coast as your example is disingenuous, it's a tiny population situated downtown where there are few schools in the first place. Try a north side zip code full of rich people and now your argument doesn't work. https://www.city-data.com/zips/60657.html
As a single issue, YIMBYism that advocates removing building restrictions is pretty antithetical to the very existence of suburbs, though, and so will always have a large built-in group of opponents, in the suburbanites who don't want to turn their suburban neighborhoods into cities. A suburb is a garden district that requires regular and intentional tending to remain that way, though laws such as zoning and building restrictions.
What YIMBYism can give suburbs is a movement that takes some development pressure off suburbs by making cities more livable for people who want to live in cities. In a lot of metropolitan areas, part of what drives demand for densifying and urbanizing suburban areas around neglected urban cores is that the cities haven't been run well enough (crime, schools, etc) to retain and attract middle class people who otherwise would prefer to live there.
So maybe the way to make all sides happy isn't trying force urbanization on unwilling suburbanites but rather some type of town and country coalition with an operative motto of "let cities be cities, and suburbs be suburbs".
I just want some more coherence and planning. No city council member should see a bunch of duplexes directly next to a shopping center where the shortest route between the two is a half mile walk around some dang artificial perimeter like chain link fence around an empty parking lot.
The fact that so many suburbs don't even have sidewalks between residential areas and a grocery store or mall that is a mile or two away is such a missed opportunity.
Ain’t nobody walking a mile to the grocery store! Not to get groceries, at least! But yes, arterials and collector roads in suburbs should have sidewalks, and they don’t in most Southern suburbs
I walked to the grocery store 0.9 miles away occasionally when I was 13-16. I wasn't getting huge amount of stuff, but I would fill up my backpack. This was in the Houston area. I also walked to/from high school every day, 0.7 miles. (I just checked the distances on Google Maps)
I do think the sidewalks and off-street paths are really, really underrated. It's very useful for people to be able to walk places, like a 14-year-old who wants to get forbidden snacks when his parents are out of town for the weekend.
They might drive for a “big” grocery purchase but they could (and do, at least in my Main Line suburb) walk a mile to get a carton of milk/loaf of bread, or even a latte.
When I was a kid, my mom's car got stolen and my dad needed his car to go to work, so trying to walk to a grocery store that was close as the crow flies, but had no connecting sidewalks, was a major pain.
I was shocked in my Texas suburb when I was biking around and ran into a neighborhood full of duplexes. I’m used to duplexes being a natural bit of infill in former single family neighborhoods that densified, not the artificial result of a greenfield neighborhood with some demand being zoned with duplexes as a cap.
As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s true that YIMBYism and suburbs are in opposition. Texas is the most YIMBY large state and Texas cities have lots of suburbs.
Suburban living is very popular, an actual free market for housing would naturally include a lot of suburban housing.
The problem is that *every* *single* *suburb* is locked into suburbanness by zoning. As population grows, you want both urban and suburban area to grow to accommodate both sorts of demands. Suburban area can easily grow into rural area. But urban area is usually hemmed in by suburbs. The natural thing would be to allow the close-in suburbs to become urban as demand grows. That means a few people with suburban preferences will need to move to keep their preference.
Upzoning the close in suburbs doesn’t mean destroying all suburbs - it just means converting the suburbs that are currently squatting on land that has demand for urban living, rather than enforcing squatters rights through zoning.
Yeah, a lot of this depends on how much land is included in a single "suburb". Some municipalities are the size of a single neighborhood, or a small number of neighborhoos - for instance, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills should be nearly fully zoned for at least moderately high density, given their location and size. Other municipalities are quite large - there's no reason to upzone all of Plano or Arlington or Garland to produce more urban space around Dallas, but each probably should have a few neighborhoods that are designed to grow up.
WeHo and Beverly Hills aren't really suburbs -- they're entirely surrounded by the City of LA -- and they're approximately as dense as the nearby areas of LA (denser in the flats, less so in the hills). As for real suburbs, mainly I think it would be a good idea to build apartments or condos in/around the strip mall areas, especially if near train stations. Doesn't need to be particularly dense, just 3-4 stories or whatever looks right. What often makes suburbanites opposed to this sort of thing is affordability requirements, but if you characterize it as a place where you can move if you want to downsize but stay in your community I'd think that would go over better. YIMBY should be about more housing, not engineering mixed-income housing where doing so will cause people to oppose more housing.
It is amazing how fundamentally suburban a lot of NOVA towns are with high walkability scores. From a lot of online NIMBY discourse, you would think Arlington looked like midtown Manhattan.
In a place as small as Arlington, a few decent urban zones/shopping areas can suddenly make the surrounding suburbs semi-walkable. I'm a 15 minute walk from Chipotle, a nice french restuarant, bakery, wine and cheese place, and a Safeway is maybe 20 minutes. Gret to walk for dinner and some drinks then walk home. Add in an e-bike and Arlington is super accessible from many parts.
Upzoning islands within a suburb (or maintaining large commercial spots but putting parking underground and densifying) can be super useful.
Big agree. I often think YIMBYism is trying to bite off too large of a political project. By revealed preference voters all over the world *like* their suburbs. I doubt it makes a lot of political sense for either party to threaten them- Dems are doing much better in the suburbs than they used to, I doubt they want to irritate voters there.
It's not a perfect solution, but it'd make a lot more sense to designate the downtown areas of cities as a free-construction zone. No height limits or other nonsense, no 'neighborhood character' restrictions. If residents complain, tell them they're free to move to the suburbs or exurbs- choosing to live in a city comes with implied consent for continuous building. If you want low density, the suburbs are right there for you! It'd make cities denser, which anyways prevents expansion pressure on the suburbs. This doesn't solve every issue with NIMBYism, but it's politically realistic and tackles a big chunk of them
>By revealed preference voters all over the world *like* their suburbs.<
And fortunately, letting property owners build more easily, and upwards, doesn't destroy suburbs. It takes decades to meaningfully alter the character of a typical suburb via densification.
Yeah, this is one of the reasons I like upzoning as much land area as possible. The more area upzoned, not only is more housing produced, but the less any one neighborhood has to be impacted by development, fighting backlash.
And chances are, the suburbs are not going to be the first place to be chosen for lots of new apartments, since they have less walkability, transit, cultural amenities for young single people, etc. That said, some suburban areas will densify a lot - especially in places like LA where a lot of areas close to the urban core and rich in transit are very suburban in nature - and that's great too.
My only point of disagreement with most urbanist types (though a point of agreement with Matt, I think) is I don't think there should be greenbelts around cities either. I'm not a fan of preserving neighborhoods in amber, but I do think an urban area should provide a lot of different options for housing types. If someone's suburb is getting more dense than they'd prefer, they can move to a new one, in a farther out area with less demand for dense housing.
It does under the current regulatory regime, sure. But that’s just the thing. YIMBYs want to make it not only legal to densify suburbs, but just as easy as digging a foundation and nailing 2x4s together (or whatever it is construction workers do, IDK)
Which, fine by me, but by-right construction can proceed on a seriously quick basis, if only you let it. We no longer have the concept of unrestrained construction from the early 20th century; it’s hard to visualize it.
I agree with your conclusion that many people would prefer suburban living in a free market, but I disagree with your premise that we can see revealed preferences. It has been illegal to build anything *except* low density suburban development on greenfield land for about 75 years (and the large majority of development is greenfield). There is no free market, and there hasn’t been one for a lifetime.
I think if we actually allowed freedom to innovate, or to copy traditional neighborhoods that are beloved, we would see a much wider range of development than we do today, and today’s simplistic labels of urban and suburban would feel much less relevant.
"It has been illegal to build anything *except* low density suburban development on greenfield land"
This is very wrong. It's true in some places, sure - but it's the norm in many states, especially the ones that have been the best at building new housing, for unincorporated land to not be zoned at all. Some, including Texas, actually ban counties from zoning this land entirely (which has probably been the single thing that's contributed most to their housing abundance). Developers there can literally put anything they want on greenfield land. They nearly always choose single family housing.
Now this doesn't, of course, mean that people always hate multifamily housing. A lot of people would prefer to live in an apartment - *if* it means they get to be in a desirable city location, in close proximity to cultural amenities, transit, jobs, etc.
But for new housing developments plopped in the middle of nowhere, when people are just assessing on the merits of the housing itself, location isn't as big a factor, and land is cheaper? People would rather have the space and the yard.
I am not surprised that the cofounder of Strong Towns has a loose grasp on the facts lol. None of their very strong, over the top claims ('Ponzi schemes', etc.) have any basis in fact https://arpitrage.substack.com/p/contra-strong-towns
Truly distant land doesn’t need zoning to stay low density. But greenfields in central neighborhoods in the suburbs (which almost always exist in new suburbs, because not every plot gets developed at once) often have the demand for higher development but are kept low by zoning.
As developing countries get wealthier, we see the new middle & upper middle classes move to suburbs in Malaysia, South Africa, Brazil, China, India, Turkey, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Sure looks like humanity has a revealed preference for the suburbs to me. People just like having their own spacious single family home and a yard. I understand that your organization does not like this revealed preference and lobbies against it
"By revealed preference voters all over the world *like* their suburbs."
At current prices people prefer to live in exurban NJ than NYC. If a 2,500 sq/ft home in exurban NJ was the same price as a condo in Manhattan the revealed preference would be different.
The revealed preference is in the price per square foot - people are willing to pay 3x as much for Manhattan as there is so much more demand.
1. Comparing per-foot costs between condos (whose size is fixed) and suburban single family homes (which can be as large as the builder likes & the market can bear) doesn't make sense. These are fundamentally different products. Homes come with land with included (people like yards), plus maybe a garage and driveway for multiple cars (you have to be really rich to get multiple parking spaces with your condo that you don't even use). Homes have no HOA fees.
Most importantly, condos were probably built in some kind of high-rise building, whose construction costs are greater than an SFH (which can be built with just wood framing). Obviously a hundred unit building cannot be framed with 2x4s.
2. Comparing 1 neighborhood in 1 city (Manhattan) to 'exurban NJ' (probably dozens of cities scattered over hundreds of square miles) is obviously nonsensical
3. Reasoning from 1 city to the whole country also doesn't really work- your units of analysis should be comparing *all* US cities to *all* US suburbs, not just cherrypicking the cities you like. For example Detroit is surrounded by wealthy suburbs which, I'm gonna take a wild guess, are more expensive per square foot than the urban core is. Same thing for Philadelphia, every city in Connecticut, much of the Midwest, etc.
I just saw a new listing on Redfin near me for a SFH with an over $1,000/month HOA fee, which feels like a circus act of an arrangement. I doubt there's enough amenities to justify that.
It depends on what they cover - I know some in FL that cover master insurance (insurance on the structure) all exterior maintenance, roof, paint, landscaping, hurricane cleanup, water, sewer, internet, trash pickup...
Right part of my HOA is going into the reserve fund to pay for a new roof in a couple years. Living in a SFH doesn't mean you don't have to pay for upkeep. It may not come as a bill every month but there are substantial ongoing expenses all the same.
I think what he’s saying is like “sure, for Manhattan.” It has a unique draw among US places. Much of the time it’s as much or more expensive to live in the nicer suburbs than cities, especially if you pick nicer suburbs to compare.
I don’t know if there’s much revealed preference either way, people live in the place they like the most that they can afford while also factoring in stuff like commute.
So we should build more suburbs if that’s something people want! YIMBYism doesn’t have to be about promoting urban life over suburban life. People should be able to choose where they live and have options.
This ignores the affordability issue of where home owners' adult children are going to live. If a suburb has increasing demand, but construction of new housing has not kept up with demand, then people are inevitably going to have to move away once they reach adulthood, which is not necessarily what those same older home owners wanted.
Unfortunately, what they want is for their children, but not anyone else's children, to be able to live there. It's not a rational desire, but it's real.
Not really. We’re at 1/5-1/6 of an acre lots in my neighborhood and traffic isn’t bad, maybe in the height of rush hour it’s hard to make a left onto an arterial without a light, but it’s still not too bad. And some of the arterials even have apartment buildings!
Another good example is the “tech right”. The DOGE approach of attacking in a hundred directions at once seems to have been fairly ineffective. They burned their political capital without clearly achieving anything.
The crypto people, on the other hand, seem to have been very effective. They are willing to support either left or right as long as the candidate is pro-crypto, and although they are loosely associated with the right wing since they are sort of a “libertarian slash financial deregulation” movement, there are still plenty of left wing pro crypto people who are welcomed into the cause, and just anecdotally if you go to a crypto event, the Trump voters and Trump haters are generally making peace and working together.
Stablecoins especially are a very non-politically-aligned genre of crypto, it seems likely they will be useful as financial rails for all sort of things.
Worth noting that this is a very old tendency - most (in)famously, under the Temperance movement - the leaders of which would campaign for or against literally any candidate, depending on their attitude on alcohol. And because of this they were frighteningly effective, sometimes cowing anti-prohibition candidates into silence or tacit support. Obviously politics was *very* different back then! But it's a model that works
the OG of this is abolitionism, which famously managed to suboordinate the entire political system to resolving the slavery question to the point that the political system realigned around abolitionists and "guys who aren't abolitionists"
I think you've got this basically exactly backwards. The non-insane abolitionists very much did not want to talk about their underlying position because they knew it was toxic, but loved talking about the Fugitive Slave Act intruding on States Rights and into their own cities. It was the slavers who wouldn't shut the fuck up about how awesome slavery was and how it needed to be allowed, nay. encouraged everywhere. There's a reason Lincoln was called a "Black Republicans" and it sure wasn't because he wanted that label.
Tbf I think that's quite unfair to abolitionism, as slavery itself was the defining issue of the future of the US - whether new states would be free states or slave states etc, what would be the economic model of the country. Whereas the Temperance movement was spun out of whole cloth, pushing a new movement from scratch
Real excited to see this article land, I strongly agree with the bottom line thesis. It's so frustrating to see so many positions be thrown into the maw of partisanship, forcing people to attach themselves to a whole bunch of views they might not agree with.
I would also say that sticking to the task at hand is even more important for non-advocacy organizations. It would always grind my gears to be reading some material and see gratuitous references to antidiscrimation and/or AGW as clear signaling. Or I think of fellow Slow Borer Lisa C's workplace, who is mired in regular statements on Gaza. Getting derailed by political and ideological causes completely unrelated to the task at hand is a great way to lose customers, donors, and trust among at least half of the population.
It’s not just about making sure YIMBYism doesn’t join the full Omnicause, issue focus also matters closer to home. An example I think is that YIMBYism shouldn’t be about telling people driving is bad, just giving people transportation options.
The adherence to zero sum ideology is a real problem in all kinds of areas. Always opposing political and ideological enemies seems to be a more important goal for a lot of these groups than actual progress in any issue. From a pragmatic standpoint it seems bonkers, but I don’t see anything changing as long as in group status seeking and policing remains supreme.
FIRE is sincerely non-partisan, but they don't fill the ACLU-of-old slot either. (1) When they intervene in court, it is pretty much always on the side of right, but they have a preference for conservative causes. (2) On their home turf (college campuses) they affirmatively support anti-free-speech causes like "institutional neutrality" and problematic time/place/manner restrictions.
Is there solid analysis that FIRE actually does have a right-leaning bias in the cases they take, or is the lopsidedness in terms of cases just a side-effect of the left bias in most university administrations?
On institutional neutrality, I think the key is the ACLU of the past was a reactive project that focused on legal cases, not so much on proactive advocacy.
Is there any evidence that ACLU of the past would have rejected or been opposed to FIRE's position that in a university setting, institutional neutrality helps to further the free speech of both students and faculty? Would they have agreed with you that institutional neutrality is de facto anti-free speech, all things considered? (to me the key here is that FIRE doesn't content that institutions MUST be neutral for any legal reason, they just believe that institutional neutrality is essential for open discourse and they think on balance that's a more pro free speech position than advocating for institutions to take sides on big issues).
A lot of "which side do they defend more" depends on who the goons in power are at a given point in time.
I forget which one, but one of the FIRE's current bigwigs first day on the job was September 10, 2001. He spent several years filing briefs protecting liberal professors who said dumb-ass shit, but legally protected dumb-ass shit, about Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yep. Historically the most successful American movements have been single issue movements, from Abolitionism to the Anti-Saloon League to the March of Dimes to civil rights and gay rights.
And the abortion one really sticks in my craw. If we ever have federal protection it will look like the Collins-Murkowski bill anyway. It's not going to look like the Women's Health Protection Act. So what's the benefit of alienating them?
The bagel that most nearly replaces the everything bagel while still remaining a single-flavor bagel is the onion bagel.
This is a self-evident truth on which all people of good will can agree.
At both new bagel places and donut shops I always order at least one Plain. It's the real test for how good the rest of their products can be --- the foundation on which all other flavors must be built.
“… the foundation on which all other….”
Agreed. Bagel qua bagel. The quintessence of bagelism. The eternal toroid. Der Ring an sich.
I do this with tuna maki at sushi places
Do you walk out if they have cinnamon raisin but not onion? I have
“…you walk out…?”
[Bunk voice:] A man must have a code.
And a famous bagel place where I went to school in Virginia that people line up in the morning to get somehow doesn't even know what an egg bagel is.
They would probably be out of business in NY for how tiny and unflavorful their bagels are but they dominate their market
Poppy seed or death.
Poppy seeds are so good, and yet I cannot even describe what they taste like.
Poppy seed is indeed the best bagel, but the bialy is the best
I’ll go with sesame if everything isn’t available, or salt
Onion is too onion-only
“…too onion….”
I will concede that onion bagels are often marked by the flavor of onion bagels.
I like salt or poppy bagels.
“… salt or poppy….”
Disjunctive bagels are a kind of Anything Bagel, not a kind of Everything Bagel.
Unfortunately In my part of the country accessible bagels mostly mean Dunkin and bread aisle brands and it’s not available.
“… In my part of the country….”
This is why we need a UBI to ensure the availability of essential foodstuffs.
(i.e. a Ubiquitous Bagel Initiative.)
Moses spent 40 years in a food desert so we could have bagels.
I thought Moses spent 40 years destroying slums and building highways so that suburbanites could drive to where the good bagels are.
"... Moses spent 40 years ...."
If you're actually at Mt. Sinai, your best bet is the H&H down on 2nd between 80th and 81st. The one on Columbus is about the same distance but you have to cross the park.
I don't know where in Orlando you live, but I can think of at least 4 places within a mile or two of where I live in Boise to get good quality onion bagels, and it's a much smaller metro that doesn't have any extraordinary claim to a history of bagel making.
Fair the thing about Orlando that's frustrating is it's incredibly dispersed. I was just Google Mapping to make sure I wasn't selling things short and any place to get bagels is a good trip out of the way. Even like an Einstein's adds like 20 minutes to my commute.
If I were really super wanting a bagel I could get one, probably via DoorDash or a trip out. But it's not like when I lived in Columbus or Cincinnati where it would be in the neighborhood on the way to the freeway. We have everything in the world here but it's always over there and when you get to work before 7 every minute is important.
This is completely accurate, everything in Orlando is always 20 minutes away. That said, just plugging that Toojay's has really good bagels, and Jeff's Bagel Run is also really good (though they don't do bagel sandwiches which is a shame).
I didn’t know about toojays. Jeff’s and bagel king have usually been my go to and Eola market but for a workday morning they may as well be on the moon.
Yeah toojays is an actual Jewish restaurant but they make their own bagels daily and they're very good. I just order ahead on my phone and pick it up at the to go counter. But I am realizing now that it opens at 8am which sounds like it's too late for you lol. Still worth keeping in mind for a weekend!
That makes sense, and I could certainly envision it. I just always run with being able to find good food of many kinds in any top 100 metros, even if more challenging in exurbia.
Bagel King (the one in Maitland). FWIW.
Sesame is my go-to.
de Tocqueville in his keenly observed Democracy in America says he knows of "nothing that is more petty, more insipid, more crowded with paltry interests — in a word, more antipoetic" than life in the United States.
How, after all, having encountered a croissant, could one still prefer a bagel.
“… having encountered a croissant….”
No one has to prefer a bagel to a croissant. They’re both good things, but not obvious rivals.
In my opinion— though this is a separate issue— it’s slightly easier to make a passable bagel than to make a passable croissant. The bagels you can find in Dubuque are closer to H&H than the croissants in Dubuque are to Parisian croissants.
> both good things, but not obvious rivals
The trouble with everything carbohydrate liberalism is it does not recognize there is a finite carbohydrate budget, and that difficult decisions need to be made.
That's why you get freaks trying to jam a croissant into a bagel and then the party's over and everyone goes home.
"Speak to the children of Israel, saying, of the bagel thou mayest eat, of the salt and likewise of the sesame, yeah even of the bialy thou mayest eat, but of the Croissanwich and of the Cronut thou shalt not eat, for they are unclean; nor of any food that mixeth the bagel with the croissant, for it will be an abomination to you."
"...trouble with everything carbohydrate liberalism...."
I like the cut of your jib, young fellow-me-lad.
I agree that it doesn't make sense to compare bagels and croissants, they're just separate categories of good thing.
However, given that UChicago created a tradition of debating "Latke vs Hamantash", I think it is important that we establish once and for all that the correct answer to that is: Sufganiyot. By a mile.
Bagels should be plain, as The L-rd intended.
Sadly it's not available online, AFAICT, but back in the late 1990s when bagels were first surging to national popularity, Daniel Pinkwater had a great rant on NPR against bagels with berries or (G*d forbid) jalapeños in them that had the great line, "A good bagel should sit in your stomach like a block of lead."
As my aunt says: Life is too short for a plain bagel.
This is roughly the same level of abstraction as Matt’s article.
I enjoy the richness of a good egg bagel. It's just _enough_ of an indulgence, without going excessive or turning into dessert (like cinnamon raisin, chocolate chip, etc).
Clever...
YIMBYism should rebrand as promoting construction jobs, which is obviously literally true. 'Getting rid of NIMBYism creates good-paying blue collar jobs locally' is a popular message- Americans love job programs. Construction can be OK paying, sometimes lucrative for skilled trades, but also can't be offshored, seems to have low automation potential, etc. It should be a great replacement for factory work. It's also a very willing employer of men from tough neighborhoods, men with criminal records, etc. You think a roofing crew cares if you have a felony?
If YIMBYs could get construction workers to testify in favor of building projects, it'd help sharpen their message and push on the class divide a little bit- it's usually the upper middle class that's *against* construction in their neighborhoods. OTOH, I can't imagine the average YIMBY I know or see online have an actual conversation with someone in the trades, so that alliance might need a little bit of work
YIMBYIsm is industrial policy! https://www.slowboring.com/p/yimbyism-as-industrial-policy
This is kind of similar to the "siding with unions against environmentalists" formula Matt has alluded to before in cases where environmentalists stimy various projects.
“… can't be offshored, seems to have low automation….”
All good points. And it’s going to take a while for artificial intelligence to replace these jobs.
Aren’t lots of building elements pre-fabricated these days? That is surely a ripe for AI possibility
Yes, but it's harder to replace the installers on a bespoke site. The men and women responsible for installing what some overeducated moron drew up in CAD without considering where it was getting installed are not easily replaced without building more advanced multipurpose robots.
*All love to those engineers, but as a welder *and*.a liberal arts major I've got to get my digs in.
Here in CA the various builder's unions (Carpenter's Union especially) have been very vocal pro-YIMBY on housing bills. This being California politics it comes with strings attached around union wage scales; but you're right that it's a natural coalition.
Well, the Carpenters _specifically_ have been good. The larger Building Trades Council has been difficult to work with and often taken positions that seem to benefit existing members at the expense of the possibility of growing the membership.
I think we've also peeled off a couple others on some particular bills. (Like I think the Laborers endorsed some stuff, last year?) It's an always an ongoing negotiation.
Say, it's still a minority of construction worker unions that are pro development in California. The majority still take the "restrict and rent-seek" model. Scratch the surface of housing politics in the state at all, and you will find this dynamic around every corner.
“can't be offshored”
The entire list of member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council has entered the chat.
They didn’t offshore the jobs, they onshored the labor.
Sir, it is clear you are not familiar with the California Building Trades and their relationship with development.
The challenge with this is that at element of Abundance is cost effectiveness and making something about jobs tempts policymakers to make things unnecessarily expensive
It's as if the Groups have unionized against policymakers. The risk of being a single issue group is that you can just get cut out. The omni-cause protects everyone. Unfortunately, the policymakers are then stuck with the worst 5% of the omni-cause ideas.
"the biggest difference between states like Maine, Washington, and Texas that are putting big wins on the board and those like New York and Maryland that aren’t, is bipartisanship."
Have to put in a shameless plug for New Hampshire. The wins might not be as big as other states, but YIMBYism seems to be doing ok here with a handful of laws just passed on a bipartisan basis and signed by a Republican governor:
1) single stairwell
2) statewide restrictions on excessive parking requirements
3) accessory dwelling allowances
4) residential allowed on commercial zoned land
https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2025/07/23/ayotte-signs-slate-of-bills-to-encourage-housing-construction-but-not-all-ideas-advance/
If I had to guess one New England state that would pick up YIMBY reforms it would be New Hampshire. Live free (in a single-stairwell apartment complex) or die!
I love NH, but the first image that comes to my mind is a 4 story apartment complex in the middle of an empty 3 acre lot with no sidewalks, a dirt driveway, and a gigantic leach field and fuel tank out back.
The second image that comes to mind is a historic main street with mixed use brick buildings on both sides.
The best reason for YIMBYs to be single issue and attempt bipartisanship is that the single party versions of these bills are usually much weaker.
A Democrat only pro housing bill is going to end up including a bunch of affordability requirements that may end up requiring inclusionary zoning that will backfire. It may also include a bunch of labor and environmental giveaways in order to get enough Democrats on board. Blue state Republicans should recognize that there is a lot of room for them to improve their states housing bills if they are willing to enter negotiations in good faith. Currently many Republicans in the northeast have decided it is more beneficial for them to criticize the bills from the sidelines in favor of local control.
There are not many examples of Republican only housing bills in the states, the Democratic party in red states has consistently come to the table to negotiate a bipartisan version of these bills. But Republican led housing bills tend to narrowly focus big cities where the Republicans have almost few legislators anyway. This does have the added benefit of reducing sprawl, but many of these concepts should also apply to suburban areas, and they prevent the creation of what could be new population centers.
I always assume affordability requirements are just NIMBY poison pills.
I'm not always that distrustful, but anyone who is pushing for any type of restriction on housing needs to know that we'll get less of it, even if unintended.
It can be, but it is often well intentioned bad policy. I have seen many well intentioned truly pro-housing groups argue for harmful inclusionary zoning policies out of a misguided ideas. It is important to differentiate between the well intentioned from those acting in bad faith, as the well intentioned can be reasoned with.
Some of these groups have a stated goal of increasing the number of "affordable units" and they define affordable units as subsidized units where low income people only pay 30% of their income in rent. The easiest political pathway to building these units is through inclusionary zoning. Policy makers often see that as a "free", or off budget, way of making these affordable units. It is more effective to offer financial incentives to builders to voluntarily include these units, but that puts it on the government budget.
It is important to try and convince these groups that the more important goal is just increasing housing production overall and not focus on building new "affordable units". We can gain credibility with these groups by pairing YIMBY policies with calls for increasing state funding for housing vouchers and public housing.
Unfortunately, blue state republicans are often NIMBYs who represent suburban constituencies (in the Northeast)
But they don’t have to be. It’s just sort of evolved that way as the path of least resistance.
Tangential question: will the outcome of Skrmetti make the ACLU reflect on its trajectory - or at least on the wisdom of allowing Chase Strangio to present his personal opinions as their official positions?
The ACLU so quickly throwing away its principles on free speech (its literal raison d’etre) shows it’s more interested in fundraising than producing specific legal outcomes.
I think that’s the broader point connected to this piece. The incentive structure for nonprofits is different than for-profits. For-profits succeed or they die. For nonprofits, success is completely orthogonal to existence (i.e. you can be effective but still shutter if funding dries up and you can be completely counter-effective in perpetuity if the funding is there). So if a non profit can get more donations by broadening its mission, it will likely do that even if it means it becomes less effective. That’s how you end up with, like, pro-choice groups saying things like “climate justice means trans black lives for Palestine.”
One of my favourite examples of this is the Congo Reform Association whose sole goal was (oversimplifying) to get King Leopold to give up personal ownership of the Congo. Which he did in 1908. But the organisation didn't actually disband until five years later when funding dried up.
Or the March of Dimes which switched from polio to birth defects once everyone got vaccinated
“… King Leopold….”
Deep cut!
King Leopold's Ghost, along with We Regret To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will We Killed, were my two "favourite" purchases from the US Holocaust Museum bookstore.
"Deep cut!"
Yes, that was the problem.
Scope creep kills organizations. Killed March For Dimes.
March for Dimes? The racial justice organization?
Pre coffee, March of Dimes. It also died because the president and leadership were fleecing the org.
I completely missed our shared typo. I was trying to do the old guy podcast meme. Not all jokes land, I'll keep workshopping.
March of Dimes was killed by scope creep? It seems like they did a lot of good work on a variety of baby and children-related health issues. Why should they have disbanded after polio was defeated? Creating an effective organization is hard; why not keep it going to achieve new goals?
Now had they made a hard turn toward fighting for From the River to the Sea, that would have been a different thing, but they just kept on working things that were generally in their lane. That strikes me as a good thing.
They recalled all their grants they funded. They basically didn’t have a clear mission after polio and thus became unfocused and bloated. The leadership of their organization basically drew down their endowment and they weren’t able to generate sufficient donations to cover operation costs.
They continue to do lots of good work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Dimes
I just remember trying to get data from their archives and basically a whole scandal they had with finances and how they sacked most of their staff.
One thing I have learned over the past few years is that people would rather double down than introspect.
(I feel like this is where dysphemistic treadmill would quip how he sees more and more evidence that people introspect but that we shouldn’t trust it and hold fast in our belief that people would rather double down)
“… treadmill would quip how….”
Quip away! This is an open shop, and anyone is allowed to apply other commenter’s principles to their comments in self-recursive fashion.
Felt more appropriate giving attribution for stealing your joke style
“… appropriate giving attribution….”
If I had to credit everyone whose jokes I’m stealing, each comment would need a bibliography.
As I once memorably put it, “talent borrows, genius steals.”
Oooh, meta jokes invoking fellow Slow Borers are TIGHT!
Some people receive more utility from the praise they receive for being bold and "speaking truth to power" than they do from achieving results. If they go down in flames, then that makes them even more praiseworthy as they proved themselves brave in the face of evil and unwilling to compromise with it.
I obviously don't agree with this point of view, but the reason why it appeals to a lot of people is that sometimes it's sort of right. If you live in a dictatorship (Soviet Union, Putinist Russia, take your pick), then it probably is more honorable to stand tall and go down in flames than it is to work within the system. In a mostly-functional democracy, however, things are different.
That's why exaggerating the hell out of the country's state of disrepair (and then working towards realizing it) has been such a core part of the MAGA movement.
If people had realized how actually-pretty-much-fine things were in 2016 then they wouldn't have started lashing out by voting for nonsense. We had a non-desperate electorate that voted with desperation... why?
Yeah, it's understandable why Russians turned to Putin exactly when they did, even if I disagree. 2016 America wasn't exactly post-Shock Therapy Russia.
One of the first political organizations I ever donated to was the ACLU. It was very disappointing to see how differently they acted from I expected based on the ACLU I learned about in my youth. I stopped donating years ago.
I think taking on that case could have consistently fit with the values of the ACLU of yore. The problem there was making a maximal argument against a hostile SCOTUS, and that should tell them that they'll have to trim their sails even on some of their traditional planks.
"The ACLU" can't do anything. The ACLU Board of Directors (a group of actual human beings with specific names) could consider imposing some message discipline on one of their employees.
ACLU is neither American civil nor liberty. Discuss 😆
We live in a world that erodes civil liberties and those liberties have to be guarded by organizations with lawyers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Ken Kovar? The ACLU have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Dobbs and Skrmetti and you curse the ACLU. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what the ACLU fights for; Ernesto Miranda, Jim Obergeffel, Mildred and Richard Loving -- that the losses in Dobbs and Skrmetti, probably saved lives; and the ACLU's existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about in Internet forums you want the ACLU -- you need the ACLU.
The ACLU have neither the time nor the inclination to explain themselves to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that they provide and then questions the manner in which they provide it.
did you file the Skrmetti case?
DID YOU FILE THE SKRMETTI CASE??
Style points for the A Few Good Men parallelism, but a deduction for opening with Ernesto Miranda as among what the ACLU fights for in what appears to be a list otherwise enumerating sympathetic litigants. To all appearances Ernesto Miranda was an utterly vile person entirely guilty of the crimes to which he confessed.
Many of the names in classic civil liberties cases were of people that were utterly vile and guilty as hell.
Yes, but you see why the parallelism with the Lovings and Obergefell doesn't work in a rhetorical context because they're ostensibly being invoked in their personal capacities as litigants. I am aware of the adage that a corollary of defending civil rights in general (particularly for speech and essentially definitionally for Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule determinations) means that one is necessarily in the position of defending scoundrels.
The Lovings were considered vile in their time. That they're behavior was immoral wasn't a minority position in much of the country.
If the Miranda case happened in 2025 you'd have people making murals of Ernesto Miranda.
I think less idiots were paying attention, so the ACLU didn't have to work very hard threading a needle of "yes this guy sucks but the principle matters. You can just re-try him on the other evidence."
Well even the utterly vile and entirely guilty have a right to not be compelled to self-incriminate!
True, although the Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination is probably the least philosophically defensible in the entire Bill of Rights. It's a right that by its terms inures to the benefit of the guilty and not the innocent and is overwhelmingly in practical terms simply an expedient to avoid the courts being clogged with nakedly perjurious testimony.
"Again, while the other privileges accord with notions of decent conduct generally accepted in life outside the court room, the privilege against self-incrimination defies them. No parent would teach such a doctrine to his children; the lesson parents preach is that while a misdeed, even a serious one, will generally be forgiven, a failure to make a clean breast of it will not be."
Henry J. Friendly, (2d Circuit Judge and later Chief Judge), The Fifth Amendment Tomorrow: The Case for Constitutional Change, 37 U. CN. L. REv. 671, 680 (1968).
The problem is once you assert a right is the State to compel self incrimination, you get into the question of what can be done to people, and at what point you can be satisfied that they have been truthful.
Shall we return to the pressing stones?
They can't all be as admirable as the Skokie Nazis.
Illinois Nazis? No way, I hate Illinois Nazis.
Very specific, CoT, very specific. I shall conclude from that that you are a lover of Wisconsin Nazis.
It would make me so sad if it turned out this was written by ChatGPT.
The funniest bit is that "Ken Kovar" is not obviously a Jewish name and so flips the story from the Marines to the ACLU. (Imagine it being, "you, Weinberg?" here and the answer is, well, yes of course; check out my name.)
1. ChatGPT writes _way_ better than I do, so this is high praise :)
2. I'm not sure! I can totally picture Lt. Daniel Kaffee flying an F-14 Tomcat in his younger years.
👏👏👏
DPRK-style acronym
That's kind of unfair to Chase. The big decisions were made well above his pay grade.
Yeah, but that's kind of my point - if he's sufficiently low down the totem pole, maybe reel in his social media activity a bit? Rightly or wrongly, he's perceived as a de facto spokesperson for the ACLU, and it doesn't seem to have served their mission to let him define their public image.
He definitely should not have tweeted on banning "Irreversible Damage".
I'm actually very happy that people of influence are airing their views on the record. It's helpful to know what they really think.
The ACLU really should get into the business of telling people what they can't say in public discourse.
Not one government to regulate free speech is a very different position than regulating the free speech of your public spokesman for your organization
Yeah - I'm going to agree here. Telling one's employees what they can say *when they are representing your organization* is not a violation of free speech.
Were they? He's the "Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project," and this was a case on Trans Rights? I sort of assume he was a big part of the ACLU's decisionmaking on it? Can't find any org chart with a quick search and he's not listed in their senior leadership page, so maybe you're right?
It's not that he's unimportant. Obviously he's important enough to have represented the ACLU in the Supreme Court.
But he didn't make the decisions that everyone is complaining about. For instance, the decision Matt references regarding free speech cases came after Charlottesville, was made by a group of people led by Anthony Romero, and as far as I know Chase had no involvement in it at all. (And BTW, it's somewhat overstated--the ACLU still takes plenty of "right wing" coded free speech cases, including notably representing the NRA in the Supreme Court and winning.)
Even the major decisions on Skrmetti were made by Chase's superiors, although Chase obviously had significant input there. He makes a nice target for all sorts of reasons, but if you don't like the direction of the ACLU, it really isn't his doing.
What Skrmetti case are yall talking about? The trans one? What did the ACLU do there? The Wikipedia page does not mention the ACLU
Yes, that's the case. And this NYT article made the rounds on the ACLU's role: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/magazine/scotus-transgender-care-tennessee-skrmetti.html
Ok. Even though I lean against gender-affirming care for pre-pubescent children, it does feel like a case that’s within the ACLU’s bailiwick. They should err on the side of free speech, even when I want to suppress it, and individual rights and freedoms, including those of children at the expense of their parents, even when I don’t agree. It’s their purview.
Ah, yes, this is certainly true. I was assuming we were discussing the trans cases, not the ACLU's overall changes, to the extent they've occured, where Chase's behavior is obviously symptom not cause.
While YIMBYism shouldn't take views on taxes, abortion or schooling. I think it is impossible for Yimbyists to ignore crime.
Property tax structure is definitely a yimby subject. A land tax is a frequently advocated for policy to encourage density.
I prefer land tax to be framed as "not punishing productive uses."
Landowners shouldn't be punished for doing something productive with their land, be it planting an apple orchard or building a factory or putting up a triplex.
This is an overly American take. YIMBYs in Australia absolutely need to take a position on the tax policy of negative gearing.
I wouldn't call it overly American. This blog is explicitly tilted toward American issues. Below is from https://www.slowboring.com/about
"Slow Boring is a daily newsletter from Matthew Yglesias (and occasionally others) about politics and public policy, mostly in the United States but occasionally elsewhere."
Crime is heavily concentrated in the poorest areas. For example despite its high crime reputation, most of the North Side of Chicago has a lower homicide rate than the national average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago. Sure, we should crack down on crime to make lives better for the poorest, but that’s a completely separate issue from building new housing.
There's a good distance between "crime" and "homicide." Every day on the L you'll see things that don't rise anywhere close to the level of homicide but still would make you nervous if you had small kids with you.
Homicide is a commonly used proxy for violent crime in general because it has near-100% reporting.
Very fair point.
I guess the disconnect is probably more related to the difference between occurrences and rates. Like, north Chicago might have a lower rate of antisocial behavior than other places, but you're still likely going to see a lot more antisocial behavior there than in far less densely populated areas.
I think this blog made the argument that people care about how much crime they see not per capita, which means that lower-density areas feel safer because you just don’t see as many things even if they actually aren’t.
But it seems most people with this attitude are probably going to move to the suburbs anyway—if you encounter 10x more people on a regular day in the city you’d need to somehow get to a 10x lower crime rate which would be impossible, or at least impossible without extremely draconian measures that people wouldn’t like either.
yeah it does seem like we'd need draconian measures that very few people would accept, but then I look at Tokyo and it doesn't seem that authoritarian despite being 10x safer than American cities. So idk.
Yeah. I used to like the Urbanist, but they’ve become a progressive everything bagel site, which is made painfully obvious by their city attorney endorsement this year.
One of the drivers of opposition to housing is the fear that new buildings may house crime prone people.
That fear doesn’t seem well-founded given how expensive new buildings are. Doesn’t seem like we can build anything for under $400,000/unit. Even the trickle down affordability theory envisions rich people moving into the newer buildings freeing up older ones for poorer people, not poor people moving into the new buildings.
“New buildings” are always said to house whatever type of person is not wanted. Whether it’s gentrifiers or criminals or gentrifying criminals.
In the UK the poorest people live in this most expensive property, though that might just be a unique British thing because we are run by lunatics.
Sure, but if crime were lower on the south side more people would move there. I lived in Pilsen in the nineties when crime was at it's peak. There was a small colony of artist types but the vast majority of people who lived there were working poor. It's blossomed quite a bit since then.
Just north of there, literally on the other side of the tracks, where Maxwell Street used to be, they redeveloped the area and called it University Village. That are used to be kind of bombed out and gross, but now it's quite nice.
St. Ignatius college prep is just a couple blocks further north and west, at Roosevelt and Blue Island. It used to be across from a ghastly housing project that I was scared to even drive by at night. Now that area has condos going for $350-450k.
This is just how succession works in urban transition. It’s very much like succession in a forest ecosystem.
When a fire or rockfall or highway construction tears down a lot of trees, the first species that succeed are ones that are fine with disturbed soil, and that climb quickly to shade their neighbors. But once there is a low shade canopy of shrubs and aspens, which keeps away grazers, the trees that take a long time to reach their full height start succeeding, and eventually shade out this first growth. There are often a couple more stages before you reach old growth forest that has something like a steady state.
You see the same thing when a neighborhood is industrial, or high crime, but becomes available for housing with easy transportation access. The first species that enter are things like artists, who take advantage of cheap real estate to buy big studios and lofts, or gay couples who don’t worry about schools (and as men don’t worry as much about street crime). Once the artists and gays have occupied a good chunk of the real estate, they have crowded out many of the problems - there is less heavy industry, less crime, and more tax base for a local school system. So others start moving in, and pretty soon the artists are priced out.
"Once the artists and gays have occupied a good chunk of the real estate, they have crowded out many of the problems..."
You just described the Museum District in Houston!
NIMBYism and crime concentration are correlated. NIMBYs don't want overbuilding to prevent the same people from infiltrating their neighborhoods. The reason families and middle class people moved to the suburbs is for lower crime and better QOL. Those who can't move are stuck in places of high crime.
Taxes and schooling are very close to zoning and construction. Crime and abortion are more distantly related. (Though crime is at least a place-based issue that is somewhat relevant.)
I can't imagine any unifying YIMBY values on education or taxes. Both school vouchers and mandatory comprehensive schooling are compatible with YIMBY, you can be a low or high tax YIMBY.
Probably keep it general, like "you need good housing and good schools to have good neighborhoods."
The paper by Broockman, Elmendorf, and Kalla that the Hypertext essay is discussing is worth a read on its own.
TL;DR: attitudes towards big cities are more predictive of holding YIMBY views than self-interest as a renter/homeowner.
“The politics of rich people who live in cities” frequently includes NIMBYism so that doesn’t seem like a workable coalition.
The most YIMBY group is probably moderately rich young people who are hoping to be able to stay in the city once they have kids. Theoretically improving crime and education should be appealing to them but in practice in most cities crime is a low priority because it’s heavily concentrated in the poorest areas where they don’t live and education also is a low priority because they don’t see policy being able to improve public schools enough outside of cities like NYC that have the total resources to create Stuyvesants etc. and are resigned to having to pay for private schools anyway—96% of parents in rich parts of Chicago use private schools for example (https://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Gold-Coast-Chicago-IL.html). YIMBYism might lead to more moderate policies on crime and education because it will make it more affordable for the people who are most sensitive to these issues to stay in the city once they have kids but that’s the way causation would run and not the reverse.
Using the gold coast as your example is disingenuous, it's a tiny population situated downtown where there are few schools in the first place. Try a north side zip code full of rich people and now your argument doesn't work. https://www.city-data.com/zips/60657.html
As a single issue, YIMBYism that advocates removing building restrictions is pretty antithetical to the very existence of suburbs, though, and so will always have a large built-in group of opponents, in the suburbanites who don't want to turn their suburban neighborhoods into cities. A suburb is a garden district that requires regular and intentional tending to remain that way, though laws such as zoning and building restrictions.
What YIMBYism can give suburbs is a movement that takes some development pressure off suburbs by making cities more livable for people who want to live in cities. In a lot of metropolitan areas, part of what drives demand for densifying and urbanizing suburban areas around neglected urban cores is that the cities haven't been run well enough (crime, schools, etc) to retain and attract middle class people who otherwise would prefer to live there.
So maybe the way to make all sides happy isn't trying force urbanization on unwilling suburbanites but rather some type of town and country coalition with an operative motto of "let cities be cities, and suburbs be suburbs".
Many many many suburbs are poorly planned, poorly connected, incoherent, and waste lots of potentially productive spaces on unused parking lots.
True.
I just want some more coherence and planning. No city council member should see a bunch of duplexes directly next to a shopping center where the shortest route between the two is a half mile walk around some dang artificial perimeter like chain link fence around an empty parking lot.
The fact that so many suburbs don't even have sidewalks between residential areas and a grocery store or mall that is a mile or two away is such a missed opportunity.
Ain’t nobody walking a mile to the grocery store! Not to get groceries, at least! But yes, arterials and collector roads in suburbs should have sidewalks, and they don’t in most Southern suburbs
I walked to the grocery store 0.9 miles away occasionally when I was 13-16. I wasn't getting huge amount of stuff, but I would fill up my backpack. This was in the Houston area. I also walked to/from high school every day, 0.7 miles. (I just checked the distances on Google Maps)
I do think the sidewalks and off-street paths are really, really underrated. It's very useful for people to be able to walk places, like a 14-year-old who wants to get forbidden snacks when his parents are out of town for the weekend.
They might drive for a “big” grocery purchase but they could (and do, at least in my Main Line suburb) walk a mile to get a carton of milk/loaf of bread, or even a latte.
When I was a kid, my mom's car got stolen and my dad needed his car to go to work, so trying to walk to a grocery store that was close as the crow flies, but had no connecting sidewalks, was a major pain.
I was shocked in my Texas suburb when I was biking around and ran into a neighborhood full of duplexes. I’m used to duplexes being a natural bit of infill in former single family neighborhoods that densified, not the artificial result of a greenfield neighborhood with some demand being zoned with duplexes as a cap.
New construction duplexes are somewhat common in Boulder, Colorado due to some quirk of horrific zoning laws and building permit limits.
As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s true that YIMBYism and suburbs are in opposition. Texas is the most YIMBY large state and Texas cities have lots of suburbs.
Suburban living is very popular, an actual free market for housing would naturally include a lot of suburban housing.
The problem is that *every* *single* *suburb* is locked into suburbanness by zoning. As population grows, you want both urban and suburban area to grow to accommodate both sorts of demands. Suburban area can easily grow into rural area. But urban area is usually hemmed in by suburbs. The natural thing would be to allow the close-in suburbs to become urban as demand grows. That means a few people with suburban preferences will need to move to keep their preference.
Upzoning the close in suburbs doesn’t mean destroying all suburbs - it just means converting the suburbs that are currently squatting on land that has demand for urban living, rather than enforcing squatters rights through zoning.
Suburbs can have better, denser town centers without changing most neighborhoods. This adds housing and benefits homeowners.
Yeah, a lot of this depends on how much land is included in a single "suburb". Some municipalities are the size of a single neighborhood, or a small number of neighborhoos - for instance, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills should be nearly fully zoned for at least moderately high density, given their location and size. Other municipalities are quite large - there's no reason to upzone all of Plano or Arlington or Garland to produce more urban space around Dallas, but each probably should have a few neighborhoods that are designed to grow up.
WeHo and Beverly Hills aren't really suburbs -- they're entirely surrounded by the City of LA -- and they're approximately as dense as the nearby areas of LA (denser in the flats, less so in the hills). As for real suburbs, mainly I think it would be a good idea to build apartments or condos in/around the strip mall areas, especially if near train stations. Doesn't need to be particularly dense, just 3-4 stories or whatever looks right. What often makes suburbanites opposed to this sort of thing is affordability requirements, but if you characterize it as a place where you can move if you want to downsize but stay in your community I'd think that would go over better. YIMBY should be about more housing, not engineering mixed-income housing where doing so will cause people to oppose more housing.
Well, or you can do things like Tysons, which is kinda far out but decided to run with the whole edge city thing
It is amazing how fundamentally suburban a lot of NOVA towns are with high walkability scores. From a lot of online NIMBY discourse, you would think Arlington looked like midtown Manhattan.
In a place as small as Arlington, a few decent urban zones/shopping areas can suddenly make the surrounding suburbs semi-walkable. I'm a 15 minute walk from Chipotle, a nice french restuarant, bakery, wine and cheese place, and a Safeway is maybe 20 minutes. Gret to walk for dinner and some drinks then walk home. Add in an e-bike and Arlington is super accessible from many parts.
Upzoning islands within a suburb (or maintaining large commercial spots but putting parking underground and densifying) can be super useful.
I really like the DC suburbs in general. Fairfax and Montgomery County are high quality of life places for families.
Rosslyn kind of does....
That's like five tall-ish buildings around a Target.
Big agree. I often think YIMBYism is trying to bite off too large of a political project. By revealed preference voters all over the world *like* their suburbs. I doubt it makes a lot of political sense for either party to threaten them- Dems are doing much better in the suburbs than they used to, I doubt they want to irritate voters there.
It's not a perfect solution, but it'd make a lot more sense to designate the downtown areas of cities as a free-construction zone. No height limits or other nonsense, no 'neighborhood character' restrictions. If residents complain, tell them they're free to move to the suburbs or exurbs- choosing to live in a city comes with implied consent for continuous building. If you want low density, the suburbs are right there for you! It'd make cities denser, which anyways prevents expansion pressure on the suburbs. This doesn't solve every issue with NIMBYism, but it's politically realistic and tackles a big chunk of them
>By revealed preference voters all over the world *like* their suburbs.<
And fortunately, letting property owners build more easily, and upwards, doesn't destroy suburbs. It takes decades to meaningfully alter the character of a typical suburb via densification.
Yeah, this is one of the reasons I like upzoning as much land area as possible. The more area upzoned, not only is more housing produced, but the less any one neighborhood has to be impacted by development, fighting backlash.
And chances are, the suburbs are not going to be the first place to be chosen for lots of new apartments, since they have less walkability, transit, cultural amenities for young single people, etc. That said, some suburban areas will densify a lot - especially in places like LA where a lot of areas close to the urban core and rich in transit are very suburban in nature - and that's great too.
My only point of disagreement with most urbanist types (though a point of agreement with Matt, I think) is I don't think there should be greenbelts around cities either. I'm not a fan of preserving neighborhoods in amber, but I do think an urban area should provide a lot of different options for housing types. If someone's suburb is getting more dense than they'd prefer, they can move to a new one, in a farther out area with less demand for dense housing.
It does under the current regulatory regime, sure. But that’s just the thing. YIMBYs want to make it not only legal to densify suburbs, but just as easy as digging a foundation and nailing 2x4s together (or whatever it is construction workers do, IDK)
Which, fine by me, but by-right construction can proceed on a seriously quick basis, if only you let it. We no longer have the concept of unrestrained construction from the early 20th century; it’s hard to visualize it.
I agree with your conclusion that many people would prefer suburban living in a free market, but I disagree with your premise that we can see revealed preferences. It has been illegal to build anything *except* low density suburban development on greenfield land for about 75 years (and the large majority of development is greenfield). There is no free market, and there hasn’t been one for a lifetime.
I think if we actually allowed freedom to innovate, or to copy traditional neighborhoods that are beloved, we would see a much wider range of development than we do today, and today’s simplistic labels of urban and suburban would feel much less relevant.
"It has been illegal to build anything *except* low density suburban development on greenfield land"
This is very wrong. It's true in some places, sure - but it's the norm in many states, especially the ones that have been the best at building new housing, for unincorporated land to not be zoned at all. Some, including Texas, actually ban counties from zoning this land entirely (which has probably been the single thing that's contributed most to their housing abundance). Developers there can literally put anything they want on greenfield land. They nearly always choose single family housing.
Now this doesn't, of course, mean that people always hate multifamily housing. A lot of people would prefer to live in an apartment - *if* it means they get to be in a desirable city location, in close proximity to cultural amenities, transit, jobs, etc.
But for new housing developments plopped in the middle of nowhere, when people are just assessing on the merits of the housing itself, location isn't as big a factor, and land is cheaper? People would rather have the space and the yard.
I am not surprised that the cofounder of Strong Towns has a loose grasp on the facts lol. None of their very strong, over the top claims ('Ponzi schemes', etc.) have any basis in fact https://arpitrage.substack.com/p/contra-strong-towns
Truly distant land doesn’t need zoning to stay low density. But greenfields in central neighborhoods in the suburbs (which almost always exist in new suburbs, because not every plot gets developed at once) often have the demand for higher development but are kept low by zoning.
As developing countries get wealthier, we see the new middle & upper middle classes move to suburbs in Malaysia, South Africa, Brazil, China, India, Turkey, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Sure looks like humanity has a revealed preference for the suburbs to me. People just like having their own spacious single family home and a yard. I understand that your organization does not like this revealed preference and lobbies against it
"By revealed preference voters all over the world *like* their suburbs."
At current prices people prefer to live in exurban NJ than NYC. If a 2,500 sq/ft home in exurban NJ was the same price as a condo in Manhattan the revealed preference would be different.
The revealed preference is in the price per square foot - people are willing to pay 3x as much for Manhattan as there is so much more demand.
1. Comparing per-foot costs between condos (whose size is fixed) and suburban single family homes (which can be as large as the builder likes & the market can bear) doesn't make sense. These are fundamentally different products. Homes come with land with included (people like yards), plus maybe a garage and driveway for multiple cars (you have to be really rich to get multiple parking spaces with your condo that you don't even use). Homes have no HOA fees.
Most importantly, condos were probably built in some kind of high-rise building, whose construction costs are greater than an SFH (which can be built with just wood framing). Obviously a hundred unit building cannot be framed with 2x4s.
2. Comparing 1 neighborhood in 1 city (Manhattan) to 'exurban NJ' (probably dozens of cities scattered over hundreds of square miles) is obviously nonsensical
3. Reasoning from 1 city to the whole country also doesn't really work- your units of analysis should be comparing *all* US cities to *all* US suburbs, not just cherrypicking the cities you like. For example Detroit is surrounded by wealthy suburbs which, I'm gonna take a wild guess, are more expensive per square foot than the urban core is. Same thing for Philadelphia, every city in Connecticut, much of the Midwest, etc.
"Homes have no HOA fees."
That will come as news to millions of Americans.
I just saw a new listing on Redfin near me for a SFH with an over $1,000/month HOA fee, which feels like a circus act of an arrangement. I doubt there's enough amenities to justify that.
It depends on what they cover - I know some in FL that cover master insurance (insurance on the structure) all exterior maintenance, roof, paint, landscaping, hurricane cleanup, water, sewer, internet, trash pickup...
I’m pretty sure most single-family homes don’t, or just have a minor one (I think my mom pays $50 per year). HOAs are a relatively new invention.
Right part of my HOA is going into the reserve fund to pay for a new roof in a couple years. Living in a SFH doesn't mean you don't have to pay for upkeep. It may not come as a bill every month but there are substantial ongoing expenses all the same.
"Most importantly, condos were probably built in some kind of high-rise building, whose construction costs are greater than an SFH"
And the reasons developers are able to profitably build them is because demand is so much higher and so people will pay so much more to live on them.
I think what he’s saying is like “sure, for Manhattan.” It has a unique draw among US places. Much of the time it’s as much or more expensive to live in the nicer suburbs than cities, especially if you pick nicer suburbs to compare.
I don’t know if there’s much revealed preference either way, people live in the place they like the most that they can afford while also factoring in stuff like commute.
"Much of the time it’s as much or more expensive to live in the nicer suburbs than cities"
That's not true in most of the cities I can think of. Are you calling Buckhead or River Oaks the city or a suburb?
So we should build more suburbs if that’s something people want! YIMBYism doesn’t have to be about promoting urban life over suburban life. People should be able to choose where they live and have options.
This ignores the affordability issue of where home owners' adult children are going to live. If a suburb has increasing demand, but construction of new housing has not kept up with demand, then people are inevitably going to have to move away once they reach adulthood, which is not necessarily what those same older home owners wanted.
Unfortunately, what they want is for their children, but not anyone else's children, to be able to live there. It's not a rational desire, but it's real.
With birthrates falling, this may be less of a problem in the future...
Going from 1 acres zoning to half an acre zoning isn't turning suburbs into cities.
Not really. We’re at 1/5-1/6 of an acre lots in my neighborhood and traffic isn’t bad, maybe in the height of rush hour it’s hard to make a left onto an arterial without a light, but it’s still not too bad. And some of the arterials even have apartment buildings!
Agree. It is enough, though, to turn traffic from free-flowing and easy to snarled and frustrating, yet not enough to support mass transit.
Is it? I have noticed much of a difference in towns that are 1 acre vs 1/2.
Another good example is the “tech right”. The DOGE approach of attacking in a hundred directions at once seems to have been fairly ineffective. They burned their political capital without clearly achieving anything.
The crypto people, on the other hand, seem to have been very effective. They are willing to support either left or right as long as the candidate is pro-crypto, and although they are loosely associated with the right wing since they are sort of a “libertarian slash financial deregulation” movement, there are still plenty of left wing pro crypto people who are welcomed into the cause, and just anecdotally if you go to a crypto event, the Trump voters and Trump haters are generally making peace and working together.
We all want to rip everyone off is a good organizing principle.
Are there left wing pro-crypto people anymore?
Oh definitely. For politicians:
Ritchie Torres
Darren Soto
Kirsten Gillibrand
Jared Polis
Ro Khanna
Stablecoins especially are a very non-politically-aligned genre of crypto, it seems likely they will be useful as financial rails for all sort of things.
Thanks
Worth noting that this is a very old tendency - most (in)famously, under the Temperance movement - the leaders of which would campaign for or against literally any candidate, depending on their attitude on alcohol. And because of this they were frighteningly effective, sometimes cowing anti-prohibition candidates into silence or tacit support. Obviously politics was *very* different back then! But it's a model that works
the OG of this is abolitionism, which famously managed to suboordinate the entire political system to resolving the slavery question to the point that the political system realigned around abolitionists and "guys who aren't abolitionists"
I think you've got this basically exactly backwards. The non-insane abolitionists very much did not want to talk about their underlying position because they knew it was toxic, but loved talking about the Fugitive Slave Act intruding on States Rights and into their own cities. It was the slavers who wouldn't shut the fuck up about how awesome slavery was and how it needed to be allowed, nay. encouraged everywhere. There's a reason Lincoln was called a "Black Republicans" and it sure wasn't because he wanted that label.
Tbf I think that's quite unfair to abolitionism, as slavery itself was the defining issue of the future of the US - whether new states would be free states or slave states etc, what would be the economic model of the country. Whereas the Temperance movement was spun out of whole cloth, pushing a new movement from scratch
Real excited to see this article land, I strongly agree with the bottom line thesis. It's so frustrating to see so many positions be thrown into the maw of partisanship, forcing people to attach themselves to a whole bunch of views they might not agree with.
I would also say that sticking to the task at hand is even more important for non-advocacy organizations. It would always grind my gears to be reading some material and see gratuitous references to antidiscrimation and/or AGW as clear signaling. Or I think of fellow Slow Borer Lisa C's workplace, who is mired in regular statements on Gaza. Getting derailed by political and ideological causes completely unrelated to the task at hand is a great way to lose customers, donors, and trust among at least half of the population.
It’s not just about making sure YIMBYism doesn’t join the full Omnicause, issue focus also matters closer to home. An example I think is that YIMBYism shouldn’t be about telling people driving is bad, just giving people transportation options.
The adherence to zero sum ideology is a real problem in all kinds of areas. Always opposing political and ideological enemies seems to be a more important goal for a lot of these groups than actual progress in any issue. From a pragmatic standpoint it seems bonkers, but I don’t see anything changing as long as in group status seeking and policing remains supreme.
FIRE is sincerely non-partisan, but they don't fill the ACLU-of-old slot either. (1) When they intervene in court, it is pretty much always on the side of right, but they have a preference for conservative causes. (2) On their home turf (college campuses) they affirmatively support anti-free-speech causes like "institutional neutrality" and problematic time/place/manner restrictions.
Is there solid analysis that FIRE actually does have a right-leaning bias in the cases they take, or is the lopsidedness in terms of cases just a side-effect of the left bias in most university administrations?
On institutional neutrality, I think the key is the ACLU of the past was a reactive project that focused on legal cases, not so much on proactive advocacy.
Is there any evidence that ACLU of the past would have rejected or been opposed to FIRE's position that in a university setting, institutional neutrality helps to further the free speech of both students and faculty? Would they have agreed with you that institutional neutrality is de facto anti-free speech, all things considered? (to me the key here is that FIRE doesn't content that institutions MUST be neutral for any legal reason, they just believe that institutional neutrality is essential for open discourse and they think on balance that's a more pro free speech position than advocating for institutions to take sides on big issues).
A lot of "which side do they defend more" depends on who the goons in power are at a given point in time.
I forget which one, but one of the FIRE's current bigwigs first day on the job was September 10, 2001. He spent several years filing briefs protecting liberal professors who said dumb-ass shit, but legally protected dumb-ass shit, about Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They consistently rated Harvard as the worst or near the worst for free speech, year after year. Yet they issued full support for Harvard's legal case against having its funding revoked by the Trump administration as legal retaliation. https://www.thefire.org/news/faq-responding-common-questions-about-fight-between-harvard-and-trump-administration
It is because FIRE has principles that its words are taken seriously.
Yep. Historically the most successful American movements have been single issue movements, from Abolitionism to the Anti-Saloon League to the March of Dimes to civil rights and gay rights.
And the abortion one really sticks in my craw. If we ever have federal protection it will look like the Collins-Murkowski bill anyway. It's not going to look like the Women's Health Protection Act. So what's the benefit of alienating them?