Quick update on my effort to get a local Dem policy group going - I gave my little speech about red states eating our lunch and I got polite agreement. We have a good mix of Democratic generations - classic 60s boomers, soft spoken Gen X types, anti-Bush/Obama era millennials, and some gen Z BLM types.
First meeting, and the local Democratic Town Committee has given us some leeway to explore a policy that gets local Democrats elected (we're a reddish town in very blue CT). I pitched some ways we can frame up local leadership's reluctance to take full advantage of state funding programs to our political advantage and I pushed back against a framing focused on social justice/diversity since this town is 85%+ white and median non-college. But. Work to be done. Will circulate this column.
Nothing makes my eyes roll more when I see people use buzzwords like "environmental justice." I am like "people are facing problems, how do we fix said problems." A lot of the normative coding annoys my pragmatistic side.
The buzzword that triggers me is "character". Such a vague, deceptive heartstring pulling term that elides the details of what one actually wants. At my least charitable, I think of Winston Wolf's last line from Pulp Fiction: "Just because you *are* a character, doesn't mean that you *have* character!".
This piece really influenced Welcome Party's thinking and strategy: https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-future-is-faction/. Yglesias has also been supporting faction-building these days (and his recent AOC analysis explored her role in the progressive/left faction).
This aligns with my comment yesterday that poor governance is causing post-material politics. Say you're struggling to save for a home or looking for a blue-collar job. Republicans don't have a platform anymore, so there's literally nothing to see there. You then see Democrats patting themselves on the back for being the adults in the room and the party of governance and think surely these guys are trying to help me. Then in practice they are stopping construction of infrastructure and homes. Can you really be blamed for losing interest or voting for whoever aligns with your cultural preferences?
Wrongly given subsidies for CO2 emissions reducing technologies. [And if it's worth subsidizing EV, which I doubt, it should not matter where they are manufactured.]
Lukewarm to cold encouragement of fossil fuel development and exports.
Letting the RCTC die
Failure to just process the asylum seekers expeditiously, allowing in the (few) actual refugees and rejecting the others.
I stand to be corrected, but failure to go all out admitting H1B-type immigrants and retaining foreign students.
"We're not as bad as Trump will be" is not a message that will attract many swing voters!
a) I think you have been negatively polarized against the IRA in a way which is not helpful. As Matt has written Biden’s energy agenda has been broadly successful.
b) Biden came around late to the Asylum thing but he literally does not have the power to fix it without congress. This
c) I agree that the H1B visa situation is bad but the democratic policy here is clearly much closer to the median voter than your preferences.
Regarding (b), it appears to be a matter of contention as to exactly how much Biden can do legally without Congress. Biden is considering[1] taking some executive steps the Speaker asked him to try in late December[2].
I am not against the IRA, just the unnecessarily inefficient (and ASAIK not even politically necessary) way the subsidies for reducing CO2 emissions are given.
At this late date, you may be right about asylum seekers.
I doubt the median voter HAS a position on H1B visas.
This is less offensive to me because they tried something, they gathered information that it wasn't working, and they reversed course. That's totally fine, and that's categorically different than simply not being able to do things like build infrastructure or allow housing development.
I actually want to take a closer look at this one!
Anecdotally, I’ve seen a surprising number of 5-over-1s being built in Portland proper (SE) recently, which makes me hopeful. But I have no numbers on it yet, which I’d like to take a look at.
I couldn't resist the joke. I'd have to look at the numbers. Kotek is TRYING to move the ball in the right direction, but idk how much has actually been built.
>This is less offensive to me because they tried something, they gathered information that it wasn't working, and they reversed course. That's totally fine,<
Agreed. I haven't taken the time to do a deep dive on what they're changing, but I hope they don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. To cite one concern: no reasonable human wants their city turned into an open air drug den. But mere possession and use (in other words, addiction) seems a very bad target for criminal law. So I hope they focus their ire on the nuisance aspects of drug use—in other words public spillover—instead of drug use itself.
I recall reading about a very similar-sounding situation in Portugal.
>I recall reading about a very similar-sounding situation in Portugal.
It's notable that the Portuguese situation is not an borne out of anarchist-adjacent skepticism of all state coercion, like the US policies, but instead an active and compassionate paternalism. When the program began, it was pretty effective -- people were essentially coerced into undergoing treatment. The way it worked was that police would still tell you to stop fucking around with public drug use, they'd give you a citation that compelled you to appear before a board that would mandate you undergo X or Y treatment program.
It was also very expensive, since while prison is pretty costly, addiction treatment on the state's dime is even moreso. Nevertheless it was quite effective until they started cutting expenditures drastically, in large part because they imported more American-anarchist views that drug use is a personal matter, a question of 'cognitive liberty' (though I think they imported these ideas in large part as wishful thinking to justify why they could spend less money on the programs).
I think the tradeoff with criminality is increasing the number of addicts. Who did the study that showed legalization increased use without decreasing deaths and it became a huge deal for her getting a progressive think tank position? I'd argue just addiction is a public spill over.
The Portuguese program (when it was still well-funded and coercive) actually reduced the number of addicts. The key is that you can't just say "let's decriminalize drug use and focus on harm reduction by making it less dangerous", you have to say "let's force people into addiction treatment instead of forcing them into prisons".
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I like your framing that their program is compassionate paternalism. It still takes a position that addiction *is bad*. Which it is. Too much of the drug discourse in the US edges on radical libertarianism - IMO - where the individual should be able to do what ever they want in the privacy of their own home. I still think we can make moral judgements that XY behaviors are socially undesirable and design policies to reduce those behaviors.
I agree, though I’m bummed that 110 couldn’t function more properly as a test. I suppose it’s not entirely worthless information-wise, but it didn’t answer the question it set out to.
I am deeply sceptical of drug decriminalisation, but Oregon didn’t care about anything even vaguely like the details of how to make their policy work. In fact, had they voted for brutal Singaporean style drug policies, the result would have been the same.
They did improve/fund addiction treatment services. The issue is that the uptick in fentanyl and decriminalization of use/possession worked against the treatment provisions.
I mean don’t you have to want to get better to get better? Addicts arent children, if they had enforced the fines or the bench warrants would that have really changed things?
Well, the solution would be to force people in to treatment against their will. But the libertarian left is allergic to that sort of thing, so they just ask nicely.
And the state of Oregon didn't have a functioning addiction treatment system until the state started funding it and regulating service providers. There were two parts of the reforms, people only focus on the decimalization aspect which is what is being changed.
My point is Democrats are absolutely experiencing consequences. It's a big driver of their weakness with non-college voters. I note "What's the Matter With Kansas" will have its 20th anniversary this year, it's been literally decades where people have struggled to figure that out.
They're still winning about 50% of elections because Republicans are extreme and weird. But if Republicans chose to maximise their odds of winning rather than run an old crazy person or a plutocrat openly committed to cutting the country's most popular social programs, Democrats would really struggle.
>But if Republicans chose to maximise their odds of winning rather than run an old crazy person or a plutocrat openly committed to cutting the country's most popular social programs, Democrats would really struggle.<
I'd probably be ok with that, because truly "maximizing their chances of winning" would imply a return to normalcy for the GOP—including abandonment of their support for authoritarianism and elections denial. As Milan has pointed out frequently, voters have consistently punished this tendency in GOP candidates.
Democrats lose more elections, but the party they're losing to is a plain vanilla right of center outfit that isn't trying to subvert the constitution every other day? Sign me up.
Per the data I posted Sunday, about 15% of Trump supporters would stay home if Haley were the nominee, but 15% of Biden voters would flip to Haley if she were the nominee. Flips are worth double the value of stay homes, but GOP primary voters are the ones driving the car. 🤷♂️
It seems like both parties have gotten by on cultural issues and in-group vibes, although I give the Democrats credit for at least having and working on a national agenda, and neither one currently has a large enough segment focused on materialist issues. There are exceptions. Renewable energy is booming in Texas. Yimby's are making some progress in California and other places. But overall the voting population doesn't have a strong enough sense that people's day to day lives could be much better.
1– Both parties have a key upper middle class constituency and are actually responsive to that group’s material demands— the professionals for the Democrats, the proprietors for the Republicans.
2– Thanks to rising demand for knowledge workers in the late 20th century, most people who are simultaneously in the top 10-15% of the population by general intelligence, executive function, and social skills and aren’t in line to inherit a business go to college, so most lower-middle and lower-income adults who fit those criteria are there because they voluntarily sacrificed material gain to pursue a fulfilling vocation (activists, social workers, academics, artists, etc). The sort of manual worker who’d start a labor union and expound a materialist class-based political ideology to his or her fellow workers— quite common in past periods— is now quite rare. So, working-class people tend to sort more along identitarian lines.
This isn't just a US-specific problem though. You can look at countries like the Philippines and argue that post-materialist politics are already at play in middle-income countries. (Though I do think McConnell's use of the filibuster did help to break the average voters' expectation that election results would translate into the policies they wanted.)
When I see people talking about “post-material politics” I think they’re usually claiming that some structural feature (such as broadly increased prosperity) is making voters care less about material politics, and thus politicians follow. But your suggestion seems to be that politicians are leading on this rather than following voters. Is there some structural reason this might be happening if it’s *not* about most voters having changed their focus?
I'm not denying that rising prosperity has contributed to post-material politics. I'm arguing that "middle class cronyism", which includes NIMBYIsm, occupational licensing, and in Britain at least the way much of government business seems to be tendered, is also contributing factor. Those behaviours are causing government to be ineffective at delivering concrete outcomes, and it's leading people to give up on seeking those outcomes from government, and either disengaging completely or focusing on cultural issues.
I'd like the voters who support this cronyism to confront that reality, which I think at the margin is likely to reduce support for these harmful practices.
It’s an intriguing idea, but I’m not sure that it works from a US perspective, at least not with this issue set. This hypothetical guy should vote on a national level for the Democrats, because they want to raise taxes on people richer than him and use the money to give him downpayment assistance with the house, expand the EITC, reduce the deficit and thereby inflation and interest rates, etc., and on a local level he can vote for whoever the more YIMBY candidate is.
I think government effectiveness issues don’t really bind here, in that the federal government is demonstrably still able to tax some people and send other people the money, and no local government really lacks the institutional capacity to loosen housing supply restrictions.
Except that their willingness to believe any of this will actually happen depends on whether they view government as a real provider of concrete services or if they view it as the outcome of politics as public theater. I think that many folks are drifting toward the later. Partly because when Republicans are in control (at least at the federal level) they tend to under govern because they don't believe in "big government" in ways that depletes capacity and partly because Democrats have in some causes failed to meaningful deliver either because of incompetence at a local level or systematic process that favor non-action at the federal level like the filibuster.
But if folks don't view government as primarily a boring thing that provides key good and where competency matters, they are more likely to vote based on vibes, values, cultural issues, or tribalism and that often doesn't put people in power who are the best suited to govern. Donald Trump would a glaring example on the Right. Socialist Council Member Sawant in my hometown would be an example on the Left. (The amount of time she made her own agenda difficult to pass because of her language was maddening and deeply harmful to housing in Seattle.)
And those people then deliver less and it gets worse. I had hoped that Biden would govern well. I think overall he has and that some of what he is getting criticized for like the Border, Gaza, and Inflation are sufficiently out of his executive control to be his fault. I thought maybe folks would remember that government could be boring and effective an vote for that the next time but the mainstream media doesn't really cover that much and focuses instead on whatever chaos has good visuals.
Binya’s idea that UK post-material politics is being driven by government incompetence is certainly interesting. I don’t think Binya’s examples here work though, at least not in the US context.
I don’t think Americans doubt that local government has the ability, the capacity, to reduce the land use regulations that artificially restrict housing supply. I don’t think Americans doubt that the federal government can raise taxes for some people and cut taxes for others.
Now, I agree that as a practical matter, “I will raise other people’s taxes and cut your taxes” doesn’t seem to be working out well as a political pitch nowadays. But is that because the pitch itself isn’t credible?
As I see it, US federal government dysfunction is most stark in procurement/contracting and self-defeating environmental regulation. So I can imagine a hypothetical cross-pressured voter who was leaning towards the Democrats due to climate change fears, who then gets black-pilled by NEPA blocking renewables transmission lines and the NRC blocking nuclear power, and so just decides to vote purely on cultural issues. Or, the same thing but with a passenger rail infrastructure enthusiast. But, while they are substantive, those are just really small issues.
Think about how things work with the big substantive issues. If tax rates go up, the IRS will successfully implement the new rates. If the formula for social security payments changes, we can trust that the Social Security Administration will carry out the new law. If we tell the health insurance companies they have to start covering something with no copay, they will do as they’re told.
So all of the biggest issues of substantive politics in the US are still amenable to political action. I don’t think incompetence and dysfunction can be driving the post-material turn here.
I think it is relevant. I agree that people don't doubt that the government can take away zoning rules. But to make that attractive it needs to include the promise that the community will maintain its quality of life by building public transit so traffic isn't a nightmare, building schools fast enough that kids aren't overcrowded, increase or improving resources like parks so that can serve more people. I think a lot of people do doubt that their local municipality is going to actually do that and it makes them assume that they will just have more people and the same infastructure and services and that sounds unattractive. The argument that in theory this will increase the tax base and that economies of scale will allow them to have more for less may not seem convincing based on how they feel their tax dollars have been used previously.
There might be a directional bias where voters believe/perceive that government can primarily deliver on getting rid of things but not so much on providing things.
That’s an extremely good point. When neither party takes up a critical cause of material suffering across many different income groups, what are voters expected to do when evaluating who to vote for?
“Dan Reed from our local group, Greater Greater Washington, objected to his elevation, arguing that “abundant housing means an inclusive, pluralistic society, period. Making an example of folks like Greg Gianforte not only undermines that, but feeds the perception (unfair as it may be) that the movement is the province of white libertarian bros.””
The irony of touting an inclusive, pluralistic society then in the next sentence arguing that someone who you agree with on the issue in question isn’t welcome in your movement because they hold unrelated views that you don’t like.
Not just that they hold unrelated, disfavored views. But that they have the wrong color skin.
Having just finished Franklin Foer's epic essay at The Atlantic detailing the increasing threats to Jewish-Americans, I'm struck at the casual racism accepted by so many across the political spectrum.
Yep. Whenever I see left-wingers talking about "making white people aware of race," my first thought is of stoned teenagers in a horror movie deliberately reading from the book of dark magic in a graveyard at midnight -- nothing good is going to happen from doing that! It's also why I'm only half kidding when I've said here before that some journalists appear to wake up each morning asking themselves brightly, "How can I foment a race war today," because I can't understand how anyone could be so clueless as to write many of the articles that put explicit racial framing on issues that either don't actually have a racial frame or where talking about the issue in racial terms is almost certainly going to do more to anger and alienate white people than it is to help fix anything (see, e.g., the "white libertarian bros" crack from Dan Reed in Matt's article).
One issue I see with the white privilege narrative is that it encourages white people to try to define themselves as something other than just white. I think this is part of why some white Americans identify as Italian-American or Irish-American.
I worry that this could go a bit further; we could see white Americans who reject the idea that being white is a huge advantage seek to distinguish themselves from white groups they see as more affluent/successful.
And in America, what group of (mostly) white people is affluent/successful, easily distinguished from other white people, and conveniently already blamed in a lot of conspiracy theories?
Liberalism is based on the values of reason, tolerance, and mutual respect. Much of Leftist thought is based on Marx's revealed truth, which is teleological and promises utopia. True believers are inherently correct and there is no room to entertain those who hold differing views because they are inherently wrong.
Not necessarily, but if you do think about it, do it reasonably. Color blind everything in not the very best we can do right now even though it should be the goal.
I think it made sense. The 2010s involved millennials digesting their ethnic diversity compared to the boomers and setting norms. There had to be corrections and some degree of honesty that the salience of skin color in society is not literally zero to a person entering a room full of people of a different background. Every generation has to decide how to treat one another fairly. The old norms didn't entirely satisfy that; they had to change.
Now it's mostly over, GOP is polling better with Hispanics and other ex-Obama Dems like Elon Musk. There's a sci-fi Lawrence of Arabia movie that would've received some viral think pieces on Orientalism a decade ago but no one cares now, plus it's cast well. The millennials won the culture war. That's why Trump could win; because people are largely content with it and now just want inflation and immigration controlled.
That quote gave off a feel of the dual yard signs of "No matter who you are, we're glad that you're our neighbor" and "OPPOSE! This MASSIVE [housing development I don't like] for [unrelated reasons]!".
Eh, this is just necessary pragmatic messaging in a supermajority Democratic district. Being associated with Gianforte or other Republicans is incredibly toxic in that context, so YIMBYs in that context are going to downplay cross-partisan ties, in much the same way that Gianforte isn’t going to be super-vocal about adopting the same housing policy orientation as AOC, Liz Warren, and the CA state legislature.
Yes, but there are critiques that can be made specifically about Gianforte (e.g., physically assaulting a journalist!) that don't give the same, "Ugh, white people" vibes.
It's interesting. As a 2000s era capital-P Progressive. The all or nothing view Dan shares here has made be shed that Progressive label. My goal is absolutely not "an inclusive, pluralistic society". That's not even on my list of priorities. I am interesting in making small progress, everyday to make things better. Starting points matter. The current Progressive goals for society read to me like a horrible dystopia.
>"The city has only become even more progressive in its official stances and attitudes since then, but successful efforts to hold off 'development pressure' have made it dramatically less accessible in practice."
This is the same attitude that led to the creation of "sanctuary cities" that Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have cleverly taken advantage of with the immigrant busing. These progressive cities are all talk and no walk. When forced to deal with the reality of their positions they recoil.
I think hypocrisy is overrated. Lots of Democrats really do want to treat other people fairly, like many Republicans do. But it is fiscally unsustainable to unselectively bring millions of people into the country, especially via American Ninja Warrior: Panama Edition and then expect to have a sense of local order and well-run safety net beyond that of Brazil's favelas. Some more years of this, and you can forget YIMBYism. Although if you're at Cato and a fan of 19th century immigration policy, that might not be a bad trade. But for the rest of us, no thanks.
The hypocrisy is that blue city Dems had no problem with the border situation when it was just El Paso that had to find places for people to eat and sleep, but now suddenly think it's a humanitarian crisis that they end up on buses to Chicago or New York.
Signed, a fan of 19th century immigration policy (but not the Chinese Exclusion Act)
Nothing stops the progressives in these cities from everything the requisite tax hikes to support the immigrants. They just know that their very own compassionate voters will vote with their feet. New York could have increased the tax rate but just didn't
In some cases that isn't true. Washington State's constitution has been interpreted by our supreme court (probably fairly given drafter's intent) to preclude any income tax and many other forms of progressive taxation. We are left with a sales tax, property taxes, b&o taxes on the GROSS revenue of businesses, and fees. We also have a major crisis with housing affordability. You can really only raise sales taxes so much before the regressive taxes really hurt low to middle income families. You can only raise property taxes so much without making the housing crisis worse. You can only tax so much of a businesses gross revenue without taking into account their costs before you can't run a business. So we end up with a lot of fees (head tax on employees or $3.99 of every food delivery) that aren't very rational at some level but at least get us some money without making the key issues worse. Seattle would pass an income tax if they could I believe especially if it was progressive and targeted mostly high earners (especially if they could get cheaper UBER eats back.) I think if we had more sources of revenue we would support higher taxes to get better results on homelessness, etc and still opt to be a supportive sancutary city. But we can't without changing our constitution and while we have a Dem majority in the legislature they don't have super majority to pass a constitutional amendment. At this point the City has passed an income tax which is on hold due to legal challenge in the hopes that the Supreme Court which is elected and liberal might bail them out.
I think that this reality is also important to understand in the context of Seattle's embrace of Defund the Police as a major political movement. The residents of Seattle and SPD have a uniquely bad relationship and have ever since the excessive force at the WTO riots and resulting Federal Consent Decree. Few people outside of Seattle know that the SPD actually pepper sprayed the majority of the Seattle City Council in the face when they came downtown to confirm reports of excessive force against non-violent protestors at the George Floyd protests. I think it becomes easier to embrace defunding someone if they have pepper sprayed you in the face for no reason and I would warrant that the SPD has done that to a larger percentage of city council members and the general public than in most cities. But we also face an actual zero sum game when it comes to revenue. If the SPD budget doubles in ten years then it my definition defunds everything else because we can't really make a bigger pie.
The real problem with the City Council's defund plan was that they picked an arbitrary number and then discovered that they don't have any power to determine any of the SPD's internal budget, just their overall budget allocation. When the SPD said that they would respond to any overall cuts, not by reducing their pepper spray budget but by cutting virtually all services for protecting people from sexual assault, DV, sex trafficking, etc. the council caved and didn't cut a dime. They just aren't as good at playing chicken as the SPD.
Since then, they have really fed a narrative that any increase in crime in the City is the result of the City's threat to defund the police, even though they didn't lose a dime and have essentially gone on an extended sick out for the last four years. Officers have literally shown up at assaults and told victims that if they want anything done about it they need elect a new City Council. Last November we did.
Two years ago their message what that they would do something about crime if we elected a new City Attorney and we elected a Republican nut bag. But she has discovered that the City Attorney's office doesn't have the budget to prosecute any more folks that they were doing before and so nothing has changed. I am not aware of any big changes since we got our new Council either.
The promise was that the SPD union would actually sit down and negotiate a new contract since their old one has expired years ago and they think that has hurt recruitment and led to the need to pay overtime at the expense of other police activity. They said they couldn't really sit down with the old council because they insulted them too much by the Defund the Police vote. The new council is almost 100% the SPD backed members But a lot of what the SPD wants in their contract is likely in violation of the City's settlement with the Department Justice and which possibly state laws around police accountability. It would also come with a price tag that is far beyond the City's ability to pay.
None of this means that the old progressive council did a good job on these issues. But things can look "loony" from the outside when they are imported to other places and make a lot more sense in the actual context. anist.org/2024/01/17/what-to-look-for-in-a-new-seattle-police-contract/
Thank you for the detailed post. As (almost) always, the devil is in the details. I understand and can sympathize with progressive goals, even when I do not agree with them. It seems to me that there are 3 different issues with revenue - sources, levels (tax rates), and allocation. I think it would be good to consciously tackle these separately than simply resign to the fact unless we can tax someone else ("the rich"), we cannot spend on our preferences ("homelessness"). This indicates that we are only going to do more if we can make someone else foot the bill. Similarly, you can increase the tax levels and then work separately on allocation to make it more progressive. Personally, I don't think a tax rate would drive a business out; it will be eventually passed down to customers. But yes, a high rate can reduce the aggregate level of economic activity.
Coming to SPD, I find this to be an issue afflicting all unions. PDs are no exception, but they do flex their muscles quite strongly. Accountability must increase, but that in general goes against the union ethos of one-for-all and all-for-one in favor of the incumbent workers as opposed to potential workers. I have seen the same situation in the hospital workforce, teachers union, etc. One preferred solution would be to completely deunionize and tackle protections through workplace safety standards, unemployment uninsurance, etc.
Just to be clear. I think that in a progressive tax system I would be paying more. I am not suggesting that can't solve these problems without taxing someone else. I am saying we can't solve them without taxing me. I suppose we could just jack the sales tax up to the rafters and then give some sort of grant to all low income families so that they could still afford to buy anything. I am not sure how we would need to structure that to not run afoul of differential taxation rates but it could probably be done. I don't think there is much hunger for that and it does run the risk of folks buying all their big ticket items out of state.
And the tax rate for b&o taxes isn't the real issue it is that it applies to gross revenue and not net revenue and it does create some fucked up incentives. Like if I hire another well-paid employee and they make me a small marginal profit that covers their salary plus 5% but I pay a 6% flat tax rate on that profit plus their salary then I could actually lose money hiring a well-paid, low margin employee. Which really makes no sense.
It hurts a lot of brick and mortar businesses because their taxes are on their gross revenue and they can't right of their inventory, rent, employee salaries etc. The rates are low so they don't alone make it impossible to run a business but it isn't ideal. I suppose that we could all just raise our prices. Actually if you ever try to buy any products or services in Seattle it is clear that we have all raised our prices! But again, having everything you buy be more expensive tends to be regressive on those who have to spend all of their income.
Interestingly, in 2020 the King County Labor Council (the largest in the region by leaps and bounds) actually kicked the SPD union out of the council which is pretty unprecedented. They basically decided that they didn't want to use their overall labor solidarity power to help push for the SPD demands that they thought boiled down to the ability to commit police violence without accountability. Again, the fact that lots of labor leaders had been on the receiving end of that violence in the WTO and other protests probably helped to drive this split a bit but it was interesting to see Labor as a whole just drop them like a hot potato even as it was adding new organized groups.
One could design a whole list of Slow Boring slogans that goes on the back of the T-shirt, in the style of a music tour shirt that lists all the days and locations.
I haven't been there, but in general I find these types of ferries charming. I hope after they have their bridge they also keep the ferry not least for its historical nature. Sometimes historical character is relevant.
If there is a flaw in our historic preservation regime, then surely it is that there is no clear way to distinguish between the US' *first* strip mall (https://www.slowboring.com/p/commemorate-history-dont-preserve), and its *last* functioning cable ferry.
This post spoke to me deeply and it articulates exactly the challenges that I struggle to explain to people from outside the area. Yea, Maryland is blue, deeply blue, and that's preferable for a whole host of reasons to being deeply red. But it is also deeply conservative in the sense that a lack of real political competition in our system ultimately amounts to a lack of accountability in politics. If anyone wants to understand why the devolution of the GOP into the MAGA cult is bad for the structure of society Maryland is a great example. Most of the political leadership is anointed by activist groups in low turnout primaries and the politicians themselves gain prominence not from successful problem solving but intra party jockeying.
Anyway they should absolutely build the damn bridge and unleash the development. If the state and counties don't change their approach I could foresee outward migration really becoming a problem for what is genuinely a cool state with a unique history of not quite the north not quite the south and by far the best flag. People peace out for NC and places like that all the time and it is far from clear to me that their quality of life suffers for it.
It's a conundrum. I'm deeply pessimistic about the prospect of bringing in housing abundance on a substantive level any time soon. I'd guess we finally get there when owner occupiers shrink to below 40% or so of the population—and not much before. Homeowners just *really* value stasis. The one part of Matt's analysis on this issue I tend to be skeptical of is his take that owners ought to do well from the financial boon they'd realize through YIMBY upzoning. I think revealed preference suggests they value keeping others away far more than the cash they might gain from selling some of their land or building and renting out an ADU. Part of this might also be that they calculate—perhaps shrewdly—that the returns to the latter would shrink pretty massively if *everybody* were allowed to do it—and so they'd be left not with a big chunk of rental income but with more traffic and less birdsong.
I'm also skeptical of the tax-receipt windfall take (he makes it often.) We just don't seem to see this in practice. If this dynamic was real, we'd see denser areas have much lower property taxes and/or better services. The citizens of San Francisco - ground zero for a natural "what-happens-with-tax-windfalls" experiment- would feel like they were living in a tax-funded wonderland.
I think Matt's missing three countereffects:
1. More density means more tax revenue but also more expenditures (duh)
2. A huge percentage of incremental tax revenue is captured by insiders - government workers, unions, private contractors and non-profits.
3. Density itself creates new problems and makes governance harder
I live in Los Angeles and I do feel I’m living in a tax-funded wonderland. There’s universal free school lunch and free after-school care, with meals provided. All school parents are provided an EBT card for each child, regardless of income. The school provides laptops and iPads for all students and internet connections for those who need them. The parks department offers youth sports for $10 for an 8-week program and free swimming lessons. Metro just put a cap on the amount of fare riders will be charged in a day. All of that is despite the limits on property tax imposed by prop 13. The city definitely isn’t a paradise, and I don’t agree with all of the spending choices that have been made, but I certainly think we have a budget abundance.
That's a great counterpoint - maybe services really are better in some denser areas, all else equal. LA does have extremely high per capita tax revenue funding this, though, so it's not clear to me whether LA is benefiting from density-driven efficiencies or just higher revenue from, say, being a global business center with high sales taxes.
I've never been able to find good data on comparative spend efficiency across municipalities, which seems like it'd be highly-studied question.
I would think SF would have at least as high per capita tax revenue, though, right? Particularly since some of LA's richest areas are technically their own cities—Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena—so I don't think they put into the kitty for LA services, at least not totally. Then, too, I don't get the feeling that the problem in SF is a lack of tax revenue—they've got hundreds of millions to spend on constructing one public bathroom, after all! Maybe the revenue does come in but the governance problems (particularly, sad to say, in highly progressive cities) keep us from reaping the full benefit of that revenue.
Sure. I'd probably agree they don't often mentally sound out the words "restrict the supply" when they oppose, uh, new supply. But it seems to be something of a distinction without a difference.
Well, I think there is a difference w.r.t. persuasion.
If you mistaken believe that they are just trying to maximize home value, and frame your arguments around that...you may not persuade many of the persuadable.
Just to add, one of our favorite games is spot the 1500-1800 sq ft cape cod built in the 40s or 50s with a crap reno job and an asking price of $1 million or close to it. It's absurd if you're trying to buy but if you own it there's no way you're walking away from your overvalued junk in exchange for the right to rent out a shed in the backyard.
On the other hand, one of my favorite small towns is Ipswich, MA. They have tourist farms, a castle estate, a sandy beach, and lots of wetland preserves. But they also have a dense pre-automobile Main Street, a commuter rail station, and a tourist bus that takes people to these rural attractions without having to drive and park. Is Ipswich a YIMBYtopia with upzoning and midrises? Definitely not. But it's still pretty great for a farm town and has potential to be even better.
Hold on there. The state of Massachusetts is fighting Milton, and there is every indication that Milton will lose. Multi-family apartments are going up in MA because of this law, and it proceeded the way everyone says it should, by moving from hyper-localism to the state level. This is the same way rent control was eliminated in MA.
I think this is a great law and I am really glad to see that the state is serious about enforcing it. I do think there will be real development as a result of it.
With that said:
-The law is pretty narrow in scope. Like lots of recent YIMBY victories, it's best thought of as a good start. It's unlikely to be enough, and it will take time to bear fruit.
-Maybe this is my own frustration talking, but the law focuses on upzoning around commuter rail stations and...MBTA commuter rail service is a joke.* Literally no one with any means is gonna move into one of thee units and think "OK, I'll just rely on this train that comes once an hour at best and is always late to get around." Which means that you'll just wind up seeing the traffic and parking issues of NIMBY nightmares.
Of course, you'd see some traffic and parking issues, anyway, and one can hope that over time this leads to pressure for improved commuter rail service. But while I fully support the law and think the long-term impact will be positive, is worth remembering that most MBTA commuter rail stops might as well not exist.
*The MBTA has had a lot of operational issues lately (I do think it's improving now, but very slowly), but the difference with the commuter rail is that even if the service runs the way it's supposed to, it's garbage. The trains come every 60-90 minutes even at peak times, fares are opaque and confusing, there's basically no integration with the subways and buses. If the Red Line does what the Red Line is supposed to do, it's actually useful. That's isn't the case with the commuter rail - they really just need to rethink the entire thing.
You're wrong. Plenty of people take the MBTA commuter rail regularly. I know people who work in finance who take it regularly. The MBTA has problems, but your characterization is way too "online" and categorical.
I'm not wrong and my characterization isn't "online" at all. I've lived a 10-minute walk from an MBTA commuter rail stop for four years and have taken it all of twice, because it comes once an hour even at, like, 8am. Granted, I also live near a bus that feeds into the subway and comes much more frequently and if I did not I'd probably take the commuter rail more often. But that just speaks to how crappy the commuter rail service is: the frequency is so terrible as to render it useless if you have another viable option (and the bus-to-subway has its own issues, but it's still better than the commuter rail).
I also know people with high-paying white-collar jobs who ride it regularly to get to work downtown, because they view it as a better option than sitting in traffic. That doesn't mean it's a good service. My point isn't that no one ever rides MBTA commuter rail, my point is that as useful public transit it's terrible. And it's going to remain that way until, at least, the frequencies improve.
I've lived a 10 min walk from an MBTA commuter rail stop for 15 years and I see people take it every day for work. I take it myself on the weekends to go into Boston. You said that it would be "worth remembering that most MBTA commuter rail stops might as well not exist." You think the service is crappy, fine. But people use it every day, and they want it to exist. You're wrong that it might as well not exist, and you should phrase your points more clearly if you didn't mean to say that.
Birdsong is important. There should be a way to pair increased density with ample parkland as MY alludes to. If we’re just going to increase density *and* give up on preserving/restoring parkland and natural areas you’d lose me. Why not both? Agriculture areas despite the green halo and pastoral views are devastating for nature but they do allow for better aquifer recharge. I doubt I’m alone in these values so probably worth addressing them.
>There should be a way to pair increased density with ample parkland as MY alludes to.<
I'd argue these two are a natural pairing. A pretty nice way to kill birds is to destroy their environment, and a nifty way to do that is make density against the law. Which is the same as requiring the destruction of more countryside to accommodate the same number of people.
But yes, governments can buy land to provide parks. Also, even quite dense areas can have lots of trees—and some bird species don't need much more than that.
When building is very dense and the area is in a major flyway, it can definitely affect birds. This has been a problem in Chicago with thousands of birds dying in building collisions during migration season. Turning off lights can help, but hard to do in a big way.
If you have a 25 acre lot requirement—or even a one acre lot requiremen— people probably have some trees on private property. Conversely, on a small enough lot, there’s going to be a house or MFH building and nothing else.
25 acre lots are probably fine as a corridor for birds and small mammals. But they’re still going to end up being pretty impassable to larger mammals if people put in fences at all.
Plus it's also going to have only the trees the landowner wants, which isn't necessarily the same as what is required for native fauna to thrive, including birds.
I dunno. I've lived in a few different, extremely dense neighborhoods in Boston. Probably at least 15 units per acre on average in most stretches. And there were trees. And shrubs and bushes. And lots of birds. And packing, say, 15,000 humans into a square mile of land means in theory the metro in question requires a smaller land footprint. Which ultimately translates into more truly rural or undeveloped land that remains undisturbed.
Really had to scroll down to find this. The backlash of the other comments is whipsawing me around to the point I'm afraid the analysts will win and the birdsong will fly away forever. A few of my frustrated impressions: people who live in big cities like D.C. simply do not know what they're missing. (I was just in D.C. and tried to find a few natural areas to walk around - nope, you don't have them.) People in Tokyo and Hong Kong and Shanghai likewise are probably many generations from knowing what they're missing. L.A. kind of knows, but it's too late.
My other broad point is that "growth" pretty much means that developers will do whatever they want. I'm skeptical about positive impacts of loosening up land use laws. Developers will still build the standard humongous single-family homes, as far away as lot-size permits from those pesky Other People, that our middle and upper class culture thinks they need in order to be happy.
Here in Portland some close-in light-industrial land opened up for development a couple decades ago. What was built? Hundreds and hundreds of small apartments. (I live in one that opened nine years ago - they are currently lopping off advertised monthly lease prices by hundreds of dollars because of all the new apartments opening up. In the meantime, the college-aged demographic is dipping.)
Of course Oregon's Urban Growth Boundaries raise the prices of housing. But you have to live here to understand what the benefits are and the effect on the soul of driving through miles of gently sloping agricultural land a half hour out of the city. I'm going to need to see broader, much more difficult analysis that gives weight to birdsong and hundred year time frames before I'll be convinced that "growth" ≠ "sprawl". (Actually, that long term time frame may only need to be a couple of decades. Once we boomers are gone, all that paving over of parkland might start looking a bit short-sighted.)
Yeah unfortunately the same adaptability that allowed humans to populate almost every biome on the planet also allows us to quickly acclimatize to a more and more impoverished natural world. And nature appreciation is just not something very high up there on the list of values that people really seem to care about so it’s only promoted and encouraged by a relatively small fraction of parents and hardly ever in school or by the culture at large. To be fair there’s probably some ancient ambivalence in the human heart towards the wildness of the natural world given that for most of our time on this planet it was so often a source of threat to our survival. And maybe our ancestors with the most affinity for the well-being of animals would’ve had a survival disadvantage relative to those that hunted and killed with remorseless abandon thereby shaping our predispositions today.
"think revealed preference suggests they value keeping others away far more than the cash they might gain from selling some of their land or building and renting out an ADU"
"Homeowners value stasis." 3 words, but 120% on, that's...pretty much exactly why the "progressive" suburban Boston area has very conservative actual policies on local issues.
The progressive slogan yard signs in front of huge single family houses on 1-2 acre lots make me crazy, but once you look past the hypocrisy, the voters are voting with their wallets and getting rich doing it. :-(
Yours is actually a hopeful post. I’ve long feared that that the more likely solution would be a knock the pieces off the chessboard catastrophe that fundamentally altered the decision making calculus on housing
Well, and it's not like there are no rays of hope-filled sunshine peeking through the housing scarcity clouds hither and thither. California not surprisingly seems to lead the way. And yes, I do tend to think in the end it'll come down to simple voter self-interest: NIMBYism is bad for renters, and when there are enough of them to form a sizeable majority, we'll see real change (in my view anything shy of the abolition of the local housing veto will inevitably fall short of what is needed).
I hope your take is right, but this is where it gets weird. In Montgomery County (where Poolesville sits) the current county executive, no exaggeration, compared development to 'ethnic cleansing' during the last election. These kinds of statements are superficially treated as appeals to the immigrant community, which in practice and the context of these primaries is in actuality pretty radical activist groups. But whatever, put that aside. The people nodding along with it are the wokest, richest denizens of the most desirable parts of the county who already own massively inflated property and for whom development is the biggest threat.
Point being the whole thing ends up being painted as a protection for the vulnerable while in actuality it is for the NIMBYs, even as it flatters certain sensibilities. The only solution I think in Maryland is for the state to step in but as was discussed on the thread about the Wes Moore proposal chances of them doing something beyond the margins of the margins are not good.
In a way it's related to the Alabama Supreme court decision regarding IVF. That decision isn't possible in a state with actual competitive elections (judges in Alabama are elected). And the new law passed by the Alabama legislature doesn't actually legalize IVF as much as it gives immunity to IVF clinics. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-ivf-bill-house-to-protect-ivf/. Which I think is important because even in this moment of intense backlash where even majorities of Alabama residents have problems with this ruling the legislature did not actually pass a law saying IVF is legal because that would imply that embryos are not humans an invite the wrath of conservative activists in the state. The lack of competitive elections is a perfect recipe for the most extreme elements to take hold as you're biggest worry is low turnout primary elections where extremists will be overrepresented AND it's a perfect recipe to push, pontificate and vote for very extreme bills as "messaging" bills without taking into consideration actual practical impact.
It just takes time. Legislatures are almost always a little slow, except in emergencies.
Even here in Alabama, the sentiment of the voters exerts a pressure and we'll eventually get something close to what we collectively want.
But the larger point you are making is a good one. If there were another competitive party here, the initial steps by the legislature would be more...properly tuned.
Our system response would be closer to critically damped as opposed to overdamped.
> Most of the political leadership is anointed by activist groups in low turnout primaries and the politicians themselves gain prominence not from successful problem solving but intra party jockeying.
I was shocked to learn when I moved here that, in Maryland, there are no special elections to the General Assembly - if a General Assembly seat becomes vacant, the party of the most recent legislator nominates three names to the Governor to fill the seat, and the Governor picks one of the three. One out of five members of the House of Delegates and one out of three state Senators first acquired their seats through appointment! It's unnerving how much of the process of moving up in state politics is a game of currying favor with the parties rather than by delivering results for voters.
> It's unnerving how much of the process of moving up in state politics is a game of currying favor with the parties rather than by delivering results for voters.
I agree with you, but a lot of people here seem to think a parliament filled with interchangeable party-selected members is a better system. I can see the logic in a way, but maybe I'm just too much of an idealist to believe individual candidates don't (or shouldn't) matter.
If my wife and I did not have so much family in the area that helps with kids (an invaluable service) we'd be seriously considering the research triangle, especially now that we are both full time remote.
My son has extremely strong feelings about flags, so I asked him about this. He said that New Mexico has the best flag, and that Ohio and the new Minnesota flag (to be adopted in May) come next, but that Maryland's is also quite good.
The lack of vitality in the Maryland Democratic Party leads to the suboptimal solution of electing Republican governors. Even worse, although I respect Larry Hogan’s distancing from Trump, I really don’t want him representing us in the Senate as part of the Republican caucus.
What strikes me about this is that it seems to be part of a troubling universal trend. As countries get rich they tend to create lots of veto points to prevent changing things. Be it preserving agricultural land in the US, declaring every other shack in the UK historically important or simply creating architectural standards for new construction.
I fear it's just a general tendency of democracies to tell citizens they value their input and people enjoying expressing themselves about what they like (let's keep X) since they can't like what doesn't yet exist.
You have just discovered that the majority of humans are (more or less willfully) ignorant, prejudiced, tribal, fearful, myopic and small-c conservative. This is the problem with democracy. It is still better than all other systens that put a small handful of humans in the driver seat without accountability, as Churchill pointed out.
I often come back to this point: for some reason we resist blaming voters/humans for what is wrong in politics. It’s always someone or something else that receives the blame. But ignorant, uninformed, uninterested voters will not give us good politicians nor good politics, and to the extent that we had better politics in the past it’s because the process was shielded from ordinary voters - in the hands of people who wouldn’t have been elected by direct voting, who could act without a million veto points set up to avoid angering the average voter etc.
>I often come back to this point: for some reason we resist blaming voters/humans for what is wrong in politics.<
We tend the "resist" blaming voters for the very reason you lay out in your preceding paragraph: human nature. Blaming humans for insufficiently wise governance outcomes is like blaming parakeets for insufficiently strong swimming skills. It's not in their nature.
Elites matter!
(I used to blame voters, too, and then I was introduced to consequentialism.)
But humans can become smarter and better educated. We are not the same now as we were 500 years ago and some of that has to do with a positive change in values and IQ.
Also, human nature will become increasingly malleable…
I think future humans will find it incredible that Trump could be supported by close to a majority of voters. One of the worst humans contemporary America has produced and disgusting in almost every respect: stupid, ignorant, evil, racist, corrupt, a compulsive liar etc. The fact that he enjoys this level of support is the most perfect condemnation of human nature, and of American voters to be frank.
As far as I understand, he wants all focus to be on more or less simple rote skills (reading, writing, maths). No history, social science, critical thinking etc.
But many schools are teaching that and students could care less.* My high school had an entire gov/econ course required for everyone. And despite an amazing teacher, many, myself included, retained very little of the info
At least literate people can learn about this on their own in the future.
*Edit: "couldn't care less". Was lazy and didn't run through ChatGPT.
ChatGPT favors widespread lazy human use and doesn't give a shit (does not have a working concept) about being "correct". Even money it would adjust you to "could care less".
I will be extremely frank--if I knew for a fact you ran your comments through ChatGPT before posting them, I would weigh them much less.
I think they teach it in the wrong way, focusing on memorization of years and names rather than on stories and context. Not everyone will love it but I think you can reach most people if you do it right. It also makes no sense to deprive all students of civics because some kids are uninterested. Trusting people to learn about politics and society in an age of 20 characters, Tik Tok and endless distractions is probably doomed to fail.
I think you probably retained more than you assume, if you had a good teacher. It creates a foundation that helps you learn more and faster in the future.
Also there is no contradiction in both learning civics and learning to write. I and everyone I know managed to. Sure, we went to a good school in a country that used to invest in education (Sweden) but this should be possible to recreate in a world that is richer than ever.
I find it surprising and, as previously said? depressing that a person as smart as you (whom I often agree with) don’t see the importance of civic education in an age where Trump is the preferred presidential choice among the less educated. I would hate it if my kid spent the whole school day like a robot performing isolated tasks of writing and calculating without any meaningful content. It sounds positively dystopian. What is the worth of civilization and growth if the end result is schools churning out obedient robots who don’t know a thing about society or themselves…
It's generally accepted now that "could care less" actually means the same as "couldn't care less." In fact, no one would use the phrase "could care less" in its original meaning.
So this was fine. Just like "irregardless" means "regardless." But, for the love of all that is holy, don't use "reticent" to mean "reluctant." This is the hill I will die on.
I wouldn't use that as a measure since most students couldn't care less about most classes at the time they take them, but still retain snippets of what they were exposed to, which they can use as a basis for exploration in the future.
We had required economics and government classes too, and they were some of my favorite classes that I retained a ton of info from. Every student is different!
Matt can step in and correct any of us if he wants, but I think that's an uncharitable read of his take. The way I'd steelman it is that as long as you can get students learning the 3 Rs with whatever material engages them the most, then that's what matters the most--and the material is likely to differ for each student.
I am deeply sceptical of “civics education” and “teaching critical thinking”.
IME what people really mean is that we could get the policy outcomes we want (eventually) if schools can sufficiently brainwash students to agree with us.
That’s not the role of public education and it wouldn’t work even if it was.
But they are sufficiently disengaged that they probably would not PUNISH a politician that wanted to be a less wrong thing.
Did Schumer make the calculation and say, "Darn, We really ought to just subsidize the CO2 voided rather than the investment in CO2 avoidance, but it will lose us 4 purple state Senators!"
Or Biden, "Sorry about that LNG "pause" but Michigan and Pennsylvania will swing to Trump if I don't do it."
Both have acted as if they were expecting a tight election against a DSA candidate.
Don’t subsidize CO2 avoided, you get a “paying for snakes” problem. (Taxing emissions is great, the center left has just been yelling that it’s politically impossible for all of the 2010s).
Sure! I'm the Internet's #1 commentator about taxing net emissions of CO2.
But within the world of the IRA, it is worse to subsidize the investment what if it works as planned will avoid CO2 emissions and better to subsidize the zero CO2 energy produced or stored.
The center left should have been using its energy to persuade other to tax net emissions rante tha explain why it is not yet politically feasible.
No one except Slow Boring commenters cares about the LNG pause. To restate: if anything comes of it, it would be to lower natural gas prices to American customers.
However many people care, it is an example of bad policy making.
We should have figured out that restricting export of fossil fuels to reduce prices domestically is mistake back in the '70's. That some of the costs in the cost benefit analysis are externalities does not fundamentally alter the analysis.
I think you’re under valuing the way plain old well off people benefit from the government system you’ve described so well. They’re the ones who have the resources to identify and take advantage of all the veto points.
I would add that the experiences of UK and US show the very real downsides of the adversarial system of justice that exists in places that rely on UK common law system. Much easier for even one person to weaponize the "heckler's veto". I don't think it's a mistake that the places with worst housing issues are UK, US, Australia and Canada. It's also a wierd consequence of our societies getting richer; even regular middle class people can either on their own or with a handful of neighbors come up with the money for lawyers to gum up the works
Then look at New Zealand, which has the similar common law structure but is significantly less economically attractive (they've got a diaspora population of over 10% their total population and a fairly consistent net migration loss, mostly to Australia).
And yet even with a net migration loss (mostly of people who would have high incomes if they stayed) they STILL have a housing crisis.
I think I am probably two sigma more NIMBY than the median Slow Borer (notably, still probably not NIMBY relative to the median voter). But preserving agriculture next to a major metro as an *achievement*--that's just fucking bonkers.
I've noted one reason this sentiment exists; "the cult of the trad" I called it or you can say this sentimentalizing of pastoralism. But there's another even more basic reason this happens in "blue" cities and neighborhoods. A heuristic error that equates more nature with environmentalism. More farms, more trees and more green stuff = more environmentally friendly. The problem is on a micro level this is very possibly true. This community given how small it is and how little traffic can come through (due to the lack of bridge) probably does contribute less pollution or to global warming than a lot of inner ring suburbs with more multifamily development. But net effect on a macro level is more pollution as people end up having to live farther out from DC in outer ring exurbs and commute farther to the office (or drive farther to the grocery store, or drug store or soccer practice etc.).
From Matt’s article it sounds like much of this is less like pure farming and more like tourist-friendly show or semi-show farms (which, to be clear, are great).
Matt insists there’s a big conceptual difference between privately owned concerns doing this and public parks, but from a pragmatic perspective….is there? Both require monies to support (whether taxes or entry fees or donations / trust moneys) and it’s not as if public amenities never charge admission (museums, the Central Park Zoo). Sustainably-run privately administered apple picking orchards are in one sense subsidizing a particular person’s private enterprise instead of a libertarian land use regime or for some reason trying to get the state to run it (color me skeptical) but it’s not like they charge Disneyland prices to pick apples. The terminal benefit to the residents and visitors is that there’s a showfarm / apple orchard, regardless of whether privately or publicly run.
The thing you'll notice quickly is that jurisdictions that allow a lot of infill also tend to add sprawl. While jurisdictions that block sprawl block multi-family housing. In other words the battle is between pro-housing forces and anti-housing forces rather than people who want housing on the fringe vs people who want housing in the core.
I think this frustrates a lot of urbanists (FWIW I've lived in cities for 20 years) who think suburbia and sprawl is harmful on a varitey of fronts. The case against suburbia is strong on a climate perspective but frankly banning suburbia hits me as about as politically feasible as banning heterosexual sex.
Given that it makes much more sense for people who want infill housing to partner with people who want sprawl housing rather than try to convert nimby-urbanites into loving development.
Just want to say that I really like the structure of this article, and would like to see more of this if practical. It was a genuine description of the nitty gritty details of a place in America that I hadn't heard of before facing problems that America as a whole faces. So much preferable over the sappy, ill informed "let's go visit the provinces" articles that the New York Times publishes. Keep up the good work!
"When I was a kid and New York City was dramatically cheaper than it is today, it was a real refuge for LGBT people and others who didn’t fit in wherever they came from. The city has only become *even more* progressive in its official stances and attitudes since then, but successful efforts to hold off 'development pressure' have made it dramatically less accessible in practice."
The idea behind these two sentences should be expanded into a book
Think of all the effort that goes into performing liberal policies in places where they weren't being challenged in any case (making New York City infinitesimally more gay-friendly, or what have you). It's not any more effective than city councils calling for a ceasefire in Palestine.
The one thing the performative stances don't do is allow more people to live in progressive areas... except in the case of immigration/sanctuary, and as someone just pointed out here, they aren't really doing that either. Even illegal immigrants need housing!
I miss dinner parties. I used to have, and attend, a lot of them. Then it just sort of stopped. Planning a menu that people will eat and getting them to commit to an event became too difficult.
If there are DC- or Ann Arbor-area SBers who like eating and (in a friendly fashion) arguing, I'm here to host it!
People should take a leaf from Chinese culture and do their entertaining in restaurants, which is a custom that developed when everyone was still in tiny state-owned apartments and has persisted even though they have more space now. We need an Abundance Agenda to get rid of this cooking-for-ten-friends nonsense.
"We need an Abundance Agenda to get rid of this cooking-for-ten-friends nonsense."
There are two problems with dinner parties: finding (and paying for) the space to host them, and the time spent cooking food for them. The former is much more intractable. I know some people very dear to me who held multiple dinner parties where the food was replated Chinese takeout. It went fantastically.
I was on the YIMBYtown organizing committee, and we explicitly chose to lean into the nonpartisan nature of the movement. I wrote about some of the skepticism here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/building-a-bigger-tent
As a blue island in a sea of red, no meaningful state-level reform will happen in Texas without a coalition, so for us, expanding the tent is both the practical thing to do, but also the right thing to do in America's second most populous state.
The YIMBY argument would be more palatable if it were limited to prosperous urban areas. New York City and the Bay are engines of economic dynamism. They boast some of the best professional opportunities in the world. Policies that price out ambitious young people curtail economic opportunities and growth. Such policies hurt the national economy.
Restricting access to Poolesville has far fewer downsides. It will not make the next generation of AI harder to develop. It will not keep anyone from getting a job at a big investment bank or tech company. It will let affluent white people live in a cozy, bucolic space unmolested by too many downscale neighbors.
I would happily upzone the shit out of Atlanta and the near north side. Let the young graduates money bring their energy and ambition. Let them have orderly public spaces and vagrant-free transit. But let me enjoy the fruits of my industry in an attractive bedroom community with good schools and well behaved children.
>The YIMBY argument would be more palatable if it were limited to prosperous urban areas. New York City and the Bay are engines of economic dynamism....Restricting access to Poolesville has far fewer downsides<
I'm somewhat open to this line of reasoning, but Montgomery County is a core constituent of a rich and productive metropolis of ten million souls. Maybe if Yglesias staged a successful coup he'd consider implementing strong YIMBY rules in, say, our 100 largest metros. And leave the rest of our national territory (I'd bet more than 80% of its land area) alone.
This reminds me of the Steph Curry brouhaha a year or so ago: he not surprisingly (and really, not unreasonably) came out as being opposed to an apartment complex proposal close to his home in Atherton, California (you know, the most expensive town in the richest metropolis in history). I totally don't blame him. But the San Francisco Bay CSA is home to nearly ten million people. If you want monastic silence, buy 900 acres miles from nowhere and build a house there. NIMBYism in our metros just causes a shitload of highly negative, downstream effects.
Montogimery County is huge. It’s eastern portions should be YIMBY land. If you want to gore some rich oxen, Potomac is close enough to DC to be a reasonable commute, upzone it. However, upzoning anything more than 12 (15?) miles from the Capitol is overkill.
Also, there’s plenty of affordable housing in PG county. You just have to be ok living near blacks people and the schools aren’t great. There’s no reason childless workers (and empty nesters) can’t live in PG.
Isn't the point that Matt makes fairly often is that if you upzoned all of it, then you would mild increases of density in most of it, but only significant increases in a small areas.
The thing is, "upzone the place near me whose leaders I don't get to vote on" is not on offer and never will be. There's nobody to decide which towns get to enjoy stasis and which don't.
There is this cool thing called a state government. Atlanta gets pissed on all the time in the general assembly. The Rs would have more shit to tax if they rammed through some urban up zoning.
More power to them if they do that. In practice this depends on Republicans being willing to steer some of that new revenue to urban schools and transit, and I'll believe that when I see it.
Metro Atlanta has been subsidizing rural Georgia for decades. Georgia has a reasonably stiff income tax with very few deductions. Basically, 6% of what urban professionals own gets spread fairly evenly across what is still a mostly under developed state.
I may happen somewhere sometime, but I suspect the marginal "development" will not attract families with ill-behaved children that will ruin the local schools. And it sure will produce more city revenue to improve policing and (if money would help) education.
We have plenty of revenue. My city spends 2 million a year on festivals and 19 million on the police, despite having very low crime and a fine county sheriffs department.
Nah...the whole state of CA is basically Poolesville on steroids..it's a systemic problem.
We want to build more homes but there's very little available land left where people would like to be, so we're limited to infill development which is very hard to do at all and almost impossible to do at scale.
Dig deeper and you find out that mandatory ag zoning is a far far bigger culprit than SFH zoning.. you could build tons of houses where those apple orchards now sit, just like around San Francisco to the north, east and south there are millions of acres dedicated to almonds, olives and wine grapes..
I appreciate your candor! As someone that would love to upzone his own cozy community, are there any incentives that could induce you to accept growth? Modest growth with strict limits?
People freak out when I say land value tax, so how about "property tax discount for neighborhoods that upzone." That way, neighborhoods that want to NIMBY can still do it, they're just leaving money on the table.
My closest friends and I all grew up here and would love to stay, but as we are graduating college and entering the early stages of our career, housing costs are a consistent pressure to relocate. I and a lot of others are living in their parent's home (which have increased in value 40% in 10 years) to start their careers. It's a drag on happiness and growth and could really hurt the state long-term if many young people start to relocate. Hopefully, Moore can continue to push harder for abundance and local leaders follow suit.
40%? Luxury! Try New Zealand, where property doubles every ten years across the entire country. A small lot to build a house on in the outskirts of a medium city costs $350,000!
In conversations with both friends and random normies, I’ve found that a lot of people believe that they personally, and people like them generally, are not going to benefit from either local or national economic growth. They also think they’ll suffer from the negative externalities of new or expanded economic activity.
This is really sad, and it’s a major obstacle to pro-growth policy. Unfortunately, I think that it’s often more true than we pro-growth types would like to admit— new economic activity does often produce negative externalities, and its benefits are often very concentrated. I suspect that part of the answer to this challenge is finding some way to explicitly transfer some of the surplus to give more people a material interest in the pro-growth policy change.
We are also extremely bad at compensating those who pay a price. The Purple Line has now turned part of Silver Spring into a construction zone for more than 6 years, and won't be finished until late 2027 at a mimumum. affected businesses have been left to twirl in a morass of busted streets.
>I’ve found that a lot of people believe that they personally, and people like them generally, are not going to benefit from either local or national economic growth.<
In some cases they may be right, especially in blue metros. If you're a homeowner in, say, San Mateo County, chances are you're not doing terrible in terms of personal finances. You've got yours, in other words. I think I get why calculus involving national well-being makes people's eyes glaze over in such cases.
It’s not just the upper middlers either. A lot of middle class-and-lower people think that the upper-middle-and-up group captures all of the benefits of growth.
Quick update on my effort to get a local Dem policy group going - I gave my little speech about red states eating our lunch and I got polite agreement. We have a good mix of Democratic generations - classic 60s boomers, soft spoken Gen X types, anti-Bush/Obama era millennials, and some gen Z BLM types.
First meeting, and the local Democratic Town Committee has given us some leeway to explore a policy that gets local Democrats elected (we're a reddish town in very blue CT). I pitched some ways we can frame up local leadership's reluctance to take full advantage of state funding programs to our political advantage and I pushed back against a framing focused on social justice/diversity since this town is 85%+ white and median non-college. But. Work to be done. Will circulate this column.
Nothing makes my eyes roll more when I see people use buzzwords like "environmental justice." I am like "people are facing problems, how do we fix said problems." A lot of the normative coding annoys my pragmatistic side.
Yes, I am an economist.
The buzzword that triggers me is "character". Such a vague, deceptive heartstring pulling term that elides the details of what one actually wants. At my least charitable, I think of Winston Wolf's last line from Pulp Fiction: "Just because you *are* a character, doesn't mean that you *have* character!".
I just think of Calvin’s dad, “being miserable builds character”
When I think of “character” I view it as a pejorative. It’s something substituting for something more cutting but impolite.
There's a big difference between "is a character" (which could be the substitute you mean) and "has character" (which to me is always positive)
+ 1000. See also "neighborhood character" 🙄
Great! Please keep the updates coming, this is real slow boring in action.
Inspiring stuff, well done !
Love this! You might like The Liberal Patriot (https://www.liberalpatriot.com/) and the Welcome Party (thewelcomeparty.org and https://www.welcomestack.org/) as you're working to form your strategy, policy agenda, brand, etc.
This piece really influenced Welcome Party's thinking and strategy: https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-future-is-faction/. Yglesias has also been supporting faction-building these days (and his recent AOC analysis explored her role in the progressive/left faction).
I’m curious if you’re attracting working class whites, non-college educated.
This aligns with my comment yesterday that poor governance is causing post-material politics. Say you're struggling to save for a home or looking for a blue-collar job. Republicans don't have a platform anymore, so there's literally nothing to see there. You then see Democrats patting themselves on the back for being the adults in the room and the party of governance and think surely these guys are trying to help me. Then in practice they are stopping construction of infrastructure and homes. Can you really be blamed for losing interest or voting for whoever aligns with your cultural preferences?
And not a lot to pat on the back for.
No tax reform.
No deficit reduction.
Wrongly given subsidies for CO2 emissions reducing technologies. [And if it's worth subsidizing EV, which I doubt, it should not matter where they are manufactured.]
Lukewarm to cold encouragement of fossil fuel development and exports.
Letting the RCTC die
Failure to just process the asylum seekers expeditiously, allowing in the (few) actual refugees and rejecting the others.
I stand to be corrected, but failure to go all out admitting H1B-type immigrants and retaining foreign students.
"We're not as bad as Trump will be" is not a message that will attract many swing voters!
:(
a) I think you have been negatively polarized against the IRA in a way which is not helpful. As Matt has written Biden’s energy agenda has been broadly successful.
b) Biden came around late to the Asylum thing but he literally does not have the power to fix it without congress. This
c) I agree that the H1B visa situation is bad but the democratic policy here is clearly much closer to the median voter than your preferences.
Regarding (b), it appears to be a matter of contention as to exactly how much Biden can do legally without Congress. Biden is considering[1] taking some executive steps the Speaker asked him to try in late December[2].
[1] "The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has previously signaled it would oppose attempts to change the asylum system by executive order. But Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), the caucus chair, said Thursday they were open to some executive orders" https://www.politico.com/newsletters/inside-congress/2024/02/29/a-biden-border-order-is-splitting-democrats-00144273
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4371872-speaker-johnson-biden-executive-action-border/
I am not against the IRA, just the unnecessarily inefficient (and ASAIK not even politically necessary) way the subsidies for reducing CO2 emissions are given.
At this late date, you may be right about asylum seekers.
I doubt the median voter HAS a position on H1B visas.
Most of these measures Dems cannot do because they do not have the house and never had the votes lol
See the debacle of Oregon drug decriminalisation, for example. A real ‘let’s pat ourselves on the back!’ policy that was a complete debacle.
This is less offensive to me because they tried something, they gathered information that it wasn't working, and they reversed course. That's totally fine, and that's categorically different than simply not being able to do things like build infrastructure or allow housing development.
Don't worry, we're also incapable of building infrastructure or allowing housing development.
I actually want to take a closer look at this one!
Anecdotally, I’ve seen a surprising number of 5-over-1s being built in Portland proper (SE) recently, which makes me hopeful. But I have no numbers on it yet, which I’d like to take a look at.
I couldn't resist the joke. I'd have to look at the numbers. Kotek is TRYING to move the ball in the right direction, but idk how much has actually been built.
>This is less offensive to me because they tried something, they gathered information that it wasn't working, and they reversed course. That's totally fine,<
Agreed. I haven't taken the time to do a deep dive on what they're changing, but I hope they don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. To cite one concern: no reasonable human wants their city turned into an open air drug den. But mere possession and use (in other words, addiction) seems a very bad target for criminal law. So I hope they focus their ire on the nuisance aspects of drug use—in other words public spillover—instead of drug use itself.
I recall reading about a very similar-sounding situation in Portugal.
>I recall reading about a very similar-sounding situation in Portugal.
It's notable that the Portuguese situation is not an borne out of anarchist-adjacent skepticism of all state coercion, like the US policies, but instead an active and compassionate paternalism. When the program began, it was pretty effective -- people were essentially coerced into undergoing treatment. The way it worked was that police would still tell you to stop fucking around with public drug use, they'd give you a citation that compelled you to appear before a board that would mandate you undergo X or Y treatment program.
It was also very expensive, since while prison is pretty costly, addiction treatment on the state's dime is even moreso. Nevertheless it was quite effective until they started cutting expenditures drastically, in large part because they imported more American-anarchist views that drug use is a personal matter, a question of 'cognitive liberty' (though I think they imported these ideas in large part as wishful thinking to justify why they could spend less money on the programs).
I think the tradeoff with criminality is increasing the number of addicts. Who did the study that showed legalization increased use without decreasing deaths and it became a huge deal for her getting a progressive think tank position? I'd argue just addiction is a public spill over.
The Portuguese program (when it was still well-funded and coercive) actually reduced the number of addicts. The key is that you can't just say "let's decriminalize drug use and focus on harm reduction by making it less dangerous", you have to say "let's force people into addiction treatment instead of forcing them into prisons".
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I like your framing that their program is compassionate paternalism. It still takes a position that addiction *is bad*. Which it is. Too much of the drug discourse in the US edges on radical libertarianism - IMO - where the individual should be able to do what ever they want in the privacy of their own home. I still think we can make moral judgements that XY behaviors are socially undesirable and design policies to reduce those behaviors.
I think drug use is fine if you've got your life in order.
Do cocaine on the weekends, just go to work on the weekdays and pay your taxes
Jennifer Doleac, I believe.
Reversing. This is still all in processes.
I agree, though I’m bummed that 110 couldn’t function more properly as a test. I suppose it’s not entirely worthless information-wise, but it didn’t answer the question it set out to.
Drug decriminalization can't mean we can do drugs wherever we want.
Get high in your own house not on the street corner or park
I am deeply sceptical of drug decriminalisation, but Oregon didn’t care about anything even vaguely like the details of how to make their policy work. In fact, had they voted for brutal Singaporean style drug policies, the result would have been the same.
They did improve/fund addiction treatment services. The issue is that the uptick in fentanyl and decriminalization of use/possession worked against the treatment provisions.
Also few addicts were actually interested in using the resources when they were given citations.
There's no enforcement if you ignore the citation. Like I don't mean the cops are being lazy, the zero enforcement is a feature, not a bug.
I mean don’t you have to want to get better to get better? Addicts arent children, if they had enforced the fines or the bench warrants would that have really changed things?
Well, the solution would be to force people in to treatment against their will. But the libertarian left is allergic to that sort of thing, so they just ask nicely.
And the state of Oregon didn't have a functioning addiction treatment system until the state started funding it and regulating service providers. There were two parts of the reforms, people only focus on the decimalization aspect which is what is being changed.
Decimalization? I hope that involves cutting people into tenths
No, it just means that pre-1970 British currency is no longer legal tender for drug transactions.
What's the structural commonality such that neither party experiences the consequences of not delivering?
If it was just pure "post-materialism" you'd think a materialist candidate would be able to come in and sweep.
My point is Democrats are absolutely experiencing consequences. It's a big driver of their weakness with non-college voters. I note "What's the Matter With Kansas" will have its 20th anniversary this year, it's been literally decades where people have struggled to figure that out.
They're still winning about 50% of elections because Republicans are extreme and weird. But if Republicans chose to maximise their odds of winning rather than run an old crazy person or a plutocrat openly committed to cutting the country's most popular social programs, Democrats would really struggle.
>But if Republicans chose to maximise their odds of winning rather than run an old crazy person or a plutocrat openly committed to cutting the country's most popular social programs, Democrats would really struggle.<
I'd probably be ok with that, because truly "maximizing their chances of winning" would imply a return to normalcy for the GOP—including abandonment of their support for authoritarianism and elections denial. As Milan has pointed out frequently, voters have consistently punished this tendency in GOP candidates.
Democrats lose more elections, but the party they're losing to is a plain vanilla right of center outfit that isn't trying to subvert the constitution every other day? Sign me up.
I think if the Republicans returned to a politics of normalcy, they'd lose a lot of their base voters. See: Nikki Haley.
Per the data I posted Sunday, about 15% of Trump supporters would stay home if Haley were the nominee, but 15% of Biden voters would flip to Haley if she were the nominee. Flips are worth double the value of stay homes, but GOP primary voters are the ones driving the car. 🤷♂️
It seems like both parties have gotten by on cultural issues and in-group vibes, although I give the Democrats credit for at least having and working on a national agenda, and neither one currently has a large enough segment focused on materialist issues. There are exceptions. Renewable energy is booming in Texas. Yimby's are making some progress in California and other places. But overall the voting population doesn't have a strong enough sense that people's day to day lives could be much better.
My take on this is in the US is roughly
1– Both parties have a key upper middle class constituency and are actually responsive to that group’s material demands— the professionals for the Democrats, the proprietors for the Republicans.
2– Thanks to rising demand for knowledge workers in the late 20th century, most people who are simultaneously in the top 10-15% of the population by general intelligence, executive function, and social skills and aren’t in line to inherit a business go to college, so most lower-middle and lower-income adults who fit those criteria are there because they voluntarily sacrificed material gain to pursue a fulfilling vocation (activists, social workers, academics, artists, etc). The sort of manual worker who’d start a labor union and expound a materialist class-based political ideology to his or her fellow workers— quite common in past periods— is now quite rare. So, working-class people tend to sort more along identitarian lines.
The first part is dead on, but it's not really clear working-class people sort more along identity than educated middle class people?
This isn't just a US-specific problem though. You can look at countries like the Philippines and argue that post-materialist politics are already at play in middle-income countries. (Though I do think McConnell's use of the filibuster did help to break the average voters' expectation that election results would translate into the policies they wanted.)
When I see people talking about “post-material politics” I think they’re usually claiming that some structural feature (such as broadly increased prosperity) is making voters care less about material politics, and thus politicians follow. But your suggestion seems to be that politicians are leading on this rather than following voters. Is there some structural reason this might be happening if it’s *not* about most voters having changed their focus?
I'm not denying that rising prosperity has contributed to post-material politics. I'm arguing that "middle class cronyism", which includes NIMBYIsm, occupational licensing, and in Britain at least the way much of government business seems to be tendered, is also contributing factor. Those behaviours are causing government to be ineffective at delivering concrete outcomes, and it's leading people to give up on seeking those outcomes from government, and either disengaging completely or focusing on cultural issues.
I'd like the voters who support this cronyism to confront that reality, which I think at the margin is likely to reduce support for these harmful practices.
Republicans might not have a national platform
But at local levels they are largely pretty pro growth, get rid of red tape.
See Florida , Texas etc
It’s an intriguing idea, but I’m not sure that it works from a US perspective, at least not with this issue set. This hypothetical guy should vote on a national level for the Democrats, because they want to raise taxes on people richer than him and use the money to give him downpayment assistance with the house, expand the EITC, reduce the deficit and thereby inflation and interest rates, etc., and on a local level he can vote for whoever the more YIMBY candidate is.
I think government effectiveness issues don’t really bind here, in that the federal government is demonstrably still able to tax some people and send other people the money, and no local government really lacks the institutional capacity to loosen housing supply restrictions.
Except that their willingness to believe any of this will actually happen depends on whether they view government as a real provider of concrete services or if they view it as the outcome of politics as public theater. I think that many folks are drifting toward the later. Partly because when Republicans are in control (at least at the federal level) they tend to under govern because they don't believe in "big government" in ways that depletes capacity and partly because Democrats have in some causes failed to meaningful deliver either because of incompetence at a local level or systematic process that favor non-action at the federal level like the filibuster.
But if folks don't view government as primarily a boring thing that provides key good and where competency matters, they are more likely to vote based on vibes, values, cultural issues, or tribalism and that often doesn't put people in power who are the best suited to govern. Donald Trump would a glaring example on the Right. Socialist Council Member Sawant in my hometown would be an example on the Left. (The amount of time she made her own agenda difficult to pass because of her language was maddening and deeply harmful to housing in Seattle.)
And those people then deliver less and it gets worse. I had hoped that Biden would govern well. I think overall he has and that some of what he is getting criticized for like the Border, Gaza, and Inflation are sufficiently out of his executive control to be his fault. I thought maybe folks would remember that government could be boring and effective an vote for that the next time but the mainstream media doesn't really cover that much and focuses instead on whatever chaos has good visuals.
Binya’s idea that UK post-material politics is being driven by government incompetence is certainly interesting. I don’t think Binya’s examples here work though, at least not in the US context.
I don’t think Americans doubt that local government has the ability, the capacity, to reduce the land use regulations that artificially restrict housing supply. I don’t think Americans doubt that the federal government can raise taxes for some people and cut taxes for others.
Now, I agree that as a practical matter, “I will raise other people’s taxes and cut your taxes” doesn’t seem to be working out well as a political pitch nowadays. But is that because the pitch itself isn’t credible?
As I see it, US federal government dysfunction is most stark in procurement/contracting and self-defeating environmental regulation. So I can imagine a hypothetical cross-pressured voter who was leaning towards the Democrats due to climate change fears, who then gets black-pilled by NEPA blocking renewables transmission lines and the NRC blocking nuclear power, and so just decides to vote purely on cultural issues. Or, the same thing but with a passenger rail infrastructure enthusiast. But, while they are substantive, those are just really small issues.
Think about how things work with the big substantive issues. If tax rates go up, the IRS will successfully implement the new rates. If the formula for social security payments changes, we can trust that the Social Security Administration will carry out the new law. If we tell the health insurance companies they have to start covering something with no copay, they will do as they’re told.
So all of the biggest issues of substantive politics in the US are still amenable to political action. I don’t think incompetence and dysfunction can be driving the post-material turn here.
I think it is relevant. I agree that people don't doubt that the government can take away zoning rules. But to make that attractive it needs to include the promise that the community will maintain its quality of life by building public transit so traffic isn't a nightmare, building schools fast enough that kids aren't overcrowded, increase or improving resources like parks so that can serve more people. I think a lot of people do doubt that their local municipality is going to actually do that and it makes them assume that they will just have more people and the same infastructure and services and that sounds unattractive. The argument that in theory this will increase the tax base and that economies of scale will allow them to have more for less may not seem convincing based on how they feel their tax dollars have been used previously.
There might be a directional bias where voters believe/perceive that government can primarily deliver on getting rid of things but not so much on providing things.
That’s an extremely good point. When neither party takes up a critical cause of material suffering across many different income groups, what are voters expected to do when evaluating who to vote for?
“Dan Reed from our local group, Greater Greater Washington, objected to his elevation, arguing that “abundant housing means an inclusive, pluralistic society, period. Making an example of folks like Greg Gianforte not only undermines that, but feeds the perception (unfair as it may be) that the movement is the province of white libertarian bros.””
The irony of touting an inclusive, pluralistic society then in the next sentence arguing that someone who you agree with on the issue in question isn’t welcome in your movement because they hold unrelated views that you don’t like.
Not just that they hold unrelated, disfavored views. But that they have the wrong color skin.
Having just finished Franklin Foer's epic essay at The Atlantic detailing the increasing threats to Jewish-Americans, I'm struck at the casual racism accepted by so many across the political spectrum.
Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/
The thing about spending the last few years making everyone hyper-cognizant of race is that we made everyone hyper-cognizant of race.
Yep. Whenever I see left-wingers talking about "making white people aware of race," my first thought is of stoned teenagers in a horror movie deliberately reading from the book of dark magic in a graveyard at midnight -- nothing good is going to happen from doing that! It's also why I'm only half kidding when I've said here before that some journalists appear to wake up each morning asking themselves brightly, "How can I foment a race war today," because I can't understand how anyone could be so clueless as to write many of the articles that put explicit racial framing on issues that either don't actually have a racial frame or where talking about the issue in racial terms is almost certainly going to do more to anger and alienate white people than it is to help fix anything (see, e.g., the "white libertarian bros" crack from Dan Reed in Matt's article).
Agree. I feel myself getting pushed inexorably to the right every time I see my ethnicity or sex used as a swear word.
I genuinely believe that it is not healthy to be part of a political movement that despises your immutable characteristics.
One issue I see with the white privilege narrative is that it encourages white people to try to define themselves as something other than just white. I think this is part of why some white Americans identify as Italian-American or Irish-American.
I worry that this could go a bit further; we could see white Americans who reject the idea that being white is a huge advantage seek to distinguish themselves from white groups they see as more affluent/successful.
And in America, what group of (mostly) white people is affluent/successful, easily distinguished from other white people, and conveniently already blamed in a lot of conspiracy theories?
This is basically Franklin Froer's recent article in The Atlantic on the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
I lol'd.
I remember when liberalism taught that I was supposed to think about race as little as possible!
I still think about race as little as possible.
Liberalism is based on the values of reason, tolerance, and mutual respect. Much of Leftist thought is based on Marx's revealed truth, which is teleological and promises utopia. True believers are inherently correct and there is no room to entertain those who hold differing views because they are inherently wrong.
This isn't liberalism's fault.
The Leftists killed and flensed Liberalism and are now wearing a costume made of its skin.
I learned a new word today!
Not necessarily, but if you do think about it, do it reasonably. Color blind everything in not the very best we can do right now even though it should be the goal.
"I still think about race as little as possible."
You just lost the game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)
I was undefeated until I followed your link.
My apologies.
I think it made sense. The 2010s involved millennials digesting their ethnic diversity compared to the boomers and setting norms. There had to be corrections and some degree of honesty that the salience of skin color in society is not literally zero to a person entering a room full of people of a different background. Every generation has to decide how to treat one another fairly. The old norms didn't entirely satisfy that; they had to change.
Now it's mostly over, GOP is polling better with Hispanics and other ex-Obama Dems like Elon Musk. There's a sci-fi Lawrence of Arabia movie that would've received some viral think pieces on Orientalism a decade ago but no one cares now, plus it's cast well. The millennials won the culture war. That's why Trump could win; because people are largely content with it and now just want inflation and immigration controlled.
It’s all about the Benjamins is not an antisemitic trope. It’s human nature.
People were too hard on Omar for that. Everyone is allowed one anti-semitic-adjacent comment as it might be inadvertent.
Two and you're on probation.
Three and you're off the island.
Being anti-Israel isn't inherently anti-Semitic...but it usually counts as one strike in this formulation.
Yes, they are absolutely not the same but they're often kissing cousins.
That quote gave off a feel of the dual yard signs of "No matter who you are, we're glad that you're our neighbor" and "OPPOSE! This MASSIVE [housing development I don't like] for [unrelated reasons]!".
We're glad that _you_ are our neighbor.
We don't want _y'all_ to be our neighbors.
I left one of Dan's local housing related projects for precisely that reason.
As my über-woke child explained to me once, that’s what intersectionality means
Inclusion for me but not for thee.
“…isn’t welcome in your movement because they hold unrelated views…”
Yes. White views.
Eh, this is just necessary pragmatic messaging in a supermajority Democratic district. Being associated with Gianforte or other Republicans is incredibly toxic in that context, so YIMBYs in that context are going to downplay cross-partisan ties, in much the same way that Gianforte isn’t going to be super-vocal about adopting the same housing policy orientation as AOC, Liz Warren, and the CA state legislature.
Yes, but there are critiques that can be made specifically about Gianforte (e.g., physically assaulting a journalist!) that don't give the same, "Ugh, white people" vibes.
It's interesting. As a 2000s era capital-P Progressive. The all or nothing view Dan shares here has made be shed that Progressive label. My goal is absolutely not "an inclusive, pluralistic society". That's not even on my list of priorities. I am interesting in making small progress, everyday to make things better. Starting points matter. The current Progressive goals for society read to me like a horrible dystopia.
>"The city has only become even more progressive in its official stances and attitudes since then, but successful efforts to hold off 'development pressure' have made it dramatically less accessible in practice."
This is the same attitude that led to the creation of "sanctuary cities" that Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have cleverly taken advantage of with the immigrant busing. These progressive cities are all talk and no walk. When forced to deal with the reality of their positions they recoil.
I think hypocrisy is overrated. Lots of Democrats really do want to treat other people fairly, like many Republicans do. But it is fiscally unsustainable to unselectively bring millions of people into the country, especially via American Ninja Warrior: Panama Edition and then expect to have a sense of local order and well-run safety net beyond that of Brazil's favelas. Some more years of this, and you can forget YIMBYism. Although if you're at Cato and a fan of 19th century immigration policy, that might not be a bad trade. But for the rest of us, no thanks.
The hypocrisy is that blue city Dems had no problem with the border situation when it was just El Paso that had to find places for people to eat and sleep, but now suddenly think it's a humanitarian crisis that they end up on buses to Chicago or New York.
Signed, a fan of 19th century immigration policy (but not the Chinese Exclusion Act)
Nothing stops the progressives in these cities from everything the requisite tax hikes to support the immigrants. They just know that their very own compassionate voters will vote with their feet. New York could have increased the tax rate but just didn't
In some cases that isn't true. Washington State's constitution has been interpreted by our supreme court (probably fairly given drafter's intent) to preclude any income tax and many other forms of progressive taxation. We are left with a sales tax, property taxes, b&o taxes on the GROSS revenue of businesses, and fees. We also have a major crisis with housing affordability. You can really only raise sales taxes so much before the regressive taxes really hurt low to middle income families. You can only raise property taxes so much without making the housing crisis worse. You can only tax so much of a businesses gross revenue without taking into account their costs before you can't run a business. So we end up with a lot of fees (head tax on employees or $3.99 of every food delivery) that aren't very rational at some level but at least get us some money without making the key issues worse. Seattle would pass an income tax if they could I believe especially if it was progressive and targeted mostly high earners (especially if they could get cheaper UBER eats back.) I think if we had more sources of revenue we would support higher taxes to get better results on homelessness, etc and still opt to be a supportive sancutary city. But we can't without changing our constitution and while we have a Dem majority in the legislature they don't have super majority to pass a constitutional amendment. At this point the City has passed an income tax which is on hold due to legal challenge in the hopes that the Supreme Court which is elected and liberal might bail them out.
I think that this reality is also important to understand in the context of Seattle's embrace of Defund the Police as a major political movement. The residents of Seattle and SPD have a uniquely bad relationship and have ever since the excessive force at the WTO riots and resulting Federal Consent Decree. Few people outside of Seattle know that the SPD actually pepper sprayed the majority of the Seattle City Council in the face when they came downtown to confirm reports of excessive force against non-violent protestors at the George Floyd protests. I think it becomes easier to embrace defunding someone if they have pepper sprayed you in the face for no reason and I would warrant that the SPD has done that to a larger percentage of city council members and the general public than in most cities. But we also face an actual zero sum game when it comes to revenue. If the SPD budget doubles in ten years then it my definition defunds everything else because we can't really make a bigger pie.
The real problem with the City Council's defund plan was that they picked an arbitrary number and then discovered that they don't have any power to determine any of the SPD's internal budget, just their overall budget allocation. When the SPD said that they would respond to any overall cuts, not by reducing their pepper spray budget but by cutting virtually all services for protecting people from sexual assault, DV, sex trafficking, etc. the council caved and didn't cut a dime. They just aren't as good at playing chicken as the SPD.
Since then, they have really fed a narrative that any increase in crime in the City is the result of the City's threat to defund the police, even though they didn't lose a dime and have essentially gone on an extended sick out for the last four years. Officers have literally shown up at assaults and told victims that if they want anything done about it they need elect a new City Council. Last November we did.
Two years ago their message what that they would do something about crime if we elected a new City Attorney and we elected a Republican nut bag. But she has discovered that the City Attorney's office doesn't have the budget to prosecute any more folks that they were doing before and so nothing has changed. I am not aware of any big changes since we got our new Council either.
The promise was that the SPD union would actually sit down and negotiate a new contract since their old one has expired years ago and they think that has hurt recruitment and led to the need to pay overtime at the expense of other police activity. They said they couldn't really sit down with the old council because they insulted them too much by the Defund the Police vote. The new council is almost 100% the SPD backed members But a lot of what the SPD wants in their contract is likely in violation of the City's settlement with the Department Justice and which possibly state laws around police accountability. It would also come with a price tag that is far beyond the City's ability to pay.
None of this means that the old progressive council did a good job on these issues. But things can look "loony" from the outside when they are imported to other places and make a lot more sense in the actual context. anist.org/2024/01/17/what-to-look-for-in-a-new-seattle-police-contract/
Thank you for the detailed post. As (almost) always, the devil is in the details. I understand and can sympathize with progressive goals, even when I do not agree with them. It seems to me that there are 3 different issues with revenue - sources, levels (tax rates), and allocation. I think it would be good to consciously tackle these separately than simply resign to the fact unless we can tax someone else ("the rich"), we cannot spend on our preferences ("homelessness"). This indicates that we are only going to do more if we can make someone else foot the bill. Similarly, you can increase the tax levels and then work separately on allocation to make it more progressive. Personally, I don't think a tax rate would drive a business out; it will be eventually passed down to customers. But yes, a high rate can reduce the aggregate level of economic activity.
Coming to SPD, I find this to be an issue afflicting all unions. PDs are no exception, but they do flex their muscles quite strongly. Accountability must increase, but that in general goes against the union ethos of one-for-all and all-for-one in favor of the incumbent workers as opposed to potential workers. I have seen the same situation in the hospital workforce, teachers union, etc. One preferred solution would be to completely deunionize and tackle protections through workplace safety standards, unemployment uninsurance, etc.
Just to be clear. I think that in a progressive tax system I would be paying more. I am not suggesting that can't solve these problems without taxing someone else. I am saying we can't solve them without taxing me. I suppose we could just jack the sales tax up to the rafters and then give some sort of grant to all low income families so that they could still afford to buy anything. I am not sure how we would need to structure that to not run afoul of differential taxation rates but it could probably be done. I don't think there is much hunger for that and it does run the risk of folks buying all their big ticket items out of state.
And the tax rate for b&o taxes isn't the real issue it is that it applies to gross revenue and not net revenue and it does create some fucked up incentives. Like if I hire another well-paid employee and they make me a small marginal profit that covers their salary plus 5% but I pay a 6% flat tax rate on that profit plus their salary then I could actually lose money hiring a well-paid, low margin employee. Which really makes no sense.
It hurts a lot of brick and mortar businesses because their taxes are on their gross revenue and they can't right of their inventory, rent, employee salaries etc. The rates are low so they don't alone make it impossible to run a business but it isn't ideal. I suppose that we could all just raise our prices. Actually if you ever try to buy any products or services in Seattle it is clear that we have all raised our prices! But again, having everything you buy be more expensive tends to be regressive on those who have to spend all of their income.
Interestingly, in 2020 the King County Labor Council (the largest in the region by leaps and bounds) actually kicked the SPD union out of the council which is pretty unprecedented. They basically decided that they didn't want to use their overall labor solidarity power to help push for the SPD demands that they thought boiled down to the ability to commit police violence without accountability. Again, the fact that lots of labor leaders had been on the receiving end of that violence in the WTO and other protests probably helped to drive this split a bit but it was interesting to see Labor as a whole just drop them like a hot potato even as it was adding new organized groups.
When do you release a Slow Boring t-shirt “Build the damn bridge to Poolesville”?
"Bridge to Poolesville" is a decent name for a blog itself- perhaps MY's "second channel".
It's going to be the title of the debut album by my presently non-existent "cottagecore" band, the Slow Borers.
Sounds like the tag line for an ad criticizing an Alaskan politician.
One could design a whole list of Slow Boring slogans that goes on the back of the T-shirt, in the style of a music tour shirt that lists all the days and locations.
We used to play them in sports. It really was a long damn drive.
I haven't been there, but in general I find these types of ferries charming. I hope after they have their bridge they also keep the ferry not least for its historical nature. Sometimes historical character is relevant.
If there is a flaw in our historic preservation regime, then surely it is that there is no clear way to distinguish between the US' *first* strip mall (https://www.slowboring.com/p/commemorate-history-dont-preserve), and its *last* functioning cable ferry.
In this house we believe you should build the damn bridge to Poolsville
"insisting on only the most artfully bespoke, transit-oriented mid-rise projects with just the right amount of affordable set-asides"
*chef's kiss*
This post spoke to me deeply and it articulates exactly the challenges that I struggle to explain to people from outside the area. Yea, Maryland is blue, deeply blue, and that's preferable for a whole host of reasons to being deeply red. But it is also deeply conservative in the sense that a lack of real political competition in our system ultimately amounts to a lack of accountability in politics. If anyone wants to understand why the devolution of the GOP into the MAGA cult is bad for the structure of society Maryland is a great example. Most of the political leadership is anointed by activist groups in low turnout primaries and the politicians themselves gain prominence not from successful problem solving but intra party jockeying.
Anyway they should absolutely build the damn bridge and unleash the development. If the state and counties don't change their approach I could foresee outward migration really becoming a problem for what is genuinely a cool state with a unique history of not quite the north not quite the south and by far the best flag. People peace out for NC and places like that all the time and it is far from clear to me that their quality of life suffers for it.
Blue states at heart all the same on this issue.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/03/03/business/milton-massachusetts-towns-housing-law/
It's a conundrum. I'm deeply pessimistic about the prospect of bringing in housing abundance on a substantive level any time soon. I'd guess we finally get there when owner occupiers shrink to below 40% or so of the population—and not much before. Homeowners just *really* value stasis. The one part of Matt's analysis on this issue I tend to be skeptical of is his take that owners ought to do well from the financial boon they'd realize through YIMBY upzoning. I think revealed preference suggests they value keeping others away far more than the cash they might gain from selling some of their land or building and renting out an ADU. Part of this might also be that they calculate—perhaps shrewdly—that the returns to the latter would shrink pretty massively if *everybody* were allowed to do it—and so they'd be left not with a big chunk of rental income but with more traffic and less birdsong.
I'm also skeptical of the tax-receipt windfall take (he makes it often.) We just don't seem to see this in practice. If this dynamic was real, we'd see denser areas have much lower property taxes and/or better services. The citizens of San Francisco - ground zero for a natural "what-happens-with-tax-windfalls" experiment- would feel like they were living in a tax-funded wonderland.
I think Matt's missing three countereffects:
1. More density means more tax revenue but also more expenditures (duh)
2. A huge percentage of incremental tax revenue is captured by insiders - government workers, unions, private contractors and non-profits.
3. Density itself creates new problems and makes governance harder
I live in Los Angeles and I do feel I’m living in a tax-funded wonderland. There’s universal free school lunch and free after-school care, with meals provided. All school parents are provided an EBT card for each child, regardless of income. The school provides laptops and iPads for all students and internet connections for those who need them. The parks department offers youth sports for $10 for an 8-week program and free swimming lessons. Metro just put a cap on the amount of fare riders will be charged in a day. All of that is despite the limits on property tax imposed by prop 13. The city definitely isn’t a paradise, and I don’t agree with all of the spending choices that have been made, but I certainly think we have a budget abundance.
That's a great counterpoint - maybe services really are better in some denser areas, all else equal. LA does have extremely high per capita tax revenue funding this, though, so it's not clear to me whether LA is benefiting from density-driven efficiencies or just higher revenue from, say, being a global business center with high sales taxes.
I've never been able to find good data on comparative spend efficiency across municipalities, which seems like it'd be highly-studied question.
I would think SF would have at least as high per capita tax revenue, though, right? Particularly since some of LA's richest areas are technically their own cities—Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena—so I don't think they put into the kitty for LA services, at least not totally. Then, too, I don't get the feeling that the problem in SF is a lack of tax revenue—they've got hundreds of millions to spend on constructing one public bathroom, after all! Maybe the revenue does come in but the governance problems (particularly, sad to say, in highly progressive cities) keep us from reaping the full benefit of that revenue.
All that and the schools still suck at actually teaching kids
Some of them probably do, I don't know. We've had success using LAUSD magnet schools.
On balance, the tax revenue is greater than the expenditures, particularly for higher density (see Detroit).
I don't think many homeowners are specifically thinking 'restrict the supply'.
It's mostly just wanting to prevent the neighborhood/environment that they have invested in to degrade. Or even just change to much.
Sure. I'd probably agree they don't often mentally sound out the words "restrict the supply" when they oppose, uh, new supply. But it seems to be something of a distinction without a difference.
Well, I think there is a difference w.r.t. persuasion.
If you mistaken believe that they are just trying to maximize home value, and frame your arguments around that...you may not persuade many of the persuadable.
Just to add, one of our favorite games is spot the 1500-1800 sq ft cape cod built in the 40s or 50s with a crap reno job and an asking price of $1 million or close to it. It's absurd if you're trying to buy but if you own it there's no way you're walking away from your overvalued junk in exchange for the right to rent out a shed in the backyard.
Goes back to Matt's point about what's really valuable about property is the land.
Yep.
On the other hand, one of my favorite small towns is Ipswich, MA. They have tourist farms, a castle estate, a sandy beach, and lots of wetland preserves. But they also have a dense pre-automobile Main Street, a commuter rail station, and a tourist bus that takes people to these rural attractions without having to drive and park. Is Ipswich a YIMBYtopia with upzoning and midrises? Definitely not. But it's still pretty great for a farm town and has potential to be even better.
Ipswich is lovely, as is that entire area. Crane Beach was my go to when I lived in Boston.
Hold on there. The state of Massachusetts is fighting Milton, and there is every indication that Milton will lose. Multi-family apartments are going up in MA because of this law, and it proceeded the way everyone says it should, by moving from hyper-localism to the state level. This is the same way rent control was eliminated in MA.
I think this is a great law and I am really glad to see that the state is serious about enforcing it. I do think there will be real development as a result of it.
With that said:
-The law is pretty narrow in scope. Like lots of recent YIMBY victories, it's best thought of as a good start. It's unlikely to be enough, and it will take time to bear fruit.
-Maybe this is my own frustration talking, but the law focuses on upzoning around commuter rail stations and...MBTA commuter rail service is a joke.* Literally no one with any means is gonna move into one of thee units and think "OK, I'll just rely on this train that comes once an hour at best and is always late to get around." Which means that you'll just wind up seeing the traffic and parking issues of NIMBY nightmares.
Of course, you'd see some traffic and parking issues, anyway, and one can hope that over time this leads to pressure for improved commuter rail service. But while I fully support the law and think the long-term impact will be positive, is worth remembering that most MBTA commuter rail stops might as well not exist.
*The MBTA has had a lot of operational issues lately (I do think it's improving now, but very slowly), but the difference with the commuter rail is that even if the service runs the way it's supposed to, it's garbage. The trains come every 60-90 minutes even at peak times, fares are opaque and confusing, there's basically no integration with the subways and buses. If the Red Line does what the Red Line is supposed to do, it's actually useful. That's isn't the case with the commuter rail - they really just need to rethink the entire thing.
You're wrong. Plenty of people take the MBTA commuter rail regularly. I know people who work in finance who take it regularly. The MBTA has problems, but your characterization is way too "online" and categorical.
"Plenty of people take the MBTA commuter rail regularly."
There is a difference between "regularly takes US commuter rail" and "relies on US public transportation as one's only motorized transport".
I'm not wrong and my characterization isn't "online" at all. I've lived a 10-minute walk from an MBTA commuter rail stop for four years and have taken it all of twice, because it comes once an hour even at, like, 8am. Granted, I also live near a bus that feeds into the subway and comes much more frequently and if I did not I'd probably take the commuter rail more often. But that just speaks to how crappy the commuter rail service is: the frequency is so terrible as to render it useless if you have another viable option (and the bus-to-subway has its own issues, but it's still better than the commuter rail).
I also know people with high-paying white-collar jobs who ride it regularly to get to work downtown, because they view it as a better option than sitting in traffic. That doesn't mean it's a good service. My point isn't that no one ever rides MBTA commuter rail, my point is that as useful public transit it's terrible. And it's going to remain that way until, at least, the frequencies improve.
I've lived a 10 min walk from an MBTA commuter rail stop for 15 years and I see people take it every day for work. I take it myself on the weekends to go into Boston. You said that it would be "worth remembering that most MBTA commuter rail stops might as well not exist." You think the service is crappy, fine. But people use it every day, and they want it to exist. You're wrong that it might as well not exist, and you should phrase your points more clearly if you didn't mean to say that.
Birdsong is important. There should be a way to pair increased density with ample parkland as MY alludes to. If we’re just going to increase density *and* give up on preserving/restoring parkland and natural areas you’d lose me. Why not both? Agriculture areas despite the green halo and pastoral views are devastating for nature but they do allow for better aquifer recharge. I doubt I’m alone in these values so probably worth addressing them.
>There should be a way to pair increased density with ample parkland as MY alludes to.<
I'd argue these two are a natural pairing. A pretty nice way to kill birds is to destroy their environment, and a nifty way to do that is make density against the law. Which is the same as requiring the destruction of more countryside to accommodate the same number of people.
But yes, governments can buy land to provide parks. Also, even quite dense areas can have lots of trees—and some bird species don't need much more than that.
When building is very dense and the area is in a major flyway, it can definitely affect birds. This has been a problem in Chicago with thousands of birds dying in building collisions during migration season. Turning off lights can help, but hard to do in a big way.
If you have a 25 acre lot requirement—or even a one acre lot requiremen— people probably have some trees on private property. Conversely, on a small enough lot, there’s going to be a house or MFH building and nothing else.
25 acre lots are probably fine as a corridor for birds and small mammals. But they’re still going to end up being pretty impassable to larger mammals if people put in fences at all.
Plus it's also going to have only the trees the landowner wants, which isn't necessarily the same as what is required for native fauna to thrive, including birds.
I dunno. I've lived in a few different, extremely dense neighborhoods in Boston. Probably at least 15 units per acre on average in most stretches. And there were trees. And shrubs and bushes. And lots of birds. And packing, say, 15,000 humans into a square mile of land means in theory the metro in question requires a smaller land footprint. Which ultimately translates into more truly rural or undeveloped land that remains undisturbed.
Really had to scroll down to find this. The backlash of the other comments is whipsawing me around to the point I'm afraid the analysts will win and the birdsong will fly away forever. A few of my frustrated impressions: people who live in big cities like D.C. simply do not know what they're missing. (I was just in D.C. and tried to find a few natural areas to walk around - nope, you don't have them.) People in Tokyo and Hong Kong and Shanghai likewise are probably many generations from knowing what they're missing. L.A. kind of knows, but it's too late.
My other broad point is that "growth" pretty much means that developers will do whatever they want. I'm skeptical about positive impacts of loosening up land use laws. Developers will still build the standard humongous single-family homes, as far away as lot-size permits from those pesky Other People, that our middle and upper class culture thinks they need in order to be happy.
Here in Portland some close-in light-industrial land opened up for development a couple decades ago. What was built? Hundreds and hundreds of small apartments. (I live in one that opened nine years ago - they are currently lopping off advertised monthly lease prices by hundreds of dollars because of all the new apartments opening up. In the meantime, the college-aged demographic is dipping.)
Of course Oregon's Urban Growth Boundaries raise the prices of housing. But you have to live here to understand what the benefits are and the effect on the soul of driving through miles of gently sloping agricultural land a half hour out of the city. I'm going to need to see broader, much more difficult analysis that gives weight to birdsong and hundred year time frames before I'll be convinced that "growth" ≠ "sprawl". (Actually, that long term time frame may only need to be a couple of decades. Once we boomers are gone, all that paving over of parkland might start looking a bit short-sighted.)
Yeah unfortunately the same adaptability that allowed humans to populate almost every biome on the planet also allows us to quickly acclimatize to a more and more impoverished natural world. And nature appreciation is just not something very high up there on the list of values that people really seem to care about so it’s only promoted and encouraged by a relatively small fraction of parents and hardly ever in school or by the culture at large. To be fair there’s probably some ancient ambivalence in the human heart towards the wildness of the natural world given that for most of our time on this planet it was so often a source of threat to our survival. And maybe our ancestors with the most affinity for the well-being of animals would’ve had a survival disadvantage relative to those that hunted and killed with remorseless abandon thereby shaping our predispositions today.
"think revealed preference suggests they value keeping others away far more than the cash they might gain from selling some of their land or building and renting out an ADU"
This is me
Unfortunately I think you are probably right.
"Homeowners value stasis." 3 words, but 120% on, that's...pretty much exactly why the "progressive" suburban Boston area has very conservative actual policies on local issues.
The progressive slogan yard signs in front of huge single family houses on 1-2 acre lots make me crazy, but once you look past the hypocrisy, the voters are voting with their wallets and getting rich doing it. :-(
Yours is actually a hopeful post. I’ve long feared that that the more likely solution would be a knock the pieces off the chessboard catastrophe that fundamentally altered the decision making calculus on housing
Well, and it's not like there are no rays of hope-filled sunshine peeking through the housing scarcity clouds hither and thither. California not surprisingly seems to lead the way. And yes, I do tend to think in the end it'll come down to simple voter self-interest: NIMBYism is bad for renters, and when there are enough of them to form a sizeable majority, we'll see real change (in my view anything shy of the abolition of the local housing veto will inevitably fall short of what is needed).
I hope your take is right, but this is where it gets weird. In Montgomery County (where Poolesville sits) the current county executive, no exaggeration, compared development to 'ethnic cleansing' during the last election. These kinds of statements are superficially treated as appeals to the immigrant community, which in practice and the context of these primaries is in actuality pretty radical activist groups. But whatever, put that aside. The people nodding along with it are the wokest, richest denizens of the most desirable parts of the county who already own massively inflated property and for whom development is the biggest threat.
Point being the whole thing ends up being painted as a protection for the vulnerable while in actuality it is for the NIMBYs, even as it flatters certain sensibilities. The only solution I think in Maryland is for the state to step in but as was discussed on the thread about the Wes Moore proposal chances of them doing something beyond the margins of the margins are not good.
I am trying to figure out the reasoning behind the county executive's statement.
Isn’t he from the sacred bleeding heart of NIMBY-ism in Potomac MD?
In a way it's related to the Alabama Supreme court decision regarding IVF. That decision isn't possible in a state with actual competitive elections (judges in Alabama are elected). And the new law passed by the Alabama legislature doesn't actually legalize IVF as much as it gives immunity to IVF clinics. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-ivf-bill-house-to-protect-ivf/. Which I think is important because even in this moment of intense backlash where even majorities of Alabama residents have problems with this ruling the legislature did not actually pass a law saying IVF is legal because that would imply that embryos are not humans an invite the wrath of conservative activists in the state. The lack of competitive elections is a perfect recipe for the most extreme elements to take hold as you're biggest worry is low turnout primary elections where extremists will be overrepresented AND it's a perfect recipe to push, pontificate and vote for very extreme bills as "messaging" bills without taking into consideration actual practical impact.
It just takes time. Legislatures are almost always a little slow, except in emergencies.
Even here in Alabama, the sentiment of the voters exerts a pressure and we'll eventually get something close to what we collectively want.
But the larger point you are making is a good one. If there were another competitive party here, the initial steps by the legislature would be more...properly tuned.
Our system response would be closer to critically damped as opposed to overdamped.
> Most of the political leadership is anointed by activist groups in low turnout primaries and the politicians themselves gain prominence not from successful problem solving but intra party jockeying.
I was shocked to learn when I moved here that, in Maryland, there are no special elections to the General Assembly - if a General Assembly seat becomes vacant, the party of the most recent legislator nominates three names to the Governor to fill the seat, and the Governor picks one of the three. One out of five members of the House of Delegates and one out of three state Senators first acquired their seats through appointment! It's unnerving how much of the process of moving up in state politics is a game of currying favor with the parties rather than by delivering results for voters.
I would be okay with this law if the person was barred from running for re-election and was a placeholder.
Special elections take time and cost money, and not having representation matters. But anoiting 20-year incumbents through this process is gross.
> It's unnerving how much of the process of moving up in state politics is a game of currying favor with the parties rather than by delivering results for voters.
I agree with you, but a lot of people here seem to think a parliament filled with interchangeable party-selected members is a better system. I can see the logic in a way, but maybe I'm just too much of an idealist to believe individual candidates don't (or shouldn't) matter.
You are entirely correct, and especially if they can take their Maryland incomes with them to Charlotte or Atlanta or whatever.
Lots of crab-flag stickers on cars in the NC triangle these days.
I am turbo-jealous of the crab-flag sticker.
I have one on my fridge, my car, my 8 month old, and if I had a dog I'd put one on him too.
If my wife and I did not have so much family in the area that helps with kids (an invaluable service) we'd be seriously considering the research triangle, especially now that we are both full time remote.
My son has extremely strong feelings about flags, so I asked him about this. He said that New Mexico has the best flag, and that Ohio and the new Minnesota flag (to be adopted in May) come next, but that Maryland's is also quite good.
The definitive grading of US state flags is here (note that it predates Minnesota's new flag): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4w6808wJcU
Thank you. This is great! My son will agree with the rubric, even if not the final ranking.
The lack of vitality in the Maryland Democratic Party leads to the suboptimal solution of electing Republican governors. Even worse, although I respect Larry Hogan’s distancing from Trump, I really don’t want him representing us in the Senate as part of the Republican caucus.
I voted for him for governor twice but won't for Senate for this exact reason.
What strikes me about this is that it seems to be part of a troubling universal trend. As countries get rich they tend to create lots of veto points to prevent changing things. Be it preserving agricultural land in the US, declaring every other shack in the UK historically important or simply creating architectural standards for new construction.
I fear it's just a general tendency of democracies to tell citizens they value their input and people enjoying expressing themselves about what they like (let's keep X) since they can't like what doesn't yet exist.
You have just discovered that the majority of humans are (more or less willfully) ignorant, prejudiced, tribal, fearful, myopic and small-c conservative. This is the problem with democracy. It is still better than all other systens that put a small handful of humans in the driver seat without accountability, as Churchill pointed out.
I often come back to this point: for some reason we resist blaming voters/humans for what is wrong in politics. It’s always someone or something else that receives the blame. But ignorant, uninformed, uninterested voters will not give us good politicians nor good politics, and to the extent that we had better politics in the past it’s because the process was shielded from ordinary voters - in the hands of people who wouldn’t have been elected by direct voting, who could act without a million veto points set up to avoid angering the average voter etc.
>I often come back to this point: for some reason we resist blaming voters/humans for what is wrong in politics.<
We tend the "resist" blaming voters for the very reason you lay out in your preceding paragraph: human nature. Blaming humans for insufficiently wise governance outcomes is like blaming parakeets for insufficiently strong swimming skills. It's not in their nature.
Elites matter!
(I used to blame voters, too, and then I was introduced to consequentialism.)
But humans can become smarter and better educated. We are not the same now as we were 500 years ago and some of that has to do with a positive change in values and IQ.
Also, human nature will become increasingly malleable…
“human nature will become increasingly malleable”
That is the one thing we can be assured will not come to pass.
I think future humans will find it incredible that Trump could be supported by close to a majority of voters. One of the worst humans contemporary America has produced and disgusting in almost every respect: stupid, ignorant, evil, racist, corrupt, a compulsive liar etc. The fact that he enjoys this level of support is the most perfect condemnation of human nature, and of American voters to be frank.
Add to your list…adjudicated rapist
And incidentally this is also why I find education important and why I find Matt’s strong anti-civic education bent so depressing.
is Matt anti-civi education?
As far as I understand, he wants all focus to be on more or less simple rote skills (reading, writing, maths). No history, social science, critical thinking etc.
But many schools are teaching that and students could care less.* My high school had an entire gov/econ course required for everyone. And despite an amazing teacher, many, myself included, retained very little of the info
At least literate people can learn about this on their own in the future.
*Edit: "couldn't care less". Was lazy and didn't run through ChatGPT.
ChatGPT favors widespread lazy human use and doesn't give a shit (does not have a working concept) about being "correct". Even money it would adjust you to "could care less".
I will be extremely frank--if I knew for a fact you ran your comments through ChatGPT before posting them, I would weigh them much less.
I think they teach it in the wrong way, focusing on memorization of years and names rather than on stories and context. Not everyone will love it but I think you can reach most people if you do it right. It also makes no sense to deprive all students of civics because some kids are uninterested. Trusting people to learn about politics and society in an age of 20 characters, Tik Tok and endless distractions is probably doomed to fail.
I think you probably retained more than you assume, if you had a good teacher. It creates a foundation that helps you learn more and faster in the future.
Also there is no contradiction in both learning civics and learning to write. I and everyone I know managed to. Sure, we went to a good school in a country that used to invest in education (Sweden) but this should be possible to recreate in a world that is richer than ever.
I find it surprising and, as previously said? depressing that a person as smart as you (whom I often agree with) don’t see the importance of civic education in an age where Trump is the preferred presidential choice among the less educated. I would hate it if my kid spent the whole school day like a robot performing isolated tasks of writing and calculating without any meaningful content. It sounds positively dystopian. What is the worth of civilization and growth if the end result is schools churning out obedient robots who don’t know a thing about society or themselves…
It's generally accepted now that "could care less" actually means the same as "couldn't care less." In fact, no one would use the phrase "could care less" in its original meaning.
So this was fine. Just like "irregardless" means "regardless." But, for the love of all that is holy, don't use "reticent" to mean "reluctant." This is the hill I will die on.
I wouldn't use that as a measure since most students couldn't care less about most classes at the time they take them, but still retain snippets of what they were exposed to, which they can use as a basis for exploration in the future.
We had required economics and government classes too, and they were some of my favorite classes that I retained a ton of info from. Every student is different!
Matt can step in and correct any of us if he wants, but I think that's an uncharitable read of his take. The way I'd steelman it is that as long as you can get students learning the 3 Rs with whatever material engages them the most, then that's what matters the most--and the material is likely to differ for each student.
I am deeply sceptical of “civics education” and “teaching critical thinking”.
IME what people really mean is that we could get the policy outcomes we want (eventually) if schools can sufficiently brainwash students to agree with us.
That’s not the role of public education and it wouldn’t work even if it was.
Democracy in a nutshell
This is the elitist attitude that gets populists elected.
But they are sufficiently disengaged that they probably would not PUNISH a politician that wanted to be a less wrong thing.
Did Schumer make the calculation and say, "Darn, We really ought to just subsidize the CO2 voided rather than the investment in CO2 avoidance, but it will lose us 4 purple state Senators!"
Or Biden, "Sorry about that LNG "pause" but Michigan and Pennsylvania will swing to Trump if I don't do it."
Both have acted as if they were expecting a tight election against a DSA candidate.
Don’t subsidize CO2 avoided, you get a “paying for snakes” problem. (Taxing emissions is great, the center left has just been yelling that it’s politically impossible for all of the 2010s).
Sure! I'm the Internet's #1 commentator about taxing net emissions of CO2.
But within the world of the IRA, it is worse to subsidize the investment what if it works as planned will avoid CO2 emissions and better to subsidize the zero CO2 energy produced or stored.
The center left should have been using its energy to persuade other to tax net emissions rante tha explain why it is not yet politically feasible.
No one except Slow Boring commenters cares about the LNG pause. To restate: if anything comes of it, it would be to lower natural gas prices to American customers.
[Imagine "There are dozens of us! Dozens!" animated GIF here]
Enough to properly train Gemini, if they would give us the chace. :)
However many people care, it is an example of bad policy making.
We should have figured out that restricting export of fossil fuels to reduce prices domestically is mistake back in the '70's. That some of the costs in the cost benefit analysis are externalities does not fundamentally alter the analysis.
I think you’re under valuing the way plain old well off people benefit from the government system you’ve described so well. They’re the ones who have the resources to identify and take advantage of all the veto points.
I would add that the experiences of UK and US show the very real downsides of the adversarial system of justice that exists in places that rely on UK common law system. Much easier for even one person to weaponize the "heckler's veto". I don't think it's a mistake that the places with worst housing issues are UK, US, Australia and Canada. It's also a wierd consequence of our societies getting richer; even regular middle class people can either on their own or with a handful of neighbors come up with the money for lawyers to gum up the works
Aren't the UK, US, Australia, and Canada also the most popular immigrant destinations by virtue of being the richest English-speaking countries?
Big confounding variable there.
Then look at New Zealand, which has the similar common law structure but is significantly less economically attractive (they've got a diaspora population of over 10% their total population and a fairly consistent net migration loss, mostly to Australia).
And yet even with a net migration loss (mostly of people who would have high incomes if they stayed) they STILL have a housing crisis.
I think I am probably two sigma more NIMBY than the median Slow Borer (notably, still probably not NIMBY relative to the median voter). But preserving agriculture next to a major metro as an *achievement*--that's just fucking bonkers.
I've noted one reason this sentiment exists; "the cult of the trad" I called it or you can say this sentimentalizing of pastoralism. But there's another even more basic reason this happens in "blue" cities and neighborhoods. A heuristic error that equates more nature with environmentalism. More farms, more trees and more green stuff = more environmentally friendly. The problem is on a micro level this is very possibly true. This community given how small it is and how little traffic can come through (due to the lack of bridge) probably does contribute less pollution or to global warming than a lot of inner ring suburbs with more multifamily development. But net effect on a macro level is more pollution as people end up having to live farther out from DC in outer ring exurbs and commute farther to the office (or drive farther to the grocery store, or drug store or soccer practice etc.).
From Matt’s article it sounds like much of this is less like pure farming and more like tourist-friendly show or semi-show farms (which, to be clear, are great).
Matt insists there’s a big conceptual difference between privately owned concerns doing this and public parks, but from a pragmatic perspective….is there? Both require monies to support (whether taxes or entry fees or donations / trust moneys) and it’s not as if public amenities never charge admission (museums, the Central Park Zoo). Sustainably-run privately administered apple picking orchards are in one sense subsidizing a particular person’s private enterprise instead of a libertarian land use regime or for some reason trying to get the state to run it (color me skeptical) but it’s not like they charge Disneyland prices to pick apples. The terminal benefit to the residents and visitors is that there’s a showfarm / apple orchard, regardless of whether privately or publicly run.
All us -2.2 Sigma NIMBY's RISE UP!!!
I strongly recommend fooling around on the hud site for permitting data. https://socds.huduser.gov/permits/
The thing you'll notice quickly is that jurisdictions that allow a lot of infill also tend to add sprawl. While jurisdictions that block sprawl block multi-family housing. In other words the battle is between pro-housing forces and anti-housing forces rather than people who want housing on the fringe vs people who want housing in the core.
I think this frustrates a lot of urbanists (FWIW I've lived in cities for 20 years) who think suburbia and sprawl is harmful on a varitey of fronts. The case against suburbia is strong on a climate perspective but frankly banning suburbia hits me as about as politically feasible as banning heterosexual sex.
Given that it makes much more sense for people who want infill housing to partner with people who want sprawl housing rather than try to convert nimby-urbanites into loving development.
Yes!!!!
Just want to say that I really like the structure of this article, and would like to see more of this if practical. It was a genuine description of the nitty gritty details of a place in America that I hadn't heard of before facing problems that America as a whole faces. So much preferable over the sappy, ill informed "let's go visit the provinces" articles that the New York Times publishes. Keep up the good work!
"When I was a kid and New York City was dramatically cheaper than it is today, it was a real refuge for LGBT people and others who didn’t fit in wherever they came from. The city has only become *even more* progressive in its official stances and attitudes since then, but successful efforts to hold off 'development pressure' have made it dramatically less accessible in practice."
The idea behind these two sentences should be expanded into a book
And call it “The Rent is too Damn High,” maybe.
But it's a slightly different concept, isn't it?
Think of all the effort that goes into performing liberal policies in places where they weren't being challenged in any case (making New York City infinitesimally more gay-friendly, or what have you). It's not any more effective than city councils calling for a ceasefire in Palestine.
The one thing the performative stances don't do is allow more people to live in progressive areas... except in the case of immigration/sanctuary, and as someone just pointed out here, they aren't really doing that either. Even illegal immigrants need housing!
I would love to live near other SB commenters and invite them to dinner parties. But the rent is too damn high!
I miss dinner parties. I used to have, and attend, a lot of them. Then it just sort of stopped. Planning a menu that people will eat and getting them to commit to an event became too difficult.
If there are DC- or Ann Arbor-area SBers who like eating and (in a friendly fashion) arguing, I'm here to host it!
People should take a leaf from Chinese culture and do their entertaining in restaurants, which is a custom that developed when everyone was still in tiny state-owned apartments and has persisted even though they have more space now. We need an Abundance Agenda to get rid of this cooking-for-ten-friends nonsense.
"We need an Abundance Agenda to get rid of this cooking-for-ten-friends nonsense."
There are two problems with dinner parties: finding (and paying for) the space to host them, and the time spent cooking food for them. The former is much more intractable. I know some people very dear to me who held multiple dinner parties where the food was replated Chinese takeout. It went fantastically.
I was on the YIMBYtown organizing committee, and we explicitly chose to lean into the nonpartisan nature of the movement. I wrote about some of the skepticism here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/building-a-bigger-tent
As a blue island in a sea of red, no meaningful state-level reform will happen in Texas without a coalition, so for us, expanding the tent is both the practical thing to do, but also the right thing to do in America's second most populous state.
Good for you.
The YIMBY argument would be more palatable if it were limited to prosperous urban areas. New York City and the Bay are engines of economic dynamism. They boast some of the best professional opportunities in the world. Policies that price out ambitious young people curtail economic opportunities and growth. Such policies hurt the national economy.
Restricting access to Poolesville has far fewer downsides. It will not make the next generation of AI harder to develop. It will not keep anyone from getting a job at a big investment bank or tech company. It will let affluent white people live in a cozy, bucolic space unmolested by too many downscale neighbors.
I would happily upzone the shit out of Atlanta and the near north side. Let the young graduates money bring their energy and ambition. Let them have orderly public spaces and vagrant-free transit. But let me enjoy the fruits of my industry in an attractive bedroom community with good schools and well behaved children.
>The YIMBY argument would be more palatable if it were limited to prosperous urban areas. New York City and the Bay are engines of economic dynamism....Restricting access to Poolesville has far fewer downsides<
I'm somewhat open to this line of reasoning, but Montgomery County is a core constituent of a rich and productive metropolis of ten million souls. Maybe if Yglesias staged a successful coup he'd consider implementing strong YIMBY rules in, say, our 100 largest metros. And leave the rest of our national territory (I'd bet more than 80% of its land area) alone.
This reminds me of the Steph Curry brouhaha a year or so ago: he not surprisingly (and really, not unreasonably) came out as being opposed to an apartment complex proposal close to his home in Atherton, California (you know, the most expensive town in the richest metropolis in history). I totally don't blame him. But the San Francisco Bay CSA is home to nearly ten million people. If you want monastic silence, buy 900 acres miles from nowhere and build a house there. NIMBYism in our metros just causes a shitload of highly negative, downstream effects.
Montogimery County is huge. It’s eastern portions should be YIMBY land. If you want to gore some rich oxen, Potomac is close enough to DC to be a reasonable commute, upzone it. However, upzoning anything more than 12 (15?) miles from the Capitol is overkill.
Also, there’s plenty of affordable housing in PG county. You just have to be ok living near blacks people and the schools aren’t great. There’s no reason childless workers (and empty nesters) can’t live in PG.
"upzoning anything more than 12 (15?) miles from the Capitol is overkill."
And have to re-fight the NIMBY/YIMBY battles again in three generations when the size of DC has decupled?
Isn't the point that Matt makes fairly often is that if you upzoned all of it, then you would mild increases of density in most of it, but only significant increases in a small areas.
The thing is, "upzone the place near me whose leaders I don't get to vote on" is not on offer and never will be. There's nobody to decide which towns get to enjoy stasis and which don't.
There is this cool thing called a state government. Atlanta gets pissed on all the time in the general assembly. The Rs would have more shit to tax if they rammed through some urban up zoning.
More power to them if they do that. In practice this depends on Republicans being willing to steer some of that new revenue to urban schools and transit, and I'll believe that when I see it.
Metro Atlanta has been subsidizing rural Georgia for decades. Georgia has a reasonably stiff income tax with very few deductions. Basically, 6% of what urban professionals own gets spread fairly evenly across what is still a mostly under developed state.
I may happen somewhere sometime, but I suspect the marginal "development" will not attract families with ill-behaved children that will ruin the local schools. And it sure will produce more city revenue to improve policing and (if money would help) education.
We have plenty of revenue. My city spends 2 million a year on festivals and 19 million on the police, despite having very low crime and a fine county sheriffs department.
“…19 million on the police, despite having very low crime…”
“Fox Butterfield, is that you?”
Well I can see why more development is not a priority for you.
Nah...the whole state of CA is basically Poolesville on steroids..it's a systemic problem.
We want to build more homes but there's very little available land left where people would like to be, so we're limited to infill development which is very hard to do at all and almost impossible to do at scale.
Dig deeper and you find out that mandatory ag zoning is a far far bigger culprit than SFH zoning.. you could build tons of houses where those apple orchards now sit, just like around San Francisco to the north, east and south there are millions of acres dedicated to almonds, olives and wine grapes..
Would that urban areas were YIMBY...
I appreciate your candor! As someone that would love to upzone his own cozy community, are there any incentives that could induce you to accept growth? Modest growth with strict limits?
People freak out when I say land value tax, so how about "property tax discount for neighborhoods that upzone." That way, neighborhoods that want to NIMBY can still do it, they're just leaving money on the table.
This article is spot on. I really love living in Maryland, but the anti-growth mentality is severely handicapping us.
My closest friends and I all grew up here and would love to stay, but as we are graduating college and entering the early stages of our career, housing costs are a consistent pressure to relocate. I and a lot of others are living in their parent's home (which have increased in value 40% in 10 years) to start their careers. It's a drag on happiness and growth and could really hurt the state long-term if many young people start to relocate. Hopefully, Moore can continue to push harder for abundance and local leaders follow suit.
40%? Luxury! Try New Zealand, where property doubles every ten years across the entire country. A small lot to build a house on in the outskirts of a medium city costs $350,000!
In conversations with both friends and random normies, I’ve found that a lot of people believe that they personally, and people like them generally, are not going to benefit from either local or national economic growth. They also think they’ll suffer from the negative externalities of new or expanded economic activity.
This is really sad, and it’s a major obstacle to pro-growth policy. Unfortunately, I think that it’s often more true than we pro-growth types would like to admit— new economic activity does often produce negative externalities, and its benefits are often very concentrated. I suspect that part of the answer to this challenge is finding some way to explicitly transfer some of the surplus to give more people a material interest in the pro-growth policy change.
We are also extremely bad at compensating those who pay a price. The Purple Line has now turned part of Silver Spring into a construction zone for more than 6 years, and won't be finished until late 2027 at a mimumum. affected businesses have been left to twirl in a morass of busted streets.
>I’ve found that a lot of people believe that they personally, and people like them generally, are not going to benefit from either local or national economic growth.<
In some cases they may be right, especially in blue metros. If you're a homeowner in, say, San Mateo County, chances are you're not doing terrible in terms of personal finances. You've got yours, in other words. I think I get why calculus involving national well-being makes people's eyes glaze over in such cases.
It’s not just the upper middlers either. A lot of middle class-and-lower people think that the upper-middle-and-up group captures all of the benefits of growth.