Thank you for including Kevin Erdmann's analysis. I recently started reading his posts, and I'm starting to believe his analysis so much about the last 15 years include the drop in marriage and children to the election of Trump as well as the reason lower income families are struggling even with higher pay. It feels so much like an unseen key I'm almost leery of it. I would love there to be a real debate about it. If he's right, the government/financial sector unwittingly created deep economic and wiped out assets for many lower income people because they misread the cause of some of the house price inflation leading up to 2007.
As Trump illustrates, the guiding principle of the US right is that anything the left proposes must be opposed. So, there is little point in pursuing bipartisan initiatives here. Fortunately, most of the big constraints are in Blue states and cities, so the objective ought to be to find ways of bringing left-NIMBYs on board
Unless Mahmoud has _specific_ proposals, it's going to be hard to push back against Preston given the latter's support from the "machine" (although how can the mayor _not_ be part of the machine).
With specific proposals, voters could push back on Preston to drop the "100 percent below market-rate housing is acceptable" policy in favor of effective proposals.
I think he addressed it because it’s (1) probably the most important issue in distributive justice, (2) something that should be genuinely bipartisan because deregulation *must* be the core, and (3) YIMBYs are a good faction to boost within the DP.
I really think the third is underrated. All the YIMBYs I’ve ever talked much to are much more normie Dems or even moderates on everything but housing. So, boosting the YIMBY faction is a way to boost moderation while not having to directly call for moderation.
A bureacuratic point of correction: "Federal Housing Administration’s oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" should be "Federal Housing *Finance Agency*".
I really don’t think that’s the real force behind even “left” NIMBYism—I think a lot of it is actual sentimentality about preserving the environment people grew up in, or at least the way things were when they first moved to whatever area it is. It’s rebelling against realizing that you’re old and things have changed, which is tough but just a fact of life that people need to learn to make peace with. And then there is also fact (that we pretend not to care about) that owning a scarce resource makes you richer as demand rises and pushes up the price of that resource—we have a system now where people tend to regard a house as a pension fund, which means people are deeply invested (literally) in the value of their property.
The expiring tax cuts offer a path to meaningful federal housing reform: grant the coastal Dems' demand of restoring SALT, conditional on residence in one of 1) An MSA (or rural county) that is not rent burdened; 2) An MSA (or rural county) that has seen at least 2% annualized population growth over the past 20 years; or 3) An MSA (or rural county) that has approved - not just zoned for - enough new permits over the past 5 years to facilitate 1% annualized growth over the next 5 years.
In a nutshell, you basically are creating a meaningful cash incentive to upper-middle-class households in coastal cities to actively support the construction of new housing, and you offset the reduction in potential home value appreciation they might experience as home prices stabilize. You'd see the local politics on the issue change real quick in that scenario.
Bonus: you get people to start thinking of where they live in terms of metropolitan areas instead of their fragmented municipality.
Matt couldn’t high speed rail solve a lot of housing problems, wouldn’t alot of opportunitiy open up if someone could live in NY but work in Philly where housing is cheaper.
I'm sure that there are some rail projects in the US that would ease housing affordability by effectively creating new space that's temporally close to a city but not currently crowded.
But I am wildly dubious that there are a lot of them or that they're a major component of any housing solution in any medium-term. Rail projects are like catnip to liberals and they're prone to massively overestimating the impact of rail or the degree to which people like them.
Rail projects in, say, Europe benefit from, first, massively higher population densities, second, connecting into extremely developed rail systems that lower the issue of taking high speed rail somewhere and then being stranded there, and third, being inherently lower-cost to build because Europe is poorer than the US. Also probably more functional rail development institutions on both the public and private side.
I do worry about this issue getting too much attention. People will literally turn away vaccines if they feel they are opposite party coded.
Given the limited policy levers of the president and very visible federal politicians maybe it's best if they just kept quiet. If this becomes a partisan issue we are totally screwed.
I agree, and I feel that this is an underrated problem. I regularly remind YIMBYs that we must avoid anything that even looks like banning low-density housing.
My best idea is stressing the "freedom to build" view.
If someone wants to buy up a block of skyscrapers to raze and replace with one detached single-family home surrounded by well-watered grass, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to react to the apartment building down the street by surrounding their house with a 12' wall topped with barbed wire, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to cover their front lawn with permeable pavers to park their cars on because street parking became more competitive, that should be allowed.
"Donald Trump can sound unhinged, telling frequent lies and rejecting basic democratic traditions. Yet millions of Americans — including more voters of color than in the past — support him. Why do you think so many people are frustrated enough that they find Trump appealing?"
I stared at that question and realized that I must be very stupid, because after *years* of that man being a daily fixture of our political landscape, I still don't know the answer to the question!
I don't know if I accept the premise that people must be voting for Trump because they're frustrated. But what else is there?
Please, fellow commenters: can you answer this question for me? Explain it to me like I'm a child. Pretend I'm a time traveler from the year 2014, when, if you had told me, "a sitting president will incite a riot to storm the Capitol to try to hold onto power, and in the next election cycle he will enjoy the support of almost half the country," I would have asked what drugs you were on. How has he not been completely destroyed by the events of Jan 6?
And please don't say "well he's the Republican so of course Republicans would vote for him." There was a primary, Republican voters had the chance to pick Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Doug Burgum, or - God help them - Vivek Ramaswamy, or several other candidates I forget. And they overwhelmingly picked Trump.
What is the ratio of "I don't like Trump but Democrats are worse" to "I have vague memories of the cost of living being lower under Trump" to "Trump is God's anointed servant" to "I vote for Trump because he's a real macho man who makes woke libruls cry" to "he won the primary and I'm a Republican so of course I will vote for him" to "I want low taxes and for abortion to be banned" to ???
Many people associate leadership traits with a general level of narcissism and assholery. See Steve Jobs for instance. So all the things that turn a lot of us off about Trump -- the swaggering, the flamboyance, the braggadocious-ness, the lies and the aggressive zero-sum mentality -- are not things that turn a bunch of people off. "Hell, every politician lies, cheats and gets rich" is something I've heard over and over.
Combine that with Trump's plausible deniability that he wasn't there, didn't directly encourage the violence and the general backdrop of violent protests being excused away during BLM and they just don't see that day as anything other than some wackos who got out of hand. His supporters pooh-pooh away the more troubling ways he tried to steal the election with fake electors, unethical calls for "more votes" and irrational requests for Pence to do something to stop the count. They just see his tenure being one where all the forces were against him -- media, academia, cultural leaders, the "dark state" -- and yet the country did well and there weren't wars all over the place.
As a Floridian who golfs, I have a number of friends who buy into some or all of the explanations above. Most (but not all) of them will concede that he is kinda unhinged and too irrational and too lazy to follow through on much of anything. But their disdain for those who look down on them is too great to see the damage he does to the Country and also their Party.
I’m familiar with the cultural divide. The part I struggle with the feeling that they are looked down on apart from them simply being considered wrong.
Take iPhone vs Android was group looks down on the other for being wrong. But your comment seems to indicate something else is at work.
It feels like a Zen koan: "By disdaining Trump's supporters, I make them more likely to double down on supporting Trump; yet I feel like I can't help but disdain them for supporting that utter dumpster fire of a human being."
It reminds me of that quote by one of the Founding Fathers (Madison?). "Is there no virtue among us? If there be none, then we are in a wretched situation." As the Founding Fathers said, democracy is based on the assumption that people are basically decent and good and hence demand a certain level of decency and goodness in their elected leaders. Where does that leave us?
Sometimes I feel like an embedded reporter sending stories back from Trumplandia. I'm outnumbered about 5:1 in my group of golfing buddies, so I feel like I have a better understanding of how one slice of Trump voters think. Honestly, I don't disdain them at all -- I think they are wrong, but they are honest men, good fathers and generally successful business people.
"Sometimes I feel like an embedded reporter sending stories back from Trumplandia."
I appreciate your contributions!
"Honestly, I don't disdain them at all -- I think they are wrong, but they are honest men, good fathers and generally successful business people."
Look, I get it. There's a guy in my dojo who I'm pretty sure is a Trump supporter based on his choice of bumper stickers (no direct references to Trump, thank Cthulhu, but very right-wing-coded words). He's a good guy! He's a tough fighter and he's generous with his time helping lower-ranking people like me. I don't want to think badly of him.
Just... uhhhh... How do I say this without sounding judgment- elit- oh f**k it, here goes:
History is chock-full of decent men who loved their wives/children/dogs and worked hard and paid their taxes and either actively supported or ignored abuses or outright atrocities that were done against *those other people over there*. Democracy is a precious and fragile thing. I feel very, very strongly about this. I was born on the far side of the Iron Curtain, in a country that had been conquered first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets, who occupied us for four decades. I remember, when I was a child, the first free elections in my native country since before WWII. People were literally weeping with joy.
And now, Americans are ok with handing their country to a would-be autocrat who tried to overturn an election, and I'm supposed to just shrug and say, eh, it's totes cool, because they are nice husbands and fathers and would help me if I had a flat tire?
I'm sorry. I can't do this. I just can't. I don't think such people are somehow inherently bad and I don't wish them ill. I just, I don't know, I want to shake them and shout at them, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!? HOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY DO YOU THINK THIS IS OKAY!?!?
I don't know. I just don't know anymore. If people can't see that Trump is utterly, completely unfit to be POTUS, what else is left to say?
It comes down to this: you (and I, mostly) believe the risk associated with Trump is greater than they do. Not that they embrace the risky outcome.
To analogize" Some climate change activists believe -- truly, deeply believe -- that climate change is an existential risk to humanity. That we as a species will not have a planet capable of supporting life if we continue to burn fossil fuels. So they look at anyone who doesn't share their risk analysis in a way that is similar to how you are describing Trump supporters. "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?" they say if you don't join them on the front lines of every decarbonization plan.
When my colleague on a work slack channel exhorts everyone to register to vote because "no election in our lifetimes has ever been more critical than the upcoming November election", it makes me more inclined to vote for Trump (ever so slightly*). So for many, it's a vote against certain types of people, whether it be a hypocritical celebrity or an annoying person in HR. Of course, if I spent more time around loud-mouthed Trump supporters, I would probably want to vote for Harris just to vote against *them*.
*To be clear, I'm as coconut-pilled as they come; I'm just expressing some of the gut instincts I can get at times.
"I really dislike nerds so I will vote for the would-be arsonist of American democracy to spite them" is.... well, it certainly is a political position one could take, but it's one I don't understand and will never understand.
Donald Trump was president in 2020. That's the thing, Donald Trump was president in 2020. If he thought arson was bad, maybe he should have given a transformative speech, flown around the country meeting with BLM protesters and promising he understood their anger, made statements about how every American has the right to protest but those protests should never extend to violence, etc., etc.
It was his watch! Donald Trump was president. It infuriates me that he gets to skate on all responsibility.
One reason the "Only build affordable housing" politicians do so well is that there are plenty of conservatives and NIMBYs who do, in fact, actually realize that this means "In practice nothing gets built" and they see this is as a feature, not a bug.
So they get all the dumb progressives to vote for them while dog whistling to the rich NIMBYs who just want to keep living in their exclusive neighborhoods.
They aren't so much tricking the dumb progressives as delivering exactly what those voters want. Those voters see the kind of capitalism practiced by big corporate landlords in SF as morally objectionable and -- like generations of people who adopt uncompromising pacifism -- they prefer not to sully themselves by being complicit in that trade than to reduce the harms.
It's the same phenomenon you see with respect to progressives and sweat shops in the 3rd world where people would often prefer to buy from rich countries rather than feel they support those awful practices even if this nets out to making the conditions in those countries worse. Or all the people in tech who refuse to work on either facial recognition or military projects even if the net effect is likely to be that the same tech gets built with fewer safeguards. And the right is just as guilty when it comes to things like needle exchanges or useful sexual advice.
It's just a general -- and very sad -- truth about human nature. Our innate moral instincts often mean we would rather avoid feeling involved with awful practices than be involved and make them a bit less awful.
There are a bunch of progressives who truly do want to build a bunch of cheap housing. They think this can be done by waving the magic affordable housing wand. This is what I mean by "dumb".
The ones you describe who do not want anything built because they don't want anyone to profit are less dumb, they just have extremist views. I think these people are pretty well aware that "only affordable housing" means "no new housing".
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There is alot of preference falsification/reshapomg going on here.
Yes I agree there are absolutely those people who really want housing. But my experience living in the bay area was that there were enough of those extremists you mentioned that those people didn't want to get called corporate shills or the like.
And people aren't robots, it's really hard to say one thing when your friends ask or when you have a dinner party while secretly planning to vote otherwise. So basically they get bullied into saying they support all those absurd 100% affordable demands (from a combination of extremists and nimbys who find that position convenient) and most people would rather just change their beliefs and deal with the internal tension than either be socially isolated (either because they are shunned or bc they are constantly consciously lying).
This is how you get this kind of shit happening in Berkeley (it's getting better now) and being supported by leading academics who may have many flaws but aren't dumb. Social pressure is very effective in convincing people to believe things.
Contra Matt, I think the cases he cites here -- Obama, Harris, the HOME Act, etc -- are in fact *bad* for the YIMBY cause.
We can point to, but don't need to emphasize, the fact that the federal government has few tools to address this form of the housing crisis. It's a state and local matter, especially when it comes to zoning and other restrictive regulations. The federal government can do its usual thing of attaching millions of mandates to its outlays but in the end the juiciest targets (the richest states and cities) will forego those funds before being forced to accept new regulations that they otherwise don't want.
But here's the real reason.
Matt talks a lot about the Secret Congress. Ezra Klein has written perceptively about how anytime the President dives into an issue, it becomes polarized and the chances of success go down. So here. Since the federal government has little practical power on the issue, all these types of things will do is to polarize the population. Everyone will retreat to their camps and the kind of bipartisan coalitions that Matt talks about here will become impossible to put together.
The YIMBY cause is making steady progress (there's that "slow boring of hard boards" thing again). Trying the short cut of having Congress and the White House set policy or at least define the terms of debate may be a sugar high but if anything will set the cause back. Obama, Harris: don't just do something, shut up.
Personally I would love it if a bipartisan group of congresspeople wrote a bill that explicitly named the hated-by-the-right cities of NYC, SF, LA, and Boston as the jurisdictions whose governments Uncle Same would own. Maybe we could even have a federal agency (exempt from local zoning!) buy land, build high-rises, sell them to the highest bidders, and generally run roughshod over the local Dems. But Democratic caucus leadership probably wouldn't allow that (Hakeem Jeffries - NYC, Kathleen Clark - Boston).
Pull a Squamish Nation in Vancouver BC, and get the BIA to buy some off reservation trust land in super urban areas to tribes to build housing on, and tell the NIMBYs to eat shit.
My mom lives in Vancouver and she hates the Squamish Nation building project. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I think it’s great to build more housing in Vancouver to meet demand!
Not only great to build housing, but a critical way to keep the Squamish Nation financially independent and allow their tribe more autonomy. I really think this project is so, so cool.
I am not sure about the specific narrative in the Erdmann piece, but it raises something worth thinking about, which is that a housing regulation system prioritizing owner occupancy and one prioritizing limiting credit risk are in tension. (Of course, this is just one of several ways that bundling together the consumption component and investment component of housing leads to misallocation of capital.)
Of course we currently are deep in Pelosi's debt for her incredible actions in July, but gosh why does she have to create a dynasty? Give the seat to Wiener (Unless we can put him in HUD instead)! There are few people more deserving of a house seat in the country!
Tru, but sooner or later the man deserves a promotion. A world in which being great means you never advance is bad. And hopefully he has been building up a replacement. Don’t know if there’s precedent for such a jump from state senator, but surely he could do great things at HUD
Thanks for pointing people to Kevin Erdmann's analyses -- his stuff needs a wider readership!
Thank you for including Kevin Erdmann's analysis. I recently started reading his posts, and I'm starting to believe his analysis so much about the last 15 years include the drop in marriage and children to the election of Trump as well as the reason lower income families are struggling even with higher pay. It feels so much like an unseen key I'm almost leery of it. I would love there to be a real debate about it. If he's right, the government/financial sector unwittingly created deep economic and wiped out assets for many lower income people because they misread the cause of some of the house price inflation leading up to 2007.
That should read "explains so much about the last 15 years including"
As Trump illustrates, the guiding principle of the US right is that anything the left proposes must be opposed. So, there is little point in pursuing bipartisan initiatives here. Fortunately, most of the big constraints are in Blue states and cities, so the objective ought to be to find ways of bringing left-NIMBYs on board
Unless Mahmoud has _specific_ proposals, it's going to be hard to push back against Preston given the latter's support from the "machine" (although how can the mayor _not_ be part of the machine).
With specific proposals, voters could push back on Preston to drop the "100 percent below market-rate housing is acceptable" policy in favor of effective proposals.
I think he addressed it because it’s (1) probably the most important issue in distributive justice, (2) something that should be genuinely bipartisan because deregulation *must* be the core, and (3) YIMBYs are a good faction to boost within the DP.
I really think the third is underrated. All the YIMBYs I’ve ever talked much to are much more normie Dems or even moderates on everything but housing. So, boosting the YIMBY faction is a way to boost moderation while not having to directly call for moderation.
A bureacuratic point of correction: "Federal Housing Administration’s oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" should be "Federal Housing *Finance Agency*".
I really don’t think that’s the real force behind even “left” NIMBYism—I think a lot of it is actual sentimentality about preserving the environment people grew up in, or at least the way things were when they first moved to whatever area it is. It’s rebelling against realizing that you’re old and things have changed, which is tough but just a fact of life that people need to learn to make peace with. And then there is also fact (that we pretend not to care about) that owning a scarce resource makes you richer as demand rises and pushes up the price of that resource—we have a system now where people tend to regard a house as a pension fund, which means people are deeply invested (literally) in the value of their property.
The expiring tax cuts offer a path to meaningful federal housing reform: grant the coastal Dems' demand of restoring SALT, conditional on residence in one of 1) An MSA (or rural county) that is not rent burdened; 2) An MSA (or rural county) that has seen at least 2% annualized population growth over the past 20 years; or 3) An MSA (or rural county) that has approved - not just zoned for - enough new permits over the past 5 years to facilitate 1% annualized growth over the next 5 years.
In a nutshell, you basically are creating a meaningful cash incentive to upper-middle-class households in coastal cities to actively support the construction of new housing, and you offset the reduction in potential home value appreciation they might experience as home prices stabilize. You'd see the local politics on the issue change real quick in that scenario.
Bonus: you get people to start thinking of where they live in terms of metropolitan areas instead of their fragmented municipality.
Matt couldn’t high speed rail solve a lot of housing problems, wouldn’t alot of opportunitiy open up if someone could live in NY but work in Philly where housing is cheaper.
I'm sure that there are some rail projects in the US that would ease housing affordability by effectively creating new space that's temporally close to a city but not currently crowded.
But I am wildly dubious that there are a lot of them or that they're a major component of any housing solution in any medium-term. Rail projects are like catnip to liberals and they're prone to massively overestimating the impact of rail or the degree to which people like them.
Rail projects in, say, Europe benefit from, first, massively higher population densities, second, connecting into extremely developed rail systems that lower the issue of taking high speed rail somewhere and then being stranded there, and third, being inherently lower-cost to build because Europe is poorer than the US. Also probably more functional rail development institutions on both the public and private side.
I agree that it could-- look at how (even without high-speed rail) many people commute into Chicago and NYC from far-flung suburbs.
The problem is building the rail. The US just has too many veto points and requires too much coordination.
I do worry about this issue getting too much attention. People will literally turn away vaccines if they feel they are opposite party coded.
Given the limited policy levers of the president and very visible federal politicians maybe it's best if they just kept quiet. If this becomes a partisan issue we are totally screwed.
I agree, and I feel that this is an underrated problem. I regularly remind YIMBYs that we must avoid anything that even looks like banning low-density housing.
My best idea is stressing the "freedom to build" view.
If someone wants to buy up a block of skyscrapers to raze and replace with one detached single-family home surrounded by well-watered grass, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to react to the apartment building down the street by surrounding their house with a 12' wall topped with barbed wire, that should be allowed.
If someone wants to cover their front lawn with permeable pavers to park their cars on because street parking became more competitive, that should be allowed.
Mostly agree...not sure about barbed wire though. Not too much an issue on a 12 foot wall but it poses some safety dangers.
Totally off-topic, but likely of interest: The NYT has published a list of 21 questions they want to ask Kamala Harris. Most of the questions are very good; here is the link https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/27/briefing/21-questions-for-harris.html
And then there's this:
"Donald Trump can sound unhinged, telling frequent lies and rejecting basic democratic traditions. Yet millions of Americans — including more voters of color than in the past — support him. Why do you think so many people are frustrated enough that they find Trump appealing?"
I stared at that question and realized that I must be very stupid, because after *years* of that man being a daily fixture of our political landscape, I still don't know the answer to the question!
I don't know if I accept the premise that people must be voting for Trump because they're frustrated. But what else is there?
Please, fellow commenters: can you answer this question for me? Explain it to me like I'm a child. Pretend I'm a time traveler from the year 2014, when, if you had told me, "a sitting president will incite a riot to storm the Capitol to try to hold onto power, and in the next election cycle he will enjoy the support of almost half the country," I would have asked what drugs you were on. How has he not been completely destroyed by the events of Jan 6?
And please don't say "well he's the Republican so of course Republicans would vote for him." There was a primary, Republican voters had the chance to pick Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Doug Burgum, or - God help them - Vivek Ramaswamy, or several other candidates I forget. And they overwhelmingly picked Trump.
What is the ratio of "I don't like Trump but Democrats are worse" to "I have vague memories of the cost of living being lower under Trump" to "Trump is God's anointed servant" to "I vote for Trump because he's a real macho man who makes woke libruls cry" to "he won the primary and I'm a Republican so of course I will vote for him" to "I want low taxes and for abortion to be banned" to ???
Many people associate leadership traits with a general level of narcissism and assholery. See Steve Jobs for instance. So all the things that turn a lot of us off about Trump -- the swaggering, the flamboyance, the braggadocious-ness, the lies and the aggressive zero-sum mentality -- are not things that turn a bunch of people off. "Hell, every politician lies, cheats and gets rich" is something I've heard over and over.
Combine that with Trump's plausible deniability that he wasn't there, didn't directly encourage the violence and the general backdrop of violent protests being excused away during BLM and they just don't see that day as anything other than some wackos who got out of hand. His supporters pooh-pooh away the more troubling ways he tried to steal the election with fake electors, unethical calls for "more votes" and irrational requests for Pence to do something to stop the count. They just see his tenure being one where all the forces were against him -- media, academia, cultural leaders, the "dark state" -- and yet the country did well and there weren't wars all over the place.
As a Floridian who golfs, I have a number of friends who buy into some or all of the explanations above. Most (but not all) of them will concede that he is kinda unhinged and too irrational and too lazy to follow through on much of anything. But their disdain for those who look down on them is too great to see the damage he does to the Country and also their Party.
“ But their disdain for those who look down”
Who do they think looks down on them and why?
I'm confident you can use Google or ChatGPT to explore the cultural divides between the parties in our country.
I’m familiar with the cultural divide. The part I struggle with the feeling that they are looked down on apart from them simply being considered wrong.
Take iPhone vs Android was group looks down on the other for being wrong. But your comment seems to indicate something else is at work.
Thanks for the detailed comment, John.
It feels like a Zen koan: "By disdaining Trump's supporters, I make them more likely to double down on supporting Trump; yet I feel like I can't help but disdain them for supporting that utter dumpster fire of a human being."
It reminds me of that quote by one of the Founding Fathers (Madison?). "Is there no virtue among us? If there be none, then we are in a wretched situation." As the Founding Fathers said, democracy is based on the assumption that people are basically decent and good and hence demand a certain level of decency and goodness in their elected leaders. Where does that leave us?
Sometimes I feel like an embedded reporter sending stories back from Trumplandia. I'm outnumbered about 5:1 in my group of golfing buddies, so I feel like I have a better understanding of how one slice of Trump voters think. Honestly, I don't disdain them at all -- I think they are wrong, but they are honest men, good fathers and generally successful business people.
"Sometimes I feel like an embedded reporter sending stories back from Trumplandia."
I appreciate your contributions!
"Honestly, I don't disdain them at all -- I think they are wrong, but they are honest men, good fathers and generally successful business people."
Look, I get it. There's a guy in my dojo who I'm pretty sure is a Trump supporter based on his choice of bumper stickers (no direct references to Trump, thank Cthulhu, but very right-wing-coded words). He's a good guy! He's a tough fighter and he's generous with his time helping lower-ranking people like me. I don't want to think badly of him.
Just... uhhhh... How do I say this without sounding judgment- elit- oh f**k it, here goes:
History is chock-full of decent men who loved their wives/children/dogs and worked hard and paid their taxes and either actively supported or ignored abuses or outright atrocities that were done against *those other people over there*. Democracy is a precious and fragile thing. I feel very, very strongly about this. I was born on the far side of the Iron Curtain, in a country that had been conquered first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets, who occupied us for four decades. I remember, when I was a child, the first free elections in my native country since before WWII. People were literally weeping with joy.
And now, Americans are ok with handing their country to a would-be autocrat who tried to overturn an election, and I'm supposed to just shrug and say, eh, it's totes cool, because they are nice husbands and fathers and would help me if I had a flat tire?
I'm sorry. I can't do this. I just can't. I don't think such people are somehow inherently bad and I don't wish them ill. I just, I don't know, I want to shake them and shout at them, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!? HOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY DO YOU THINK THIS IS OKAY!?!?
I don't know. I just don't know anymore. If people can't see that Trump is utterly, completely unfit to be POTUS, what else is left to say?
It comes down to this: you (and I, mostly) believe the risk associated with Trump is greater than they do. Not that they embrace the risky outcome.
To analogize" Some climate change activists believe -- truly, deeply believe -- that climate change is an existential risk to humanity. That we as a species will not have a planet capable of supporting life if we continue to burn fossil fuels. So they look at anyone who doesn't share their risk analysis in a way that is similar to how you are describing Trump supporters. "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!?" they say if you don't join them on the front lines of every decarbonization plan.
When my colleague on a work slack channel exhorts everyone to register to vote because "no election in our lifetimes has ever been more critical than the upcoming November election", it makes me more inclined to vote for Trump (ever so slightly*). So for many, it's a vote against certain types of people, whether it be a hypocritical celebrity or an annoying person in HR. Of course, if I spent more time around loud-mouthed Trump supporters, I would probably want to vote for Harris just to vote against *them*.
*To be clear, I'm as coconut-pilled as they come; I'm just expressing some of the gut instincts I can get at times.
I think a lot of people really, really dislike nerds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfkJ-4iU25A
"I really dislike nerds so I will vote for the would-be arsonist of American democracy to spite them" is.... well, it certainly is a political position one could take, but it's one I don't understand and will never understand.
Well, I think there was a lot of arson about six months before the big thing you were thinking about, and the nerds told everyone it was fine.
Donald Trump was president in 2020. That's the thing, Donald Trump was president in 2020. If he thought arson was bad, maybe he should have given a transformative speech, flown around the country meeting with BLM protesters and promising he understood their anger, made statements about how every American has the right to protest but those protests should never extend to violence, etc., etc.
It was his watch! Donald Trump was president. It infuriates me that he gets to skate on all responsibility.
Good luck!
RE: San Francisco
One reason the "Only build affordable housing" politicians do so well is that there are plenty of conservatives and NIMBYs who do, in fact, actually realize that this means "In practice nothing gets built" and they see this is as a feature, not a bug.
So they get all the dumb progressives to vote for them while dog whistling to the rich NIMBYs who just want to keep living in their exclusive neighborhoods.
They aren't so much tricking the dumb progressives as delivering exactly what those voters want. Those voters see the kind of capitalism practiced by big corporate landlords in SF as morally objectionable and -- like generations of people who adopt uncompromising pacifism -- they prefer not to sully themselves by being complicit in that trade than to reduce the harms.
It's the same phenomenon you see with respect to progressives and sweat shops in the 3rd world where people would often prefer to buy from rich countries rather than feel they support those awful practices even if this nets out to making the conditions in those countries worse. Or all the people in tech who refuse to work on either facial recognition or military projects even if the net effect is likely to be that the same tech gets built with fewer safeguards. And the right is just as guilty when it comes to things like needle exchanges or useful sexual advice.
It's just a general -- and very sad -- truth about human nature. Our innate moral instincts often mean we would rather avoid feeling involved with awful practices than be involved and make them a bit less awful.
There are a bunch of progressives who truly do want to build a bunch of cheap housing. They think this can be done by waving the magic affordable housing wand. This is what I mean by "dumb".
The ones you describe who do not want anything built because they don't want anyone to profit are less dumb, they just have extremist views. I think these people are pretty well aware that "only affordable housing" means "no new housing".
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There is alot of preference falsification/reshapomg going on here.
Yes I agree there are absolutely those people who really want housing. But my experience living in the bay area was that there were enough of those extremists you mentioned that those people didn't want to get called corporate shills or the like.
And people aren't robots, it's really hard to say one thing when your friends ask or when you have a dinner party while secretly planning to vote otherwise. So basically they get bullied into saying they support all those absurd 100% affordable demands (from a combination of extremists and nimbys who find that position convenient) and most people would rather just change their beliefs and deal with the internal tension than either be socially isolated (either because they are shunned or bc they are constantly consciously lying).
This is how you get this kind of shit happening in Berkeley (it's getting better now) and being supported by leading academics who may have many flaws but aren't dumb. Social pressure is very effective in convincing people to believe things.
Contra Matt, I think the cases he cites here -- Obama, Harris, the HOME Act, etc -- are in fact *bad* for the YIMBY cause.
We can point to, but don't need to emphasize, the fact that the federal government has few tools to address this form of the housing crisis. It's a state and local matter, especially when it comes to zoning and other restrictive regulations. The federal government can do its usual thing of attaching millions of mandates to its outlays but in the end the juiciest targets (the richest states and cities) will forego those funds before being forced to accept new regulations that they otherwise don't want.
But here's the real reason.
Matt talks a lot about the Secret Congress. Ezra Klein has written perceptively about how anytime the President dives into an issue, it becomes polarized and the chances of success go down. So here. Since the federal government has little practical power on the issue, all these types of things will do is to polarize the population. Everyone will retreat to their camps and the kind of bipartisan coalitions that Matt talks about here will become impossible to put together.
The YIMBY cause is making steady progress (there's that "slow boring of hard boards" thing again). Trying the short cut of having Congress and the White House set policy or at least define the terms of debate may be a sugar high but if anything will set the cause back. Obama, Harris: don't just do something, shut up.
Personally I would love it if a bipartisan group of congresspeople wrote a bill that explicitly named the hated-by-the-right cities of NYC, SF, LA, and Boston as the jurisdictions whose governments Uncle Same would own. Maybe we could even have a federal agency (exempt from local zoning!) buy land, build high-rises, sell them to the highest bidders, and generally run roughshod over the local Dems. But Democratic caucus leadership probably wouldn't allow that (Hakeem Jeffries - NYC, Kathleen Clark - Boston).
Pull a Squamish Nation in Vancouver BC, and get the BIA to buy some off reservation trust land in super urban areas to tribes to build housing on, and tell the NIMBYs to eat shit.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/03/the-bold-new-plan-for-an-indigenous-led-development-in-vancouver
More useful than a land acknowledgement, for sure!
My mom lives in Vancouver and she hates the Squamish Nation building project. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I think it’s great to build more housing in Vancouver to meet demand!
Not only great to build housing, but a critical way to keep the Squamish Nation financially independent and allow their tribe more autonomy. I really think this project is so, so cool.
It's also so based--they did not give a flying fuck about what White people wanted them to care about.
“These aren’t indigenous ways of being!!!” scream white people at indigenous people any time they aren’t doing some Paleolithic tabula rasa cosplay.
I am not sure about the specific narrative in the Erdmann piece, but it raises something worth thinking about, which is that a housing regulation system prioritizing owner occupancy and one prioritizing limiting credit risk are in tension. (Of course, this is just one of several ways that bundling together the consumption component and investment component of housing leads to misallocation of capital.)
Of course we currently are deep in Pelosi's debt for her incredible actions in July, but gosh why does she have to create a dynasty? Give the seat to Wiener (Unless we can put him in HUD instead)! There are few people more deserving of a house seat in the country!
Is he term-limited out? Because if he isn't he is more useful in the legislature
He has one more four-year term, so he'd be giving up two years in Sacramento if Pelosi retires in 2026 and he wins.
Tru, but sooner or later the man deserves a promotion. A world in which being great means you never advance is bad. And hopefully he has been building up a replacement. Don’t know if there’s precedent for such a jump from state senator, but surely he could do great things at HUD
Mayor.