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As real life continues to contain a lot of stuff, my posting continues to be more occasional, so this is a twofer.
First, Ben Christopher for Calmatters, "Los Angeles’ one weird trick to build affordable housing at no public cost". (Part of an itinerant series on housing, mostly in California. Also at TheSchism.)
"Affordable housing" in California generally means deed-restricted subsidized housing, discussed in depth here. It involves specialized nonprofit developers, a "layer cake" of various granting agencies, a web of everything-bagel requirements from union-only labor to LEED Platinum that really add up.
In December of 2022, the Mayor of LA, Karen Bass, signed Executive Directive 1, which put a sixty-day approval timeline on 100% below-market rate project and skip the discretionary and environmental review processes, but without adding the usual everything-bagel requirements. These projects also get so-called "density bonus" concessions, which allow them to ignore or soften a variety of local restrictions on setbacks, density, height, and so on.
As a result, no public subsidy is needed, and the market just... produces these things.
More details from Benjamin Schrader here and from Luca Gattoni-Celli here. It's especially important because the Bay Area is planning on shoveling enormous amounts of public money at the problem (meme form here), and maybe there's another way.
The key thing here is to Voltron together "ministerial approval and sixty-day timeline" with "unlimited waivers and super density bonus", without sandbagging it somehow. As one of the developers in the article puts it: “To go from acquiring a lot to putting a shovel in the ground in less than a year is kind of unheard of.”
However, nothing good can last; this was accidental, kind of like the time Rhode Island legalized prostitution. David Zahniser for the Los Angeles Times, "Faced with community complaints, Mayor Karen Bass retools her affordable housing strategy".
The changes would exclude sites with twelve or more rent-controlled properties (regardless of residents' incomes), historic districts, and very high fire hazard severity zones (which might make sense, but you can still build everything else there). Everyone wants to dip their beak.
(United Neighbors is closely related to Livable California, one of the state's preeminent NIMBY organizations.)
It's unclear how much of an actual effect this will have. Much will depend on whether the policy is expanded or curtailed, going forward.
Also, this week in Berkeley, land of the historic homeless encampment, remember the sacred parking lot, last seen in 2021 where the developer won a ruling?
Ally Markovich for Berkeleyside, "Berkeley will buy Ohlone shellmound site, return it to Indigenous land trust". In March, the city bought the property (mostly with money from one of the indigenous-activist groups) and gave it to the tribe.
How, might you ask, did the Sogorea Te' get twenty-five million dollars, which seems like a lot for a local band of busybodies?
The city has, in total, spent five and a half million dollars on this.
(This may seem like a lot, but Berkeley's annual city budget is over half a billion dollars, or about five thousand dollars per resident.)
The people who now have the land are celebrating.
As noted in the 2018 EIR, this is not actually a shellmound or burial ground, but the Ohlone believe that it is, and everyone here is respecting their beliefs. (This is not noted in the article. I've requested a correction.) I remember, but cannot find, some initiative to use "indigenous ways of knowing" or the like in public policy. This is what this looks like in practice.
I had a post on last week's topic where I suggested that the civil war would be takers vs makers, and I got asked how I would tell them apart.
This is how. You see those people building shit? Makers. You see those people complaining and trying to prevent them from doing so? Trying to get handouts and secured employment and concessions? Takers.
Regulations and taxes are the tools of the takers, wielded against the makers.
While I think "civil war" isn't the right lens through which to examine most divisions (can you imagine all the boomers fighting all the millennials, somehow?), I think you might be interested in Ilforte's two-by-two matrix of left/right, build/retreat, as a lens.
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If there is a civil war, it will be some approximation of Red vs Blue. California is not going to align with Texas, Civil War style, against a coalition of Taker states.
It might start out that way, but major ‘maker’ states are better served in the short run carving out their own little empires in the hinterlands, so it’ll turn into 3-5 dueling imperial cores.
Of course I don’t seriously think that there’s about to be a second civil war. But if there is, Texas, California, etc would be strongly incentivized to preserve their own citizenry’s standard of living(remember, these are democracies where one party always wins by being good at convincing the public they’re responsive to local needs) in the face of wartime hyperinflation and shortages by transitioning into micro-empire builders, and that’s a recipe for a shift to realpolitik.
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If there's a civil war, the battle lines aren't going to fall along neat ideological lines and a lot will depend on which military units stationed wherever will side with whichever side. If you look at the Spanish Civil War battle lines (with the caveat that they moved a lot, of course) and compare them with the preceeding election, there are parts where the Nationalist/Republican territories match the left/right election map and parts where they don't.
Hence the qualifier "some approximation of". The vast majority of Reds will end up on one side, the vast majority of Blues will end up on the other side, and exceptions to that will be exceptions rather than the rule.
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I have to disagree.
The steelman for regulation is keeping people from trampling the commons. Even if they Make something by doing so, they’re Taking it from everyone. It’s possible to Make something with zero or negative value to everyone else.
For taxation, it’s solving a coordination problem to do things enough people would like done. You can get a net positive out of Taking.
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Your mistake is thinking these are different groups of people instead of the same people at different times of day.
Then we should encourage people when they act like makers and punish people when they act like takers.
Unfortunately, democracy means you get to vote to take money from your neighbor's pocket, and most people are willing to choose that option.
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It's still a useful distinction, even if not everyone is 100% maker or taker.
I don't think that it is - at least not in a political sense. Conceptually it's an easy distinction to make, but in practice it's just arguing over whose subsidies and legal privileges don't count.
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But not (if taken seriously) a politically productive one given that the vast majority of the population are takers from birth to the early 20's, makers during their working life, and takers in retirement.
Given the number of right-populists who try to use maker/taker framing, it is very easy to have fun with the fact that makers voted for remain and takers voted leave, but in fact that just reflects the generational divide in British politics.
That once was the vast majority of America, but it's closer to a bare majority today, and the share is shrinking. There have been policy and especially immigration decisions which have caused this.
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Sure but NIMBYism is a near uniquely bad litmus test for Maker/Taker. By that test in a lot of cases you'll get answers like "Tech CEO is a TAKER because he doesn't want his beach town to have a new low end high rise hotel put up" or "Union Carpenters are TAKERS because they want Union labor on Gov subsidized work."
Most NIMBYs are, or at least were, successful employed people who want to "protect" the lifestyle they feel their work entitled them to.
Most tests suffer similarly, unless you're ready to bite the an-cap bullet at least a few times.
NIMBYism is unusual because it is important enough to be politically unavoidable but doesn't align with any of the other obvious dividing lines in American politics. The fact that it isn't a federal question helps - in the UK it is enough of a national issue that the logic of partisanship eventually forced politics into a "YIMBY Labout NIMBY Tories" alignment.
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Deregulation to increase housing development feels like the biggest bang for your buck pro growth policy out there.
Just ease the regulations and let private investment handle the rest. Parking may get more difficult for some but to me that’s a fair trade.
This is literally true. See Hsieh and Moretti (2019) and Caplan's addendum; the fact that people can't move to opportunity is a horrible drag on the economy as a whole.
Parking issues are down to economic illiteracy. Parking is scarce because the price is too low (zero almost everywhere), though the cost is distributed elsewhere. We value the time of people seeking parking at zero, so rather than charging enough for parking that there's a space or two free on every block, we mandate ever-larger parking craters in cities. Here's a summary of Donald Shoup's work on parking economics.
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More than fair, considering that's what the environmentalists wanted in the first place.
It's doubtful that most environmentalists want to help the environment at all.
If we look at their actual actions and proposals, many are quite harmful to the environment. Therefore, environmentalism is best modeled as an aesthetic movement that prefers naturalistic forms to technological ones, and decay over growth.
There are two different things called "environmentalism" I've seen described as 'Green' and 'Gray'.
Green environmentalism is fighting development to save the forest or save the stream or save the neighborhood. It's judging how much harmony you have with the environment by counting the trees you can see from your front porch. It's "we tread lightly on the earth here". It's this tweet showing an aerial picture of Manhattan with the caption, "reminder that the people lecturing you about Earth Day today live here". It's a conviction that we will only be saved by not doing things.
Gray environmentalism is shutting up and multiplying, and is primarily concerned with climate change. It's judging your environmental impact by calculating your carbon footprint. It might be getting an electric car, but it's even more so moving to a city and getting an electric bike instead. It's heat pumps and rooftop solar and nuclear power if we can ever manage to get costs down. It's living near a park instead of having a huge backyard. It's this tweet, dunking on the above by pointing out that Manhattanites have some of the lowest per-capita carbon emissions in the country. It's a conviction that we will only be saved by doing things.
It would be nice if these groups could get along, but they really don't have that much in common.
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That’s like saying Nazis didn’t really want Germany to succeed. No, it was just an aesthetic movement that preferred jackboots to street wear?
Environmentalists also have the excuse of being a big tent. “Buy organic” doesn’t come from the same philosophy as “fuck coal plants,” but they both get called environmentalism because of that aesthetic overlap.
You should be more specific about which proposals you’ve got in mind.
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Cynically, every movement is just a cover for one of Scott's backscratching clubs.
However, this does not mean that the people in the movement are cynics who just pay lip service to the movement for status gain. The best way to pass for a true believer is to be a true believer. Humans are very capable of believing anything, while their subconsciousness keeps a careful lookout for their self-interest.
I think that most environmentalists want to help the environment, but often do not pick the solutions which offer the most bang for buck, and sometimes may be indeed net-negative given a specific set of goals.
The fact that their goals are actually tractable exposes them to criticism. I mean, nobody is giving the Christians shit about how raising kids is actually a terribly inefficient way to populate heaven, and the utility of running embryo-farms which could produce a baptized soul for a few dollars each would be much higher.
It is always easy to say 'person P took an action X which was not the best action towards goal G, thus by revealed preference P does not care about G', because modelling humans as a single rational actor is a gross oversimplification.
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I think environmentalists want to help the environment, although aesthetics is definitely a major aspect, but they are dumb and don't understand what actually helps the environment. A lot of the people who vote for rent control don't want there to be an under supply of housing; they just don't get how economics work
Some form of JJ's razor applies here; whether it is malice or ignorance in creating the same shitty outcomes is irrelevant, because you still have the shitty outcome. Given that everything is subject to vibes-based politics in 2024, the not do things/do more things dichotomy is actually more useful. Doing nothing is a vibe, desiring green spaces is a vibe, hating litter and people who litter is a vibe, lecturing people who aren't as green is a vibe. Learning about economics is very much not a vibe, or at least less of a vibe than throwing rocks at people in houses going "just stop charging so much for rent".
I used to be strongly in the do-more-things camp, but given that the western world somehow forgot how to make or do things and subcontracted it all to the lowest bidders they could find globally, I don't think they could do anything without fucking it up.
However, there's a particular form of optimism I subscribe to. I think people will do the right thing, after first exhausting every other option. I think we'll eventually science our way out of it, likely just before the whole species is collectively doomed and the surface becomes inhospitable to all life.
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I consider myself mostly a conservationist rather than an environmentalist simply because of my observations of how little most environmentalists understand either about how modern technology works or how the environment works.
On the modern technology side, a lot of what they want would make modern technologies unworkable. You simply cannot power an entire city with wind and solar — both of which are dependent on weather. If they were in favor of nuclear and hydroelectric power it’s plausible, but you need a lot of power to run a city. And the acres of wind turbines or solar panels needed for the task destroy the environment anyway.
On the environment side, most environmentalists I have talked to are urban or suburban dwellers, often quite well off. They don’t spend much time in rural areas or in nature— to the point where many of them didn’t seem to understand that carnivores eat other animals. They don’t understand that rotting things are normal.
I think the way to save the environment is through finding balance between what people need and what nature needs and doing so with technology.
There's definitely a massive disconnect among pretty much everyone between how much they sympathize with and care about any animal they see or hear about, even just in a book or video, and how much meat they eat. I'm not a vegan, but I'll whole heartedly admit to not actually consistently following my principles in real life, and I respect vegans who shape their lives around their beliefs.
I just accept that most people are not very self-aware.
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If they're suburban, they're not paying much attention (which is rather likely). Rotting things are really common (even if most of the rotting animals are roadkill). And literally in my own back yard (in northern New Jersey) I've seen a juvenile hawk take a squirrel, a cat take a chipmunk, and a fox teaching its kit how to hunt using a (presumably just-caught) rabbit as a prop.
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LMAO. These people are pathetic (not the native Indians, the whites who fold as easily as a deckchair). Separating them from their money would be a net positive for humanity were it not for the fact that they are playing with public money and will just tax everyone more if you took if from their hands.
You’re doing the thing again. Stop it.
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