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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Very happy to see you here. This series is one of my favorite fixtures of this space.

Agreed, and it's good to see California improving a bit on housing policy! (even if only to keep more Californians in California and not dragging their policies to me)

Thanks! I'm glad folks are interested.

(even if only to keep more Californians in California and not dragging their policies to me)

Now I'm going to be a humorless scold about this; the problems that California has are due to a combination of its policies and its luck. The housing crisis that came to California was a slow burn caused by gradually-applied restrictions on growth which made it so when boom times came, the market couldn't respond. The boom time, in scale and duration, is unique to California, but the policies aren't, which is why Austin is going through the same thing that various California cities do where the rent rises, homelessness surges, and the main response of the city is to obey the very angry citizens and chase homeless people from place to place, trashing their belongings as they go.

The policies are already there. To the extent that California is responsible, it's by displacing people out of the state. Just as in California, the homeless are demonized as outsiders, when they're mostly just people who used to be housed there, but can no longer afford the rent.

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