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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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It's Morning in California. Rather, it's Morning in the legislative season, a time when big ideas seem possible, before they disappear into a swamp of obscure pitfalls and shenaniganry. Here's my understanding of the current roster of big housing bills this year, and the threats and potential involved. See also Alfred Twu's very detailed writeup (PDF).

(Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California, also at theschism.)

Some common themes:

  • CEQA, the California version of NEPA, is a problem, and though it's right up there with Prop 13 as a Third Rail in California politics, many of the housing bills this year center around exempting projects from CEQA, especially after a particularly egregious use to block student housing because the students themselves would constitute an environmental impact. (I'm reminded of SourceWatch's very cursed Precautionary Principle chart.)
  • Last year's AB 2011 was a particularly big deal, not because of its contents, but because Assemblymember Wicks (previously seen here) managed to get the carpenters' union on board. The Building Trades have been adamant in their demands (basically, require that workers on streamlined projects attended a particular union training program), which the YIMBYs consider a dealbreaker. The compromise in AB 2011 was to provide various benefits to any worker on those projects, and to give preferences to graduates of union apprenticeship programs. There's a huge difference in California politics between "the unions oppose" and "the unions are divided". This mainly applies to SB 423, but the model will likely be tried in plenty of other bills.

The major bills:

  • AB 68 (CA YIMBY), the Housing and Climate Solutions Act. (Not to be confused with 2019's AB 68, part of the push to legalize ADUs). This will likely be a two-year bill, but it's a mass upzoning in the vein of SB 827 and SB 50. Those bills failed, so the YIMBYs are taking a different tack: this is a collaboration between California YIMBY and the Nature Conservancy, as it would not only make it easier to build in cities, it would make it harder to build in the wilderness, under the Gain/Maintain/Sustain rubric outlined here. Details are still in flux, but Livable California is furious. Much of how this goes will depend on how labor gets on board.
  • SB 423 (CA YIMBY), an extension of 2017's SB 35 (previously seen here). The original SB 35 streamlined approvals (including CEQA exemptions) for general plan-compliant projects in cities behind on their housing goals. It was a compromise, which got the Building Trades on board: all-subsidized projects could pay prevailing wage, but market-rate projects had to use "Skilled and Trained" labor, which is extremely scarce. As a result, the only SB 35 projects completed as of this point are subsidized. SB 423 would apply AB 2011-style labor standards to all projects and indefinitely extend the streamlining. The intra-labor fight has been intense. The carpenters are supporting in droves; the remaining trades are stopping just shy of calling them scabs.
  • SB 4, a revival of 2020's SB 899, which would allow churches and nonprofit schools to build housing on their land. This is enormously popular, and was killed for unclear reasons last time. There's been some remarkable cross-pollination with SB 423 at the Capitol, with religious leaders supporting SB 423 and the carpenters supporting SB 4.
  • AB 309 (CA YIMBY), a revival of AB 2053, which would take the first steps in establishing a statewide social housing agency.
  • AB 1630 would exempt student housing within a thousand feet of a school from CEQA, as well as from a variety of building standards such as floor-area ratios, parking minimums, density limits, and height limits under forty feet. This is a direct response to the Berkeley ruling earlier this year.

These bills will of course change going forward, and some will certainly fail to advance, but this is the state of things at the top of the year.

Like heavy, I know little about this and have no significant comments as a result - but the detail about something unfamiliar is what makes posts like these interesting!

YIMBY policy progress, from 50k feet, seems slow and intermittent - caught up in the tangle of state and local politics, regulation and courts. You make it slightly easier to build in one way and another law makes it harder, pitting your procedural edge cases against theirs, fighting through tens of thousands of local interests. I wonder how plausible 'significant progress' is, or what the path to it is - where YIMBYs can say 'yeah, we accomplished a solid 40/70% of what we want to in ' and we can observe its effects on rents, random social issues potentially caused by housing, homelessness, etc.

Great question! To the extent that there's a long-term goal or vision, it fits with the concept of an abundance agenda. It's what Laura Foote talks about at rallies.

YIMBY policy progress, from 50k feet, seems slow and intermittent - caught up in the tangle of state and local politics, regulation and courts.

This is a really good point. For example, SB 9 overturned single-family zoning by (with a lot of caveats and complications) allowing duplexes (and, kinda, fourplexes) wherever you could build a house. Livable California (our statewide NIMBY organization) was terrified. And yet it kinda... went nowhere. Almost no one took advantage of the law, and there's a cleanup bill, SB 450, this year to hopefully change that.

We have a reasonably good idea of the size of the shortage (McKinsey, Legislative Analyst's Office, UCLA.) We have a pretty quantifiable idea of the effects of supply on rents, and the effect of rents on homelessness.

The state has decent reporting for some things; see here (page eight, select Structure Type as Accessory Dwelling Unit) to see the effect of the 2017-era ADU liberalization, driving annual construction numbers from less than a thousand to up to twenty thousand. SB 35 streamlined about three thousand units per year in its first two years of implementation; SB 423 looks to greatly expand that.

So, tl;dr, there's a quantifiable housing gap, we know how much housing the state is producing, and getting the latter to reach the former is a reasonably proxy for "we're winning".

a particularly egregious use to block student housing because the students themselves would constitute an environmental impact

Yeah, humans tend have an impact on environments they live in. Seriously, how did we get a system that is so self defeating? It's insane that Califorians can't build houses.

Seriously, how did we get a system that is so self defeating?

Remember that feeling. Hold on to it. One thing I've learned from working in this space is that the systems are always stupider and more vile than you think.

One thing that helps is to remember that at this point, a society that builds is not in living memory for any but the very oldest of Americans.

"And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half generations, the builder's mindset passed out of all knowledge.”

The YIMBYs are envisioning a wonderfully abundant future, and at the same time, doing a lot of Slow Boring of Hard Boards. In practice, the tip of the spear involves showing up at community meetings to politely ask your local officials to knock it off, or calling your legislator to politely ask them to take your local officials' toys away, or to pore over your city's state-mandated reports and politely tell the state that the city is lying. Roughly none of it looks like Punching The Bad People. (There's an excellent, unfortunately Patreon-only, episode of "The War on Cars" interviewing Matthew Lewis that covers a lot of this.)

Sometimes there are wins, and they're worth celebrating. My city's downtown is replacing a closed donut shop with a small apartment building with ground-floor retail. It's only a few stories tall, but it has a cool roof deck, and it'll make our downtown a little nicer. It's only possible because AB 2097 says the city can't require fifteen parking spaces, which would make the project unconstructible. It's not loud, it's not huge, but it's something. And piling up more and more of those will eventually matter.

Hello, sorry for commenting on this out of nowhere, but I found the podcast you suggested and wanted to ask you a question, if you don't mind.

The host of the podcast retweets groups of vandals who slash car tyres and smash people's headlights. Links: https://twitter.com/Naparstek https://twitter.com/T_Extinguishers/status/1630479016531578881

Can you explain? Are you acting as the public facing moderate voice of a violent extremist movement?

The host of the podcast retweets groups of vandals who slash car tyres and smash people's headlights.

The Tyre Extinguishers, so far as I can tell, encourage people to deflate tires, as shown in the linked thread. I'm not saying that Aaron Naparstek has never retweeted a violent extremist, but he's not doing so here. If he has, let me know.

I'm not very public facing, I'm moderate in my approach but radical in my goals, and I absolutely disavow violent extremism.

There is, however, violence involved here. The arms race making vehicles larger and taller means that every life saved by an SUV costs four lives outside of the vehicle. Pedestrian deaths are steeply rising after falling for decades. I think that's worth caring about as well.

There is, however, violence involved here. The arms race making vehicles larger and taller means that every life saved by an SUV costs four lives outside of the vehicle. Pedestrian deaths are steeply rising after falling for decades. I think that's worth caring about as well.

I don't care what your noble goal is. This is not a valid legal or moral justification for vandalism and deflating people's tires.

Perhaps I've been unclear. I also dislike vandalism. Not as much as I dislike violent extremism, but I find it distasteful and I don't endorse it. I'm providing some context for why people feel so strongly, but I'm not endorsing vandalism. I hope that clears things up.

Can you explain? Are you acting as the public facing moderate voice of a violent extremist movement?

This does not look to me like a question asked in good faith. Why would someone who recommends a podcast be obligated to answer for whatever the host of the podcast might do elsewhere on social media? How do you know he's even aware of these tweets? You've made quite a leap to accuse him of being some sort of shill.

Coming from a "new" account that seems to have been created just for the purpose of asking this question, I almost didn't let your post out of the new user filter, but decided to do so just to point this out as something not to do.

Seriously, how did we get a system that is so self defeating?

I'd argue the problem stems from having tons and tons of empty land.

Other countries (specifically Asian ones) simply can't afford inefficiency or the death cult of "environmentalism, therefore do nothing ever" in this area; North America is unique in having the vast majority of its land unsettled so the moralization to preserve its "character" is appealing (to the corrupt citizens and politicians that are getting rich off the inherent rent-seeking this enables).

Most of the places that are growing these days are in deserts or upon flat land as far as the eye can see partially for this reason (US Southwest and to a degree the Midwest up through Idaho, Alberta, Saskatchewan)- can't spoil a view that really wasn't much to begin with (realistically, it's just another farm field), the hard requirement for life support to survive outside 6 months of the year (extreme heat for Southwest, extreme cold for Canada) is complementary to building for cars (obligatory "future car sanctuary states"), while most of the places that are locked in the hardest are the places that look the nicest.

Also, local government and people within that local area actually having actual power.

The dirty secret is one of the ways France, Spain, Germany, etc. can cheaply build trains, metros, and even housing at times is simple - the federal government has immense powers to step in and say, "sorry, we're doing this, giving you market value for your land, and you have no recourse in the law at all to stop us."

There's other things, but this is something people on both sides overlook.

The dirty secret is one of the ways France, Spain, Germany, etc. can cheaply build trains, metros, and even housing at times is simple - the federal government has immense powers to step in and say, "sorry, we're doing this, giving you market value for your land, and you have no recourse in the law at all to stop us."

"Moses tore down America's great old cities, Jacobs ensured you could never build great new ones."

I want to emphasize that this is indeed how things used to work in the United States, most notably in postwar New York City, where Robert Moses legendarily used eminent domain to raze neighborhoods to build his projects. (If you have plenty of time, the Henry George Program had an excellent discussion about Moses.) The environmental movement of the sixties and seventies was in large part a backlash to Moses; the edifice of law and regulation they erected made it harder to build bad things by making it harder to build anything.

The tradition that separates us from better-functioning countries dates back seventy years at most.

You see this in our transit projects, where things simply get bogged down because it's much easier to say no or be cautious or add requirements than it is to say yes. You see this in our environmental laws like CEQA and NEPA (the federal version of CEQA), where they're used to delay obviously environmentally-friendly projects (congestion pricing, solar panels, offshore wind) in favor of an environmentally-unfriendly status quo. You see it in the way that these processes provide a foothold, so, for example, labor unions fight against CEQA reform because their process involves threatening obstruction to get labor benefits. And you see it in the infuriating "precautionary principle" which acts as a fully-general excuse for inaction, because you're comparing the worst case of "Life Continues" if you don't do something and "Extreme Catastrophe" if you do.

I have nothing substanitive to offer so my thanks for these fascinating posts will have to suffice.

Thank you so very much! Honestly, it's very motivating to not feel like I'm yelling into a void about this stuff, so the fact that you're here and reading means a lot to me.

if feedback is appreciated, it's probably worth saying that I've read in detail and extensively ponder every post you've done in this series. As someone reflexively skeptical of the idea of modern urban governance and development and of the idea of "progress" generally, the events you highlight are one of the best sources of "maybe I'm wrong" impressions I get in this space, and I value them very highly.

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