The way I have often put it (including talking to voters as a candidate for local office) is that I think everyone that contributes in our community, whether it's a doctor or lawyer or engineer, or a barista or lawncare guy or teacher, should be able to find a place to live in our community. And that can't possibly happen unless you make it legal to build some smaller apartments, and let folks adapt their own properties to meet the needs of their families, like was legal up until the wave of '70s down-zoning. Make normal neighborhoods legal again!
Lots of positive response, a lot of people get it! They see how their kids can't afford to stay here, and they support stuff like the CA state laws that have made it a lot easier to build an ADU. (I broke ground in my back yard literally the day before yesterday -- we're building an ADU with the object of having it as an option for my parents.)
I got to 45% of the vote in the end, as a first-time candidate running against an incumbent who was going for his third term. Not too shabby, considering, but not quite good enough. I intend to run again in '26.
As a sidenote, similar to what Daniel Herriges talks about in that article, I also rented in a non-conforming duplex (converted in the '60s, before the '70s downzoning wave) a few towns south of where I currently live, for like six years, before we had saved up enough to become homeowners. It was fine! To even notice it existed, walking by on the street, you would've had to look carefully.
Integration and diversity is a super power. The people who are against it are zero sum gamers (and probably racists) who think if other people win they lose. We should be optimizing for win-win
First link-Citation quantity, honestly have no idea if that is a good metric for how successful or productive a group of people are, especially self-selected groups. It could be that studies that are international gain more funding from colloborative efforts. The paper also suggested that colloborations increased as a result of the interet. LOL good luck controlling for the effect of the internet. There's really inadequate controls in this particular study in general, including funding controls. The results are also based on authorship groups, which I don't think is compelling evidence that other groups would perform better. The most obvious example of groups that perform better with less diversity would be professional basketball teams. We wouldn't sample a professional basketball league and say that because diversity is ineffective there that it applies to countries or businesses.
The second link: These cited studies are either surveys or they are also not controlled for. The largest corporations have a strong public relations incentive to hire diversely and when they outperform smaller counterparts it would not prove that diversity was the causation at all. I have seen some evidence that gender diversity does produce controlled demonstrated results, but that was postulated to be likely because of breaking down of nepotism inefficiencies. Also the evidence I saw suggested that a little diversity did show some improvement, but that it hard marginal returns. I would have to spend a lot of time searching my browsing history so take my memory with a big grain of salt.
The problem with academia is there is a huge incentive to produce results that support a narrative, the results gives the researcher notariety and can justify additional research funding. One experiment which was very clearly flawed is the stock price diversity experiment. The study had a group in Texas and a group in Singapore. The Texas homogenous group was Latinos and the Singapore group was homogeous Chinese. The experimenters found no difference in financial education between the homogenous or diverse group, which I find hard to believe. They did not even bother to control for income which would be a pretty big marker for financial education.
Another of the studies actually found a similar flaw in methodology. It tested a group for jury deliberation and found diversity was a good thing because the minority group (white people) were more likely to be better at jury deliberation. "One possible reason for this difference was that white jurors on diverse panels recalled evidence more accurately." Sure, diversity is a "super power" if you are adding people from groups who are better at the given task than the majority. That's obviously not always the case.
The third link had studies behind paywalls. The Cloverpop study used this methodology "The study was able to measure when teams made better decisions by tracking how often the decision maker changed their mind based on the input of the team" I mean come on now. This is not a good metric for performance at all, it could be that the decision maker was more likely to make the correct decision in the first place. Obviously also this could show that the original decision makers from the worse minority group were more likely to be corrected by someone from the better group. I would be interested to see all groups accounted for and to see if the diverse groups perform better than the highest performing homogenous groups, none of these studies do not offer those results.
When you look at the details under scrutiny and with nuance, the data and research really does not warrant the claims you and the researchers are making in the end. Even if it does we are talking about very incremental improvements of maybe 5% (the citation example)
Good notes about the higher ed plateau/shrinkage. I called this "peak higher ed" a decade ago.
A few thoughts:
1) Yes, the institutional numbers decline has been marginal, but don't forget the additional amount of program culling going on. WVU is just the most recent instance. Further, recall the higher ed is strongly dependent on enrollment for revenue, and that enrollment, after forty years of rising, is reversing.
2) I'm not sure if research is slowing down. There's the problem of overproduction there, with too many unread papers and books, but the US still has a solid research-producing professoriate.
3) Much depends on institutions' abilities to pivot to new populations: more internationals, more adults.
I had thought that I saw some data that the areas immediately surrounding Minn/St Paul had substantial rent increases in the same time period. I saw the data in an old reddit reply that I can't find easily.
Great article! My only comment is college education can hardly work for the half of the population less equipped for academic study, plus a lot of jobs are always going to be those that do not require post-secondary education. Adopting economic policy that restores income growth across all quintiles is still the best solution to the problems you mentioned.
I think you may want to distinguish between research universities and small colleges in regards to which colleges are under threat due to declining enrollment. You noted West Virginia budget cuts but from what I’ve read this is the result of some very particular poor spending decisions rather than a general trend.
Much more under threat are your small liberal arts colleges and small religious colleges (especially the latter given declining religiosity in America). I think this is part of the general trend I’ve remarked upon in the past whereby colleges are confronting the contradiction that they are mostly 19th century constructs (at least in foundation) in a 21st century world.
I’ve most touched on this regards to the affirmative action and legacy debates. Namely that legacy is a relic of when colleges were essentially finishing schools for the upper crust (a dynamic that existed well into mid 20th century). But it goes beyond that to things like what courses are taught and what colleges exist in the first place. I say the following as someone with a history degree that included significant course work in Ancient Greek history and Ancient Greek philosophy; why does the Classics major exist still? I’m sorry it’s a relic of when learning classics was a marker of being upper class. This is not an argument that this course work is useless but rather that classics as a major is well past it sell by date. Reality is all sorts of ways colleges are constructed as far as course requirements that are out dated. I was required to take all sorts of “core” classes unrelated to major in order to graduate. Sounds great to learn so much until you consider the enormous costs involved with taking even one class.
For religious colleges. Especially smaller less prestigious ones (so places like Notre Dame and Georgetown excepted) the future is even more stark. America is clearly becoming a less religious place; a trend apparently accelerating with each passing year. The “need” for religious colleges, especially small ones is going to decline dramatically very soon.
Left-NIMBYs are loud on Twitter, but the strongest opposition is from Republicans. Trump, who used to be YIMBYish (he's a property developer, after all) has sniffed the wind and gone full NIMBY
I’m a city planner working mostly in the northeast US, and left NIMBYs are the predominant obstacle for the projects I work on. Also, Matt Yglesias had a great recent post about how the issue doesn’t really break along partisan lines, which has been helpful for the YIMBY cause.
I think the key is that who is most NIMBY is really dependent on the specific location you’re talking about. In a lot denser parts of cities, you’re main NIMBYs are more often loud lefties. But the suburbs? I can tell you from first hand experience the biggest NIMBYs are more right leaning. A group my local GOP rep is very happy to pander to.
Biggest takeaway is that NIMBY vs YIMBY is one of the few issues that cuts across partisan lines (although if you look at polling there are more right leaning NIMBYs then left leaning). No better example than what you see in CA with left of center Newsom battling with left wing SF and LA to get more housing built.
Well, some are - people who have lived in a neighborhood for a long time and don't like change (most people don't like change). But, as Colin notes above, it's pretty location-dependent. A lot of very online urban youngs get very worked up about anything they perceive as "gentrification" (how I hate that word!), which usually includes new housing.
Just some polling to indicate there is more support (at least in polling) for building more housing among Democrats than GOP (although to reiterate my point, there is a cross partisan aspect to this). https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-favor-building-more-housing-their-neighborhood. Also to note, from Cato, so not exactly an org. inclined to put out data showing democrats or democratic voters in a good light.
As for your specific question regarding age, I have seen polling on this issue broken down by age and you are correct; there is definitely a pretty big age skew as to who's YIMBY and NIMBY that probably is a more important cleavage than partisanship. Unfortunately, in my quick 2 minute google search, I can't find the polls I've seen, but they are definitely out there. But makes intuitive sense; older voters are more likely to own their homes or have bought their homes way before the run up in housing costs and are therefore way less likely to be negatively impacted by high rent costs or housing costs.
One issue too is older voters and especially retirees are way way more likely to show up to your local zoning meeting or board meeting concerning whether to approve a new triplex being built. If you take a random photo from a local news story concerning a hearing about a new apartment building going up, just take a look at how much white hair you see.
I agree that the MAGA types have been trending NIMBY, but then you can go look at Greg Gianforte in Montana who has tilted pretty hard YIMBY. Montana YIMBYs have done pretty well with a message of repudiating the bad zoning policies of California, and avoiding letting Californians moving to Montana bring the housing crisis with them. (And speaking as Californian, I am 100% in favor of treating us as a cautionary tale, at least in this department.)
Californication is real. The housing crisis comes because when a Californian moves in, the market price resets around what Californians are willing to pay. (There's a similar effect in DC with the Northern Virginia prices creeping down toward Richmond and the Hampton Roads.)
Can I just say that the whole "YIMBY" vs "NIMBY" thing is stupid? Whatever happened to the people in the middle? The people who neither subscribe to "build nothing anywhere, ever" nor "build absolutely anything anywhere at any time"?
YIMBY is just a catchy name. Most of us seek coalition with anyone who is not a NIMBY. I recommend the Emily Hamilton piece Noah mentions. I hope you'll find much to like in her view.
I think I previously posted the advantages of a National Education system. Full merit. No union. 2x pay. Minimum 1000 per grade. No local property tax. National funding
Now- improved idea
Mega High School has 7 to 12th grade organized around important learning areas....for life. Each has a child/parent selected 7 to 12th grade facility to take the child a long way:
A. Machine school
B. Design engineering school
C. Auto mechanic school
C.1 Electric, AC, Plumbing
D Pre Nurse school
E. Pre Med school
F Pre Veterinarian and Tech school
G Classics School- English, Philosophy, Literature
H. All around school
I. Everyone has math, science, History, English all years
J. Switching as desired. Where else to better explore a growing minds interest
K. Some may matriculate with essentially Associate degrees and technician level accreditation
I think it kind of depends how you interpret multi-culturalism. One of the things I love about living in America is that in our major cities, you can get the cuisine of virtually everywhere else in the world, on a whim. Even out in farther flung places, contra the stereotypes, Americans are generally pretty open to trying new stuff. My family once encountered an Afghan restaurant off of I-70 in a random exurb in Kansas, like a couple hours west of KC. It was obviously getting part of its business from people stopping in off the highway, but also clearly had a lot of locals who were in there joking with the family that ran it.
The fact that we can integrate immigrants and make them beloved members of the community, while also letting them continue to be who they are -- wear some "odd" clothes, adapt their native cuisine to use local ingredients and suit local tastes (like, that Afghan place had plainly toned down the spice relative to what you'd find at an "authentic" place in the Little Kabul neighborhood of Fremont, CA) -- is clearly one of our great strengths. It also is one way of defining "multi-culturalism".
If your definition of "multi-culturalism" says that it's bad if the kids of immigrants decide they're not so into observing every aspect of their native culture, I'm not so down with that. People should be free to choose, to remix their ancestral inheritance with the best of what's developed here. That's the cosmopolitan liberal ideal, and it is _objectively better_ than tribalism.
I don't think I've ever read an argument in favour of multiculturalism that doesn't start with food. Often (as in this case) it seems to end with food, as well.
Like, is this really the only argument we have? Recipe books are a thing, we could probably have X cuisine without X culture. Japan has excellent French food.
The toning down of culture, the wearing of native garb etc do not mean not melting pot. I’d argue it actually furthers the melting pot analogy!
I see the salad bowl as what is currently allowing the federal lawsuit brought by immigrants against LGBT books and content. Like I said, it’s only when the pieces in the salad clash that it’s problem. Or maybe it isn’t, as there are religious folks here (LDS) that also signed up on it.
Wisconsin is still authentically German. Brats, Beer the whole works, but, it feels super American too. There’s a common trend of an organic synthesis of the host culture and the home culture. I worry the current push of preservationary multiculturalism will have.
I left India for greener pastures economically speaking, but I have begun to see similar clashes and problems crop up here.
Fact of the matter is to accept immigrants you need to have an open mind, and if the immigrants were open minded themselves, they’d assimilate without a big hassle, especially with today’s demographics. I don’t know how true that is, especially with my own encounters with other immigrants, who make up a majority of my social circle (both from India and elsewhere).
I could share deeper and more personal examples if you would like to know.
“ It’s too early to tell, but it’s possible that the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed marked the end of a 30-year-long Age of Human Capital, where knowledge industries dominated everything else and you needed a degree to flourish.”
Just wait five years and see how AI has eaten many white collar jobs that required a college degree. As of this spring I have been telling my students that, unless you really love the law and want to be public service, don’t go to law school. Eighty percent of the work lawyers do is transactional work, such as reading contracts or writing briefs, and that is currently being automated away by fine-tubes LLMs. See harvey.ai or spellbook.legal for examples.
To put the melting pot narrative in historic context, the "melting pot" and "multiculturalism" narratives refer to the same social dynamics. They are distinctions without a difference.
The life and death of the melting pot metaphor reflects the conditions of 19th and early 20th century America. The film "Gangs of New York" is very good for its social realism despite a fictionalized story; the melting pot was the response to that world. America had: true open borders with constant streams of immigrants pouring in, very weak state capacity, high population growth, high anomie (moral vacuum), an economy with very sharp booms and busts, sectarian strife, and America and the immigrant nationalities who arrived here were very much honor cultures.
Violence was constant -- nativist vs. immigrant, Protestant vs. Catholic, Christian vs. Jewish, White vs. Black, White vs. Chinese, etc. There was also a low sense of solidarity among immigrant groups. Protestants and Catholics broadly hated each other as a group, but Catholicism wasn't enough of a unifying force to stop Irish, Italians and Germans from feuding among themselves.
This is identity politics in its most literal, basic and naked form. A lot of the institutions we take for granted today, like government, houses of worship, employers, etc., did not exist or were too weak and served existing group power structures. Everyone looked after their own.
The melting pot was a response to this madness. Assimilation was an aspiration to transcend petty tribal identities. (In the early days of show business, "ethnic" was a disparaging term for someone whose name, usually Italian or Jewish, or appearance would give away their outsiderness and would be concealed to sound more commonly American.) It stressed education and involvement in civic life. It encouraged tolerance. The melting pot was forward-looking; the American identity could be created without being fraught with past attachments.
The melting pot narrative became conventional wisdom by the 20th century, helped along by the strengthening of the state and wresting control of economies and institutions from political machines and racketeers. There were also large public works projects and the world wars.
The melting pot faded away because in many ways it succeeded, so much so that there's very little trace of what came before it.
We are actually starting to see how the Auckland Unitary Plan has effected rents - see this recent paper from Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy finding that rents for three bedroom dwellings are 22-35% lower than they would have been in absence of the upzoning.
I think what’s happening at universities is ultimately a good thing. Marginal institutions will be forced to innovate in order to survive. We spent 20 years propping them up with obscene amounts of easy student loan debt. It seems like many institutions who face challenges are now thriving by recruiting out of state students or offering unique programs. Welcome to capitalism! Long overdue in this space, in my opinion.
Regarding: The college shakeout and the market forces behind it.
Industrial policy to the rescue? If the U.S. positions itself as a worldwide supplier of education, then policies to encourage foreign students to attend U.S. universities could bolster existing college enrollments. It would also yield both a sustainable skilled labor force and geopolitical benefits, especially if partnered with other educational foreign-aid initiatives. Attending foreign students would benefit by experiencing the world outside their country, even if they ultimately return home.
As purely regional drivers of economic health, community colleges and trade schools seem beneficial. The Our Towns initiative started by James and Deborah Fallows ( ourtownsfoundation.org ) has noted the positive contributions of local higher education facilities.
Regarding: Integration works, the melting pot is real.
If our tendency is towards fusion, as the evidence suggests, then it reveals that divisiveness is manufactured. The dynamics behind manufactured divisiveness would be an interesting journalistic beat for someone (or many someones!).
The way I have often put it (including talking to voters as a candidate for local office) is that I think everyone that contributes in our community, whether it's a doctor or lawyer or engineer, or a barista or lawncare guy or teacher, should be able to find a place to live in our community. And that can't possibly happen unless you make it legal to build some smaller apartments, and let folks adapt their own properties to meet the needs of their families, like was legal up until the wave of '70s down-zoning. Make normal neighborhoods legal again!
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-neighborhoods-legal-again
Love this! What kind of reactions do you get?
Lots of positive response, a lot of people get it! They see how their kids can't afford to stay here, and they support stuff like the CA state laws that have made it a lot easier to build an ADU. (I broke ground in my back yard literally the day before yesterday -- we're building an ADU with the object of having it as an option for my parents.)
I got to 45% of the vote in the end, as a first-time candidate running against an incumbent who was going for his third term. Not too shabby, considering, but not quite good enough. I intend to run again in '26.
As a sidenote, similar to what Daniel Herriges talks about in that article, I also rented in a non-conforming duplex (converted in the '60s, before the '70s downzoning wave) a few towns south of where I currently live, for like six years, before we had saved up enough to become homeowners. It was fine! To even notice it existed, walking by on the street, you would've had to look carefully.
Awesome!!! Kudos to you for seeking office (and building an ADU)! This is the way change actually happens…
Integration and diversity is a super power. The people who are against it are zero sum gamers (and probably racists) who think if other people win they lose. We should be optimizing for win-win
with what evidence do you base your claim? Aside from a boring catch phrase and race card immediately at the ready.
If you just google a little you would see this is a consensus. It's basically social hybrid vigor. As far as I can tell resistance to this is a bug in humanity (tribalism Trumps broader cooperation). Almost all great things done by humans is when they work together. Here's a couple of links most relate to businesses, but it scales to societies https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6701939/ https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter https://online.uncp.edu/articles/mba/diversity-and-inclusion-good-for-business.aspx https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_diversity_makes_us_smarter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6701939/ https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
You posted four links and two of them twice.
First link-Citation quantity, honestly have no idea if that is a good metric for how successful or productive a group of people are, especially self-selected groups. It could be that studies that are international gain more funding from colloborative efforts. The paper also suggested that colloborations increased as a result of the interet. LOL good luck controlling for the effect of the internet. There's really inadequate controls in this particular study in general, including funding controls. The results are also based on authorship groups, which I don't think is compelling evidence that other groups would perform better. The most obvious example of groups that perform better with less diversity would be professional basketball teams. We wouldn't sample a professional basketball league and say that because diversity is ineffective there that it applies to countries or businesses.
The second link: These cited studies are either surveys or they are also not controlled for. The largest corporations have a strong public relations incentive to hire diversely and when they outperform smaller counterparts it would not prove that diversity was the causation at all. I have seen some evidence that gender diversity does produce controlled demonstrated results, but that was postulated to be likely because of breaking down of nepotism inefficiencies. Also the evidence I saw suggested that a little diversity did show some improvement, but that it hard marginal returns. I would have to spend a lot of time searching my browsing history so take my memory with a big grain of salt.
The problem with academia is there is a huge incentive to produce results that support a narrative, the results gives the researcher notariety and can justify additional research funding. One experiment which was very clearly flawed is the stock price diversity experiment. The study had a group in Texas and a group in Singapore. The Texas homogenous group was Latinos and the Singapore group was homogeous Chinese. The experimenters found no difference in financial education between the homogenous or diverse group, which I find hard to believe. They did not even bother to control for income which would be a pretty big marker for financial education.
Another of the studies actually found a similar flaw in methodology. It tested a group for jury deliberation and found diversity was a good thing because the minority group (white people) were more likely to be better at jury deliberation. "One possible reason for this difference was that white jurors on diverse panels recalled evidence more accurately." Sure, diversity is a "super power" if you are adding people from groups who are better at the given task than the majority. That's obviously not always the case.
The third link had studies behind paywalls. The Cloverpop study used this methodology "The study was able to measure when teams made better decisions by tracking how often the decision maker changed their mind based on the input of the team" I mean come on now. This is not a good metric for performance at all, it could be that the decision maker was more likely to make the correct decision in the first place. Obviously also this could show that the original decision makers from the worse minority group were more likely to be corrected by someone from the better group. I would be interested to see all groups accounted for and to see if the diverse groups perform better than the highest performing homogenous groups, none of these studies do not offer those results.
When you look at the details under scrutiny and with nuance, the data and research really does not warrant the claims you and the researchers are making in the end. Even if it does we are talking about very incremental improvements of maybe 5% (the citation example)
Good notes about the higher ed plateau/shrinkage. I called this "peak higher ed" a decade ago.
A few thoughts:
1) Yes, the institutional numbers decline has been marginal, but don't forget the additional amount of program culling going on. WVU is just the most recent instance. Further, recall the higher ed is strongly dependent on enrollment for revenue, and that enrollment, after forty years of rising, is reversing.
2) I'm not sure if research is slowing down. There's the problem of overproduction there, with too many unread papers and books, but the US still has a solid research-producing professoriate.
3) Much depends on institutions' abilities to pivot to new populations: more internationals, more adults.
The effect on rent in Minneapolis is huge!
I had thought that I saw some data that the areas immediately surrounding Minn/St Paul had substantial rent increases in the same time period. I saw the data in an old reddit reply that I can't find easily.
Great article! My only comment is college education can hardly work for the half of the population less equipped for academic study, plus a lot of jobs are always going to be those that do not require post-secondary education. Adopting economic policy that restores income growth across all quintiles is still the best solution to the problems you mentioned.
I think you may want to distinguish between research universities and small colleges in regards to which colleges are under threat due to declining enrollment. You noted West Virginia budget cuts but from what I’ve read this is the result of some very particular poor spending decisions rather than a general trend.
Much more under threat are your small liberal arts colleges and small religious colleges (especially the latter given declining religiosity in America). I think this is part of the general trend I’ve remarked upon in the past whereby colleges are confronting the contradiction that they are mostly 19th century constructs (at least in foundation) in a 21st century world.
I’ve most touched on this regards to the affirmative action and legacy debates. Namely that legacy is a relic of when colleges were essentially finishing schools for the upper crust (a dynamic that existed well into mid 20th century). But it goes beyond that to things like what courses are taught and what colleges exist in the first place. I say the following as someone with a history degree that included significant course work in Ancient Greek history and Ancient Greek philosophy; why does the Classics major exist still? I’m sorry it’s a relic of when learning classics was a marker of being upper class. This is not an argument that this course work is useless but rather that classics as a major is well past it sell by date. Reality is all sorts of ways colleges are constructed as far as course requirements that are out dated. I was required to take all sorts of “core” classes unrelated to major in order to graduate. Sounds great to learn so much until you consider the enormous costs involved with taking even one class.
For religious colleges. Especially smaller less prestigious ones (so places like Notre Dame and Georgetown excepted) the future is even more stark. America is clearly becoming a less religious place; a trend apparently accelerating with each passing year. The “need” for religious colleges, especially small ones is going to decline dramatically very soon.
Left-NIMBYs are loud on Twitter, but the strongest opposition is from Republicans. Trump, who used to be YIMBYish (he's a property developer, after all) has sniffed the wind and gone full NIMBY
https://reason.com/2020/08/17/donald-trump-and-ben-carson-go-full-nimby-in-the-wall-street-journal/
And there are almost no Republican YIMBYs
I’m a city planner working mostly in the northeast US, and left NIMBYs are the predominant obstacle for the projects I work on. Also, Matt Yglesias had a great recent post about how the issue doesn’t really break along partisan lines, which has been helpful for the YIMBY cause.
I think the key is that who is most NIMBY is really dependent on the specific location you’re talking about. In a lot denser parts of cities, you’re main NIMBYs are more often loud lefties. But the suburbs? I can tell you from first hand experience the biggest NIMBYs are more right leaning. A group my local GOP rep is very happy to pander to.
Biggest takeaway is that NIMBY vs YIMBY is one of the few issues that cuts across partisan lines (although if you look at polling there are more right leaning NIMBYs then left leaning). No better example than what you see in CA with left of center Newsom battling with left wing SF and LA to get more housing built.
Well, some are - people who have lived in a neighborhood for a long time and don't like change (most people don't like change). But, as Colin notes above, it's pretty location-dependent. A lot of very online urban youngs get very worked up about anything they perceive as "gentrification" (how I hate that word!), which usually includes new housing.
Just some polling to indicate there is more support (at least in polling) for building more housing among Democrats than GOP (although to reiterate my point, there is a cross partisan aspect to this). https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-favor-building-more-housing-their-neighborhood. Also to note, from Cato, so not exactly an org. inclined to put out data showing democrats or democratic voters in a good light.
As for your specific question regarding age, I have seen polling on this issue broken down by age and you are correct; there is definitely a pretty big age skew as to who's YIMBY and NIMBY that probably is a more important cleavage than partisanship. Unfortunately, in my quick 2 minute google search, I can't find the polls I've seen, but they are definitely out there. But makes intuitive sense; older voters are more likely to own their homes or have bought their homes way before the run up in housing costs and are therefore way less likely to be negatively impacted by high rent costs or housing costs.
One issue too is older voters and especially retirees are way way more likely to show up to your local zoning meeting or board meeting concerning whether to approve a new triplex being built. If you take a random photo from a local news story concerning a hearing about a new apartment building going up, just take a look at how much white hair you see.
I agree that the MAGA types have been trending NIMBY, but then you can go look at Greg Gianforte in Montana who has tilted pretty hard YIMBY. Montana YIMBYs have done pretty well with a message of repudiating the bad zoning policies of California, and avoiding letting Californians moving to Montana bring the housing crisis with them. (And speaking as Californian, I am 100% in favor of treating us as a cautionary tale, at least in this department.)
Californication is real. The housing crisis comes because when a Californian moves in, the market price resets around what Californians are willing to pay. (There's a similar effect in DC with the Northern Virginia prices creeping down toward Richmond and the Hampton Roads.)
Can I just say that the whole "YIMBY" vs "NIMBY" thing is stupid? Whatever happened to the people in the middle? The people who neither subscribe to "build nothing anywhere, ever" nor "build absolutely anything anywhere at any time"?
Running away from the dichotomy is a surefire marker that you are a NIMBY.
YIMBY is just a catchy name. Most of us seek coalition with anyone who is not a NIMBY. I recommend the Emily Hamilton piece Noah mentions. I hope you'll find much to like in her view.
I think I previously posted the advantages of a National Education system. Full merit. No union. 2x pay. Minimum 1000 per grade. No local property tax. National funding
Now- improved idea
Mega High School has 7 to 12th grade organized around important learning areas....for life. Each has a child/parent selected 7 to 12th grade facility to take the child a long way:
A. Machine school
B. Design engineering school
C. Auto mechanic school
C.1 Electric, AC, Plumbing
D Pre Nurse school
E. Pre Med school
F Pre Veterinarian and Tech school
G Classics School- English, Philosophy, Literature
H. All around school
I. Everyone has math, science, History, English all years
J. Switching as desired. Where else to better explore a growing minds interest
K. Some may matriculate with essentially Associate degrees and technician level accreditation
Should pay students to apprentice during school too. Would probably help the drop out rates a bit.
Yes indeed.
Always appreciate the facts on housing! Thank you!
Multiculturalism SUCKS. Melting Point FTW. America is Awesome ~ immigrant
I think it kind of depends how you interpret multi-culturalism. One of the things I love about living in America is that in our major cities, you can get the cuisine of virtually everywhere else in the world, on a whim. Even out in farther flung places, contra the stereotypes, Americans are generally pretty open to trying new stuff. My family once encountered an Afghan restaurant off of I-70 in a random exurb in Kansas, like a couple hours west of KC. It was obviously getting part of its business from people stopping in off the highway, but also clearly had a lot of locals who were in there joking with the family that ran it.
The fact that we can integrate immigrants and make them beloved members of the community, while also letting them continue to be who they are -- wear some "odd" clothes, adapt their native cuisine to use local ingredients and suit local tastes (like, that Afghan place had plainly toned down the spice relative to what you'd find at an "authentic" place in the Little Kabul neighborhood of Fremont, CA) -- is clearly one of our great strengths. It also is one way of defining "multi-culturalism".
If your definition of "multi-culturalism" says that it's bad if the kids of immigrants decide they're not so into observing every aspect of their native culture, I'm not so down with that. People should be free to choose, to remix their ancestral inheritance with the best of what's developed here. That's the cosmopolitan liberal ideal, and it is _objectively better_ than tribalism.
I don't think I've ever read an argument in favour of multiculturalism that doesn't start with food. Often (as in this case) it seems to end with food, as well.
Like, is this really the only argument we have? Recipe books are a thing, we could probably have X cuisine without X culture. Japan has excellent French food.
The toning down of culture, the wearing of native garb etc do not mean not melting pot. I’d argue it actually furthers the melting pot analogy!
I see the salad bowl as what is currently allowing the federal lawsuit brought by immigrants against LGBT books and content. Like I said, it’s only when the pieces in the salad clash that it’s problem. Or maybe it isn’t, as there are religious folks here (LDS) that also signed up on it.
Wisconsin is still authentically German. Brats, Beer the whole works, but, it feels super American too. There’s a common trend of an organic synthesis of the host culture and the home culture. I worry the current push of preservationary multiculturalism will have.
I left India for greener pastures economically speaking, but I have begun to see similar clashes and problems crop up here.
Fact of the matter is to accept immigrants you need to have an open mind, and if the immigrants were open minded themselves, they’d assimilate without a big hassle, especially with today’s demographics. I don’t know how true that is, especially with my own encounters with other immigrants, who make up a majority of my social circle (both from India and elsewhere).
I could share deeper and more personal examples if you would like to know.
“ It’s too early to tell, but it’s possible that the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed marked the end of a 30-year-long Age of Human Capital, where knowledge industries dominated everything else and you needed a degree to flourish.”
Just wait five years and see how AI has eaten many white collar jobs that required a college degree. As of this spring I have been telling my students that, unless you really love the law and want to be public service, don’t go to law school. Eighty percent of the work lawyers do is transactional work, such as reading contracts or writing briefs, and that is currently being automated away by fine-tubes LLMs. See harvey.ai or spellbook.legal for examples.
To put the melting pot narrative in historic context, the "melting pot" and "multiculturalism" narratives refer to the same social dynamics. They are distinctions without a difference.
The life and death of the melting pot metaphor reflects the conditions of 19th and early 20th century America. The film "Gangs of New York" is very good for its social realism despite a fictionalized story; the melting pot was the response to that world. America had: true open borders with constant streams of immigrants pouring in, very weak state capacity, high population growth, high anomie (moral vacuum), an economy with very sharp booms and busts, sectarian strife, and America and the immigrant nationalities who arrived here were very much honor cultures.
Violence was constant -- nativist vs. immigrant, Protestant vs. Catholic, Christian vs. Jewish, White vs. Black, White vs. Chinese, etc. There was also a low sense of solidarity among immigrant groups. Protestants and Catholics broadly hated each other as a group, but Catholicism wasn't enough of a unifying force to stop Irish, Italians and Germans from feuding among themselves.
This is identity politics in its most literal, basic and naked form. A lot of the institutions we take for granted today, like government, houses of worship, employers, etc., did not exist or were too weak and served existing group power structures. Everyone looked after their own.
The melting pot was a response to this madness. Assimilation was an aspiration to transcend petty tribal identities. (In the early days of show business, "ethnic" was a disparaging term for someone whose name, usually Italian or Jewish, or appearance would give away their outsiderness and would be concealed to sound more commonly American.) It stressed education and involvement in civic life. It encouraged tolerance. The melting pot was forward-looking; the American identity could be created without being fraught with past attachments.
The melting pot narrative became conventional wisdom by the 20th century, helped along by the strengthening of the state and wresting control of economies and institutions from political machines and racketeers. There were also large public works projects and the world wars.
The melting pot faded away because in many ways it succeeded, so much so that there's very little trace of what came before it.
We are actually starting to see how the Auckland Unitary Plan has effected rents - see this recent paper from Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy finding that rents for three bedroom dwellings are 22-35% lower than they would have been in absence of the upzoning.
https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/business/about/our-research/research-institutes-and-centres/Economic-Policy-Centre--EPC-/WP016.pdf
Amazing
I think what’s happening at universities is ultimately a good thing. Marginal institutions will be forced to innovate in order to survive. We spent 20 years propping them up with obscene amounts of easy student loan debt. It seems like many institutions who face challenges are now thriving by recruiting out of state students or offering unique programs. Welcome to capitalism! Long overdue in this space, in my opinion.
Regarding: The college shakeout and the market forces behind it.
Industrial policy to the rescue? If the U.S. positions itself as a worldwide supplier of education, then policies to encourage foreign students to attend U.S. universities could bolster existing college enrollments. It would also yield both a sustainable skilled labor force and geopolitical benefits, especially if partnered with other educational foreign-aid initiatives. Attending foreign students would benefit by experiencing the world outside their country, even if they ultimately return home.
As purely regional drivers of economic health, community colleges and trade schools seem beneficial. The Our Towns initiative started by James and Deborah Fallows ( ourtownsfoundation.org ) has noted the positive contributions of local higher education facilities.
Regarding: Integration works, the melting pot is real.
If our tendency is towards fusion, as the evidence suggests, then it reveals that divisiveness is manufactured. The dynamics behind manufactured divisiveness would be an interesting journalistic beat for someone (or many someones!).
On the victory of the melting pot, from the micro to the macro, there are questions still to be asked and answered.
As a reference, for example, "The Sources of Brexit and Trumpism Are Not the Same", by
Alexander Clarkson at World Politics Review.