"Walking by it, the upper-class professionals of tomorrow and the landed homeowning gentry were forcibly reminded every day of the existence of society’s most abject castaways. As they stepped quickly and nervously past the park, the lurking presence of tents and huddled forms in the corners of their vision served as a reminder that the game they had spent their whole lives winning was one that someone had lost. And perhaps at the back of their minds, a small voice whispered: “That could have been you.”"
This, uh... reads like you are talking about a transgressive public art installation
maybe we should just get actors to portray the junkies and homeless, so that we can have this experience without the actual suffering involved
Obviously if we could create a society with no homelessness or drug addiction, I'd be in favor of that.
But given that such problems do exist, I question the wisdom of keeping the people who suffer from them forever locked out of sight, so that the masses of people forget they even exist...
Not to worry, just head to the Berkeley BART station or any highway underpass. Or walk a mile or two south to Oakland. The modern day version of People’s Park lives on - from Berkeley and Oakland west to the SF Civic Center.
Yeah. This was why in media in the 1970's and earlier, places like asylums were conceived as complete mysteries and horrible places where every human malady was concentrated (which they somewhat were, even though those portrayals may have been exaggerated). It's pretty likely that, just as concentrating poverty is bad, concentrating mentally ill people and drug users in an asylum is bad.
Nah, it’s good to force them into either treatment or prison. Having them out on the streets to accost people and harm themselves just to promote a political ideology seems perverse.
The other reason to build more housing is that the existence of homeless create work for the social services sector.
When we talk about the litany of issues people experiencing homelessness face -- mental illness, drug use, the need to obtain social services, etc. -- we also need large numbers of not-homeless people who are not mentally ill, drug users and not poor to be able to take care of their own lives as well as the lives of people who can't take care of their own.
This is the "wraparound services" or "continuum of care" you often hear about. There are two intractable macro problems:
1. These wraparound services need to be provided for the homeless person's entire life. While a path to self-sufficiency is part of the continuum of care, removing any part of it will cause the homeless person to relapse into pathological behaviors.
2. Social services are Baumoled -- it is necessarily cost-diseased because it involves a lot of face-to-face human interaction that can't be made more productive through technology or resources that can be scaled.
Similarly, it's easy for people to forget that diarrhea exists, when it is hidden away quietly in toilets. Those who suffer from diarrhea should shit on the street so that we not forget that this problem exists.
What other problems should we take care to remind ourselves of every day? Perhaps instead of burying drunk driving victims we can tape them to the sides of buildings so that their rotting corpses can remind us not to drink drive.
But we don't want to _just_ house the homeless. We want to get them into housing close to both the services they need to resolve issues like drugs and mental health, and near jobs that they're qualified for.
If the only place a low-income person can afford to live is a three hour commute away from the city center, then there's no way for people in the city center to hire for low-wage jobs, and some jobs just _fundamentally_ have to either be low-wage, or not get done, because they're not terribly productive -- hiring a marginal worker doesn't add enough to the income of the business to pay more than a low wage. This is pretty much the norm for retail and restaurants. So if you want retail with actual workers at the cash registers instead of Amazon-style camera surveillance and self-checkout, and if you want wait-staff to be a thing instead of ordering from a phone at your table, then we need to build a lot more cheap housing near where you want those things to exist.
The average homeless person is at minimum months away from being able to hold down a job. To pretend like they are just one San Francisco studio away from working is delusional.
I'm not going to debate the entire content of a book ( https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ ) in this comment thread, but suffice it to say your thumbnail of a Frontline episode has this exactly backwards.
Was de-institutionalization bad? Yes. Did it _contribute_ to the homelessness crisis? Yes. Is it _the main driver_ of homelessness? Absolutely not. Furthermore homelessness _causes_ mental health and substance abuse problems, as well as being caused by them.
Mississippi has the same drug and mental health problems and the same deinstitutionalization as California, and yet homelessness is very low, because housing is cheap, and even people on drugs or with mental health problems can pay the (low) market rent for somewhere they can lock a door behind them.
The majority of _very long term_ homeless, people who are homeless for years at a time, have mental health and substance abuse problems. Some of them had those problems before they became homeless, others had a temporary crisis that spiraled.
But the vast majority of homeless in a place like the Bay Area, at any given time, are short-term homeless. Either they have jobs and yet couldn't pay the rent (due to a rent hike, or some adverse event like a health crisis), or were recently laid off. The majority of homeless are not terribly visible to you -- they're in their cars, or couch surfing, or they are on the streets briefly and they keep their heads down because they have hopes of getting out of homelessness reasonably soon. This vast majority of homeless would _absolutely_ be helped by having drastically more housing near the kind of jobs they can work. Did you know that over the course of a semester, around 20% of CA community college students spend at least one week with nowhere to sleep but a vehicle? We're not talking about drug-addled locked-ward cases here, just late-teen to twenty-something kids, whose parents either wouldn't or couldn't keep them at home, who are trying to improve their lives.
You have to learn to think of this in terms of both stocks and flows. We maintain a large stock of short-term homeless because rents are too high, and so ordinary low-wage workers are constantly at risk of flowing into homelessness. We're playing an evil game of musical chairs -- there just aren't enough homes for everyone who works here to actually live in housing here.
Then the existence of the stock of short-term homeless creates a flow of people who spiral into long-term homelessness, which is much more expensive for social services to treat (and creates a higher risk of crime and general disorder), e.g. because somebody who spends a week in a tent gets attacked while asleep, so they start taking meth to stay awake, and get hooked.
We would all collectively be much better off if we just made sure that housing was cheap in the places we want people to work. We need to add more chairs to the game, so everyone can sit.
The cost of warehousing people depends greatly on what kind of people they are. Warehousing well-disciplined soldiers is easy. Even warehousing ordinary people who'd rather get out (e.g. internment camps) is not that tricky.
But warehousing the absolute dregs of society, half of whom cannot take care of themselves and half of whom are determined to prey on others, is very difficult. You need a massive guard presence or it turns into a horror show.
Who are you? And what have you done with Noah Smith? Noah is king of the YIMBYs. An arch Japan stan. A rationalist. The most articulate proponent for allocating scarce resources in a utility-maximizing way. A supporter of the social-mobility engine of public universities. Do you even like rabbits? Please let me know where I can contribute to the GoFundMe to pay his ransom.
This will have something to do with the lack of crime and drug addiction in homelessness communities in Japan. Draconian law enforcement and social stigma has ensured that.
>We need a muscular, realist, rational left that is properly skeptical of dreamers and hippies.
+1000. The left was very successful in the 20th century because it focused on diffuse benefits and concentrated costs - we’ll curtail the power of the aristocracy by implementing universal suffrage, we’ll reduce disease by taxing the rich to provide universal healthcare, we’ll provide education through taxes etc. Now, the left has flipped the formula to diffuse costs and concentrated benefits - we’ll allow our pet victims to engage in antisocial behavior which gratifies us but you get to live in a worse place.
How can we get to the level of community connection like in Japan? People here in Ishikawa came together after the quake, everyone helps each other and follow the common ordnance... In US we are so addicted to rebelling whenever someone tells us what to do. Fight over a small park... What a shame.
1. This is probably the only column I’ve had a strong negative reaction to. Keeping dysfunctional elements in the public sphere to promote a political agenda is perverse.
2. From Matt Yglesias’ piece (which is a complement to this), we can see how both ends of the spectrum are fine with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs as long as it benefits their constituents. On the right, we see Heritage promoting local NIMBYs and SFH only zoning to benefit incumbents at the cost of making housing expensive, on the left we see the usual progressives promoting the tolerance of antisocial behavior because it benefits their pet victims (I refuse to accept their framing by using the word “marginalized”) at cost to normal people.
Genuine question wrt marginalized; I get if you’re against it’s use for racial dynamics, but it feels like it’s just an accurate descriptor for homeless people? They absolutely aren’t the center of our society. Granted, it’s anecdotal from some first responders I know, but people in the city next to my hometown would literally step over ODd folk on the sidewalk.
Unless you’re really pissed about the change from it’s old literary meaning with like, writing in margins and such. I think that would be maybe silly but I’d get it.
The problem with "marginalised" is that it puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. It implies that society's reaction to these people, rather than the actions of the people themselves, is the problem.
Being "marginalised" is a passive thing, it's something done by others to you. It carries an unspoken implication that if only we'd all stop being so mean to these people then they wouldn't have a problem.
I wrote in an old post here on Noahpinion why I have a problem with marginalization as a concept. As a liberal, I hope people to the left of me in My Tribe will accept it as constructive criticism of a flawed concept.
The notion of "marginalization" can be metaphorically represented by the playground game King of the Mountain. It's where a large group of people form a large circle and the objective is for the winner (or winners) to run into a small circle in the center and hold off other people outside of the circle from pushing them out in order to win the game.
Marginalization is basically any person who falls outside of the winners circle, because the game will necessarily involve someone not only trying to force themselves into the winner's circle, but also must watch their back from an opponent trying to push them outward.
This is not the opposite of a rightwing worldview (zero-sum stakes, might makes right, hierarchy, etc.), but rather a mirror image of it from the standpoint of the game's loser. They see the center and the margin as essential states of the human condition that are unchangeable, but covet not being able to enjoy the glory of being in the center because they can never win by playing the game (they may be small and lack the strength and agility to outmaneuver their opponents).
This harbors ressentiment, or the notion that some outside force is the cause or obstacle to one's personal frustrations and there is a desire but an inability to reflect that rage back to that force.
Marginalization worldviews also foreclose possibilities of cooperation (like: instead of King of the Mountain, let's play a European-style board game that offers multiple strategies and the possibility of multiple winners), sympathy and empathy, mutual respect, fair play, etc.
Basically, I view “marginalized” as a term to engender sympathy for their pet victims (the same way leftists like to describe riots coming from the same as “uprisings”). Whatever sympathy I have for vagrants is gone, so I refuse to accord them the sympathetic phrase.
As someone who grew up in the chaos and crime of 1960s-70s Berkeley, I strongly disagree with your romanticism here. The initial riots were bad (my school was shut down). The disorder was bad. Walking by the encampment (I won’t dignify it with the term “park”) was always scary. Seeing homelessness is bad: most of them were drug addicts, not avatars of a free frontier. They were there because of a misguided belief in freedom, the freedom to be dysfunctional, criminal, and self-indulgent.
As an adult I reject 1960s romanticism because I saw what it did to children (broke up my family, drew many into destructive cults), our public spaces, and basic social norms. If Berkeley had made the effort to maintain norms of social order, rather than to celebrate their breakdown, perhaps we wouldn’t be in some of fixes we are in today.
Unfortunately most liberals still believe the storybook version of the 60's. "It was all about peace, love, and ending oppression. Shh, don't talk about the sexual abuse at the communes, the decade of violence and rioting that sprang forth from the civil rights movement, the discussion of how young is too young that was the predictable result of the sexual revolution, etc."
Thank you! I often feel like I’m shouting into the wind when I describe my childhood in Berkeley, raised by hippies and cultists, surrounded by constant violence, as a terrible not a fun thing. The mythology of liberation is just so powerful.
I'm optimistic it's coming to an end. You almost never hear anyone mythologize JFK, Woodstock, and a lot of other 60's idols I remember from my childhood in the 90's. I think the sexual revolution is also on its way out as an idol. The tyranny of the Boomer Truth regime will not be forever.
There's a reason for that. As a Generation Xer, I have to concede that everyone including and especially me that our birth cohort is worthless.
Remember the scene in "Back to the Future" where the principal catches Marty being late to school and tells him he's a slacker who will never amount to anything? Principal Strickland was right!
It was the millennials who ended up delivering the world Generation X'ers sought but failed at.
Millennials and Gen Zers are rebelling against the 1980s and '90s, our childhoods, and it's sad to watch middle-aged or elderly-adjacent Xers cling on to those decades and pick the same fights that have long been settled and the world has moved on from.
Gen Xers either died young and became heroes or lived long enough to become problematic.
You should look into Christiania in Kopenhagen. Originally one of the more developed hippie communes, it’s tolerated drug market has been taken over by assorted criminal elements, which has led to the remaining hippies (by this point old people squatting on prime real estate) to become much less hostile to the police
Apparently people now just get their drugs via MobilPay and some guys doing a GrubHub like delivery (from my friend who was shocked about how open this was at a party he was at.)
They still need to be "properly ruled and trained". Government, military and police are incapable, on its own, of civilizing even itself. Society (the economy) and Public Force mutually need each other to keep civilization or progress.
I think it is fabulous they are removing the blight of "The People's Park." The housing situation is desperate in that area. What would be a grand idea is for the school to partner with the county to open (don't know if it is necessary to build) and operate a group home/halfway house for recovering homeless addicts. I am of the opinion that those addicted to drugs and living on the street are basically at danger to themselves and others and qualify for involuntary medical treatment (detox and drug rehab and mental health treatment with transitional housing afterwards in group homes with therapy). Allowing people to publicly commit suicide day by day is immoral.
Only in CA would a University building a dorm on a small plot of land plus being extorted by pols and activists for some tangential housing be a multi year saga and major news event stimulating odes to new futures and old ways.
Is that a place where taxpayers are forced at gunpoint to either work harder or sacrifice consumption so that dissolute, dysfunctional people can live on the streets being catered to by NGO activists?
well, if you disclose your suicidal tendencies to me, I will guarantee you I will Baker Act/72 hr admit to mental health to save your life. We just should not discard people who are mentally ill to the vagaries of the street, to live like rats, self medicating on street drugs laced with fentanyl and tranq so they can either literally rot or die of unintended overdose. You want to live "free", be a hermit in some wilderness. I will never feed delusional, antisocial and self harming behavior.
Forcing severely mentally ill people into inpatient treatment is not fascism, unless you consider most European nations to be fascist, in which case I don't know what to tell you.
Wholesale use of force is most certainly fascism, and your ignorance of the history of mental 'illness' and its constant weaponization against the poor, women, LGBTs, etc, is so abyssal that this exchange is OVER.
Granted, nothing happens smoothly in Berkeley so who knows what will actually happen? The developer for the supportive housing portion walked away (protests and CEQA) so the University is looking for a new one.
I don't think it's romanticizing poverty to want to have some spaces in the world that aren't off-limits to anyone, and also aren't far removed from the general populace.
I agree that we need truly public spaces. But they become a home for the homeless, which essentially means that these public spaces involve other people trespassing on the de facto living space for the homeless, because they can't enforce property rights.
Obviously it's better that homeless people have the People's Park than having to squat under a bridge or whatever, but I'd much rather these people had private spaces, y'know? If they did then the public places really would be more of a level playing field.
Public third places are good (especially since that role has been outsourced to the commercial sector, like coffee shops)! People's Park, unfortunately, had become so inhospitable to the public that it ceased to qualify as a third place.
The thing is, for most of US history in most places the "third place" has been church. Now that the country is way less religiously observant than in the past, what will we do?
Hard to say. The US hasn't been well-designed for unplanned encounters for a while, especially those that don't require money. The Internet is kind of our new public square and that's not been going well recently.
We definitely need more third places, though. Urbanists obviously have a lot of good ways to design a city to maximize encounters. Suburban and rural areas aren't as easy, especially if people don't have kids that can force community engagement.
Just before the pandemic (February 2020) I went to the same indoor mall where my family used to run errands to get a new phone. In the late 90s and early 00s the place on Saturdays was absolutely jammed with shopping families (and Millennial kids), with playspaces and everything. It was comparatively a total ghost town a few years ago.
One of those "abandoned places" Instagram/TikTok pages had my hometown mall on it*. Stores are still open but you can guess how well they're doing based on that.
*The mall has one or two pines depending on the timeline.
That's true of malls in general. It's happening in well-to-do suburbs and exurbs as well.
The department-store anchor model, as well as indoor malls, are both dying formats. Customers have shifted to power centers, where the anchors are Walmart or Target, and the stores are clustered into disconnected "neighborhoods". Lately they've taken on adding things like playgrounds or fountains surrounded by tables where people can eat.
Also, in urban gridded areas, main streets have been coming back into vogue. Wide boulevards are narrowed to slow traffic, and parallel parking becomes diagonal. The parklet, a pandemic-era innovation to allow outdoor dining on commandeered street parking spaces, has proven to be so popular cities are working to make alfresco dining permanent and replace the parking with a garage or central lot where people park once, pay, and walk around.
And how many corruption scandals have ruined projects like the proposed one? "Alleviating/ending" poverty is the opposite of a 'no-brainer' (*vomits at cliche*) ; it is instead a horrendously complex problem entwined with systemic racism and hatred like a tumor wrapped around a vital organ. We'll be lucky if this tumor is even operable.
It may not be a no-brainer, but the truth is liberal groups like the ACLU have completely blocked solutions to the problem. If we could commit obviously insane people and ban outdoor camping the problem would immediately improve.
I think the problem of current homelessness is because most people now have zero tolerance for taking in other people as 'lodgers'. When I was a kid growing up in london UK I do not remember seeing homeless people like these anywhere - but many people had 'lodgers', who were sometimes not even family, living in their homes. But people then were living a much more lean life so having a little money coming in from a 'lodger' was a good means to improve your financial standing. Such lodgers often acted as child-minders, did odd jobs around the house or even helped in the garden. In my working class neighborhood all the homes were occupied by multiple people - nowadays so many houses have ONE lone human living in them ! I currently have one son living in my home, but in prior years I too was alone in a 3 bed house - it would not have occurred to me to 'take in a lodger' as the phrase used to be - but that is what many people did years ago ! Food for thought ? Maybe a way the Gov't could get creative with stipends for such ?
Yes, the biggest cause of the housing crisis is often overlooked: plummeting household size. It's causing shortages even in cities with shrinking populations
Having Lodgers is common in many cities, but their zoning has to allow it. Building codes have raised the floor cost and likely destroyed the low end of the market needed to curve homelessness.
A good piece... a mix of changing realities and romantic nostalgia for a bygone time (which mostly never existed).
I’ve never believed in People’s Park. 99% of Berkeley have never stepped foot into the so-called people’s park. They were scared to do so. They were disgusted by the filth and absence of hygiene. Afraid of knifings and violent arguments between mentally ill denizens of the park.
When my grandkids were little, I would never have taken them inside that park.
None of my other Berkeley friends ever took their kids to People's Park -- and don’t now take their grandkids there. Neither I nor any non-homeless citizens ever picnic there, ever take a blanket and read a book while lying in the sunshine. Sane people keep their distance and avoid setting foot in People's Park because it is not safe there.
I understand that there’s a lot of nostalgia that hovers around People’s Park… and lots of thoughts about a people’s revolution that represents feelings of that time -- a people's revolution that never arrived, never had a positive impact..
If People’s Park was indeed a place that Berkeley citizens could and did enjoy for decades, I’d be protesting its demise. Alas, it’s never been a park for the people. It’s time to let that delusion fade away.
Funny - I'm a Lib who needs trees ! That meant when I was a divorcee deciding to buy my own home I looked around for where the trees were - and located a far flung not-quite suburb where trees & almost-mountains prevailed. That meant an hourly+ ride to work, but to me it was worth it, at least at the weekends I could enjoy the trees & my small home is sitting in the middle of an acre of hilly land. This NJ area is still a bit 'forgotten' compared to similar commutes elsewhere over the past 20+ yrs. I dealt with the rush hour crush by simply leaving my house at 6.0am & relaxing the other end ! So yes there are STILL places within a 90 minute commute to the NJ-NYC metro area where you can find countryside & a wonderful air of freedom ! I'm retired now but that ride to work was very enjoyable anyway - music & lots of greenery almost all the way & time to think, not at all stressful !
You should relocate to Sacramento. If you have the means, you could buy your own single-family Victorian home on a tree-lined street ... and live in the heart of downtown!
Or tell everyone you're moving to Poverty Ridge, where poverty is a Victorian home on a tree-lined street with Teslas and BMWs parked out front.
Noah, I love your Substack, but I disagree with you most strongly on this one.
You wrote:
"Police are called to the park about five times a day, on average, and there’s about one violent crime there every five days."
And then:
"There are few spaces left in the developed world that exclude absolutely no one."
Ponder those two sentences and notice their inherent contradiction. Do you honestly believe that a place where a violent crime is committed every 5 days excludes no one? It's the difference between *de jure* and *de facto*. Sure, on paper, it excludes no one. In practice, it sure as hell excludes anyone with young children, any frail 5'2" woman who rightly feels she wouldn't be able to fight off an assailant, and more generally, anyone who cares about their physical safety more than a vague feeling of "anarchic chaos," as most middle-class people do. Call me a boring normie, but this park sounds like a net negative for the community and it needs to go YESTERDAY.
"The suburbs of these cities will be speckled with rowhouses and low-rises and duplexes and missing-middle housing of all sorts, while city centers will slowly open themselves to high-rise housing. The country won’t become Tokyo or Manhattan, but it’ll look a little more like Germany."
Yes. This is GOOD. This is a GOOD THING. I want us to look more like Europe, I want more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, not sprawling-ass suburbs where you have to drive freaking everywhere. I understand nostalgia for a wild frontier, but it can't be the basis of rational public policy in the Year of Our Lord 2024. The world has changed.
I think if Americans go out in the world more and see other cities as they are, we would come to an uncomfortable realization that the answer to "Why are American cities so dangerous?" has to be answered by rephrasing the question as ... "Why are dangerous cities so American?"
You don't even have to go across an ocean. You can go to Canada -- all but a couple of provinces speak English (and the francophone ones are bilingual) and you will generally find the same brands and cars to make it seem less "foreign." Canada has guns and diversity, yet people manage not to shoot one another in the street.
Density is also not making people deranged. Crime does exist, but not at the same scope and scale as American cities. More importantly, it's much rarer to see public displays of vagrancy and dereliction -- those behaviors that don't rise to property or violent crime but signal that individuals are inconsiderate assholes incapable of functioning in society. Like being noisy drunks, men physically and verbally harassing women, people who go on violent rages for making eye contact, and the like.
America incarcerates and punishes more people on a relative and absolute basis than anywhere else in the world, so the carceral state doesn't serve as negative reinforcement for corrective behavior.
Again, you don't see this anywhere in the world except in war zones or in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, where material conditions are much worse and institutional trust is much lower or nonexistent.
Alon Levy pointed this out in his Pedestrian Observation blog, but he focuses narrowly on the abysmal state of transit infrastructure. He notes that the high costs and low quality of American infrastructure is endemic to America (Why is American transit so expensive? is really Why is expensive transit so American? and Levy shows myriad examples). His framework applies to American culture as a whole.
Well, I was going to just hit "like", but it wasn't strong enough. Having been in Tokyo, Seoul, and other far more dense cities, the experience is very different.... And that has been true for a long time - not just in NIMBY time or even since Reagan. "individuals are inconsiderate assholes".....
My son living in Tokyo said something very profound that I like to repeat - "the primary rule in Japan is don't be a dick"
I've never been to Tokyo, and my one chance to go was an invitation from my extended family was to stay with them and attend the Olympics, but 2020 happened. :( After reading Noah's pieces, I yearn to go.
You ask all these questions, but if someone told you the answer then I imagine you'd just call them racist. So I'm not sure why you bother asking them.
Why does the USA have more crime than Canada? Why does Chicago have more crime than Burlington? Why does Oakland have more crime than Mountain View? What could the answer possibly be?
We live in the era of Donald Trump. Like, a lot of his appeal is from the very same people who want to be able to call the very people you are pointing at by name and not being called out for it. Say it, Melvin. In a nation that sees Donald Trump fit to hold power, his presidency is essentially your permission slip.
I would not describe the '90s IE as "clean, pretty refuges." But there were some nice areas, of course.
Back when I was a student at Cal, I hated walking by People's Park. I didn't really acknowledge its history because I couldn't imagine anything good wanting to claim that dump as its legacy. That hasn't changed.
Also, Dumpster Muffin and her ilk sitting in trees to block the stadium renovations had already got me riled up against the anti-development crowd. Plus, the atrocious Berkeley housing market during DotCom 1.0 was quite radicalizing.
True about the Inland Empire. Even back in the 1990s and before, when there were a lot fewer people, the Inland Empire had a social-geographic caste system. It had various names, but one was the "Bermuda Triangle" (the 15, 215 and 60 freeways), and it encompasses the cities of Fontana, Rialto and San Bernardino. Despite plenty of jobs and lots of single-family housing, this is the area that gets looked down upon as a crime-infested crapsack. Fontana is disparagingly referred to as "Fontucky." Route 66 (Foothill Boulevard) is the Inland Empire's 8 Mile Road, where people living north of it look down upon people living south of it.
I've called it Fontucky forever. But I've spent a decent amount of my adult life in the 909 (and lived just off Foothill). San Bernardino, Rialto, and South Fontana are still pretty rough. Norton AFB closing was crushing. Rancho and Redlands have long been the fancy burbs. Loma Linda is for the Adventists. Riverside is big enough to be pretty mixed, though Mo Valley is still Mo Valley. I can never quite figure out Ontario (but love the airport).
I'm one of the people who consider the IE to start east of the 15 and not at the SB county line (Montclair).
Redlands has great bones, as does downtown Riverside. Redlands is something from another place and time, where there is a private liberal arts university and it's very woody. It looks like a New England college town.
Redlands and Riverside benefitted from the late 19th century citrus farming boom, and the farmers were civic-minded and built a lot of great infrastructure that they still preserved into the 21st century. Today, the Redlands boom is from the geographic information services firm Esri.
On the other side of the county line, the other gem city is Claremont, which neighbors Montclair (see what they did there?). Montclair is generally known for the mall next to I-10 and the Metrolink train station and bus transit center. Montclair was trying to get the mall to colonize the transit center by making essentially a large parking lot an extension of the shopping center, but nothing came of it.
Claremont, on the other hand, is like Redlands, only much more so. The Claremont Colleges are much larger than U of Redlands, and they are integrated into the urban fabric (not a walled garden campus). The train station looks out toward the walkable downtown, and the whole city is an easy walk to the center. It's also got a mix of single-family and multifamily housing, and everything is close by. It's just really expensive.
I lived in Claremont too. I don't consider it the IE but it's beautiful. "City of Trees and Ph.D.s" They were doing outreach for the Gold Line while I was there and some redevelopment projects that I obviously supported. Some of the redevelopment already happened but the Gold Line was cut short at Pomona until they get more funding.
It'll still go to Claremont, but stop there. The San Bernardino County transportation board decided against extending the train past the county line to Ontario Airport. It's planned to be finished by the 2028 Olympics.
And the Gold Line is no more. Last summer, Metro opened its second subway under downtown L.A. The San Gabriel Valley leg of the Gold Line is now run by the A Line, meaning that it would be possible to take a one-seat ride from Claremont to Long Beach. The East L.A. leg of the Gold Line is now the E Line, extending to Santa Monica just two blocks from the pier. The Little Tokyo platform is now a subway station, and that's where the trains split.
It's better than other Anglo countries and on average is not severe; it's bad in certain specific areas (NIMBY cities in blue states).
And no, getting rid of all the construction workers and people most willing to have roommates would be a pretty bad solution. Especially as the opposite problem of a housing crisis (blight/disinvestment) is worse.
Oh good, so then you'll approve of my policy of "Give visas to anyone who asks for one, instead of requiring long wait-lists with low approval rates", right?
As Noah has written before, anti-immigration people just make everything up in service of being anti-immigration.
This is false twice over. Immigrants don't lower wages (adding people increases demand more than supply), and we've had negative illegal immigration in the 2010s (they've been leaving).
Of course you don't care, because you didn't actually look any of that up before posting it.
Do you have empirical evidence from someone who isn't Borjas? Illegal immigrants are less able to compete with your labor (because they're legal), don't have the same skill sets as you the non-college local (they don't speak English natively), they can weakly support your incomes (because they pay taxes into welfare systems but can't claim from them), etc.
More importantly all evidence I know shows this doesn't happen, not even to these figurative non-college workers. It's not a median argument, it doesn't happen to anyone. (If there's someone whose wages are lowered, it's other recent immigrants. They're the ones with the most similar skill sets.)
The same can be said about housing policy on the other side (that's the root of NIMBYism). Not every policy will help every individual person. And by all means replace the illegal immigration with legal immigration.
There's plenty of data to debate the sectoral economic effects of immigration on wages and whatnot but my point stands either way so I'm not wading into it.
There is absolutely a lack of land to build on. Where, exactly, do you plan to build? You're not building brand-new self-contained cities + suburbs + farmland in the middle of some dessert, you're bulding close to existing such things and changing them, very likely for the worse.
And please tell me at what level of US population this stops, because there really is no more room? One billion? Two billion? Whatever it is, THERE IS A LIMIT, and exceeding it will likely cause a sudden and very unpleasant collapse, an inevitability (read history) always ignored by economists.
Plenthy of ancient civilations collapsed from famine etc. The interconnected devloped world has not -- yet. But perhaps you've heard of "climate change"? There are plenty of challenges going forward, and every additional person on the planet makes them harder, not easier.
The solution to climate change is technological improvements, which benefit from new people so much that I'm certain more people is in fact the solution to it.
The main causes (bad land usage policy) aren't correlated by number of people but by where they live in specific countries.
Insightful post. I was a teen-ager in the 70s and I can say first-hand that we did feel we were casting off pointless constraints in all directions -- companies seemed sclerotic, but so did unions. Marriage looked pretty boring, whether you were straight or gay. I think we felt that previous generations had had no choice but to knuckle under (Great Depression, WWII) but that we could make a more free and more happy world.
Now it's pretty clear that some of the rules and norms that went out the window protected people from all kinds of bad outcomes. But the sense of freedom being created (not inherited) was exhilarating. I guess that is the essence of the Romantic sensibility.
There's a lovely riverfront park on the Hudson here in New York City, west of Greenwich Village. It's nice. But in the 70s (and 80s), when it was an array of ruined piers and sheds, it was wild. People went there, took their chances, did whatever they wanted. I miss that, much as I admit the park benefits more people by far.
This is a very vague statement based on "vibes" as the kids say, but it seems to me that the US has moved far in the direction of the idea that self-expression and self-assertion are the highest and best forms of freedom. The problem is, most people don't have much to say that's useful, interesting, or kind about most things (including you and me). A lot of people have who have nothing constructive to say at all have been elevated to celebrity (and in the former president's case, the highest office on Earth) by the built-in dynamics of reality TV and social media that their creators didn't intend for.
It turns out a high-trust society is nice to have and if you want one your society has to value self-awareness, tact, civic knowledge and duty, and consideration of others as well as self-expression.
A high-trust society has to value self-awareness, tact, civic knowledge and duty, and consideration of others as well as self-expression. The key phrase is "as well as"! Unfortunately, we're at an impasse between those who'd have us value those attributes OVER self-expression, and those who don't value them at all.
That's a losing proposition. In America, Tom Sawyer ALWAYS wins out over Aunt Sally; McMurphy wins out over Nurse Ratched. That's what happened in 2016.
“Obviously, the state of California and the city of Berkeley are in a severe housing crisis, caused by stubborn refusal to build new housing.”
This is a such a BS narrative. Nobody has the right to affordable housing to some of the most desirable real estate in the country. And the people who already own real estate in that area can set the rules that maintain their high property values.
Pulling up the ladder is always on one's temporary self interest, but in this case, setting those rules is also a mechanism for denying property rights
The role of government is not to have men with guns arrest people for *building houses* to protect the economic viability of people who want to sit with their thumbs up their asses extracting wealth for doing fuckall.
Property rights are not the right for you to control your neighbors property, especially when those actions have externalities that affect all the towns around them too.
You didn’t actually refute the existence of a housing crisis, or that it’s caused by a refusal to build housing. You just said that people have a right to not do anything about it. I don’t see how that makes the narrative BS.
Also, thinking about rights is a zero-sum mindset. It’s possible to build more housing *and* increase property values *and* lower rents *and* have more tax revenue to make the community a nice place to live.
It sure can. Preventing infill developments is a choice, and one we don't have to make. If there is something magical about a place that makes a bunch of people want to live there, policies that prevent that don't make sense. Whatever discomfort some may have from having more density around them is greatly offset by the benefit of having a bunch of middle class families being able to make a life for themselves in a great place to live.
Lower density might be an aspect of what's "magical about a place." Nantucket wouldn't be so magical if it were more like Hong Kong. The same is true for much of San Francisco (even those endless rows of quiet bungalows out in the Avenues).
People's Park is another story, however. That pig-sty is no Nantucket. Build the housing.
When I was a kid, I thought that cities grew just based on demand. If more people live in a place, someone buys out lower density residential/commercial properties and builds higher dinsity ones, to meet need. Far as I can tell this is how it used to be, but no longer is. Most of the dense cities that are magnets for people today would not be allowed to be built if we let people have a veto on them back in the day. I'm sure a sparsely populated farmland was someone's magical version of Manhattan too. I'm not sorry we allowed it to get dense though.
"Dense cities are magnets for people today"? You seem to be implying that density makes those places "magnets" -- but (urbanist hype notwithstanding) many (if not most) people don't want to live crammed together, stacked and packed; they prefer private space over living among crowds. Check out Houston's (zoning-free, suburban) Chinatown, or Milpitas, CA. For that matter, Silicon Valley was born in suburbia.
To the suburbanite, Manhattan is great -- as an artifact or theme park. Indeed, many of those charming European "Old Towns" have parking underneath.
I still believe that high prices reduce demand and low prices increase demand, even more so with remote work. Zillow says the hottest real estate markets for 2024 are Cleveland, Columbus and Buffalo. People say they are great places to raise a family. We need to fight NIMBYism but having price on your side really helps.
Don't trust "hot" lists. They are mostly SEO-bait.
If you want to move to Cleveland or Buffalo, you should do some due diligence. Understand that for decades, they have been depopulating and the core cities' populations are less than half of what they were at their peaks due to structural Rust Belt economic woes.
Since Zillow exists to service real estate transactions, what's hot for Zillow might be freezer burn for homeowners. If depopulation trends continue, you've caught a falling knife and will be underwater on your home purchase.
Depopulating cities also have the problems of very tough labor markets to break into, unless you are going there to establish a small business from the ground up. Much of the jobs in order to cover the costs of mortgage, taxes and living expenses are likely to be in non-tradeable private businesses or the public sector, so expect a lot of competition for a job you might not like and worry about low turnover in other jobs should you decide to exit.
"Walking by it, the upper-class professionals of tomorrow and the landed homeowning gentry were forcibly reminded every day of the existence of society’s most abject castaways. As they stepped quickly and nervously past the park, the lurking presence of tents and huddled forms in the corners of their vision served as a reminder that the game they had spent their whole lives winning was one that someone had lost. And perhaps at the back of their minds, a small voice whispered: “That could have been you.”"
This, uh... reads like you are talking about a transgressive public art installation
maybe we should just get actors to portray the junkies and homeless, so that we can have this experience without the actual suffering involved
Obviously if we could create a society with no homelessness or drug addiction, I'd be in favor of that.
But given that such problems do exist, I question the wisdom of keeping the people who suffer from them forever locked out of sight, so that the masses of people forget they even exist...
Not to worry, just head to the Berkeley BART station or any highway underpass. Or walk a mile or two south to Oakland. The modern day version of People’s Park lives on - from Berkeley and Oakland west to the SF Civic Center.
Yeah. This was why in media in the 1970's and earlier, places like asylums were conceived as complete mysteries and horrible places where every human malady was concentrated (which they somewhat were, even though those portrayals may have been exaggerated). It's pretty likely that, just as concentrating poverty is bad, concentrating mentally ill people and drug users in an asylum is bad.
Locked out of sight in a secure facility where they can get the long term supportive care they need? That’s exactly what needs to happen!
Some people are so susceptible to drugs and alcohol that they can’t exist in a world in which they have access to
those things. Some people are so mentally ill that they are unable to care for themselves. That’s just how it is.
Nah, it’s good to force them into either treatment or prison. Having them out on the streets to accost people and harm themselves just to promote a political ideology seems perverse.
The other reason to build more housing is that the existence of homeless create work for the social services sector.
When we talk about the litany of issues people experiencing homelessness face -- mental illness, drug use, the need to obtain social services, etc. -- we also need large numbers of not-homeless people who are not mentally ill, drug users and not poor to be able to take care of their own lives as well as the lives of people who can't take care of their own.
This is the "wraparound services" or "continuum of care" you often hear about. There are two intractable macro problems:
1. These wraparound services need to be provided for the homeless person's entire life. While a path to self-sufficiency is part of the continuum of care, removing any part of it will cause the homeless person to relapse into pathological behaviors.
2. Social services are Baumoled -- it is necessarily cost-diseased because it involves a lot of face-to-face human interaction that can't be made more productive through technology or resources that can be scaled.
Similarly, it's easy for people to forget that diarrhea exists, when it is hidden away quietly in toilets. Those who suffer from diarrhea should shit on the street so that we not forget that this problem exists.
What other problems should we take care to remind ourselves of every day? Perhaps instead of burying drunk driving victims we can tape them to the sides of buildings so that their rotting corpses can remind us not to drink drive.
But we don't want to _just_ house the homeless. We want to get them into housing close to both the services they need to resolve issues like drugs and mental health, and near jobs that they're qualified for.
If the only place a low-income person can afford to live is a three hour commute away from the city center, then there's no way for people in the city center to hire for low-wage jobs, and some jobs just _fundamentally_ have to either be low-wage, or not get done, because they're not terribly productive -- hiring a marginal worker doesn't add enough to the income of the business to pay more than a low wage. This is pretty much the norm for retail and restaurants. So if you want retail with actual workers at the cash registers instead of Amazon-style camera surveillance and self-checkout, and if you want wait-staff to be a thing instead of ordering from a phone at your table, then we need to build a lot more cheap housing near where you want those things to exist.
The average homeless person is at minimum months away from being able to hold down a job. To pretend like they are just one San Francisco studio away from working is delusional.
The Berkeley hills seem like a terrible place for them to find housing that's close to jobs that they're qualified for.
Lots of low-skilled agricultural work available in the Central Valley, though. Why not start building tent cities out there?
I'm not going to debate the entire content of a book ( https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ ) in this comment thread, but suffice it to say your thumbnail of a Frontline episode has this exactly backwards.
Was de-institutionalization bad? Yes. Did it _contribute_ to the homelessness crisis? Yes. Is it _the main driver_ of homelessness? Absolutely not. Furthermore homelessness _causes_ mental health and substance abuse problems, as well as being caused by them.
Mississippi has the same drug and mental health problems and the same deinstitutionalization as California, and yet homelessness is very low, because housing is cheap, and even people on drugs or with mental health problems can pay the (low) market rent for somewhere they can lock a door behind them.
The majority of _very long term_ homeless, people who are homeless for years at a time, have mental health and substance abuse problems. Some of them had those problems before they became homeless, others had a temporary crisis that spiraled.
But the vast majority of homeless in a place like the Bay Area, at any given time, are short-term homeless. Either they have jobs and yet couldn't pay the rent (due to a rent hike, or some adverse event like a health crisis), or were recently laid off. The majority of homeless are not terribly visible to you -- they're in their cars, or couch surfing, or they are on the streets briefly and they keep their heads down because they have hopes of getting out of homelessness reasonably soon. This vast majority of homeless would _absolutely_ be helped by having drastically more housing near the kind of jobs they can work. Did you know that over the course of a semester, around 20% of CA community college students spend at least one week with nowhere to sleep but a vehicle? We're not talking about drug-addled locked-ward cases here, just late-teen to twenty-something kids, whose parents either wouldn't or couldn't keep them at home, who are trying to improve their lives.
You have to learn to think of this in terms of both stocks and flows. We maintain a large stock of short-term homeless because rents are too high, and so ordinary low-wage workers are constantly at risk of flowing into homelessness. We're playing an evil game of musical chairs -- there just aren't enough homes for everyone who works here to actually live in housing here.
Then the existence of the stock of short-term homeless creates a flow of people who spiral into long-term homelessness, which is much more expensive for social services to treat (and creates a higher risk of crime and general disorder), e.g. because somebody who spends a week in a tent gets attacked while asleep, so they start taking meth to stay awake, and get hooked.
We would all collectively be much better off if we just made sure that housing was cheap in the places we want people to work. We need to add more chairs to the game, so everyone can sit.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
> Furthermore homelessness _causes_ mental health and substance abuse problems, as well as being caused by them
How does homelessness make you a drug addict? Do people sneak up and inject heroin into your veins while you're sleeping?
I've honestly never understood what's so difficult about not taking drugs. Did they not teach "drugs are bad" at your school?
Warehousing people is cheap. America was vastly poorer in 1942 and yet built plenty of barracks very quickly. Feeding people is also cheap.
The cost of warehousing people depends greatly on what kind of people they are. Warehousing well-disciplined soldiers is easy. Even warehousing ordinary people who'd rather get out (e.g. internment camps) is not that tricky.
But warehousing the absolute dregs of society, half of whom cannot take care of themselves and half of whom are determined to prey on others, is very difficult. You need a massive guard presence or it turns into a horror show.
Or if we need reminding, maybe we should have People's Park on every street! You can't have too much of a terrible thing.
Who are you? And what have you done with Noah Smith? Noah is king of the YIMBYs. An arch Japan stan. A rationalist. The most articulate proponent for allocating scarce resources in a utility-maximizing way. A supporter of the social-mobility engine of public universities. Do you even like rabbits? Please let me know where I can contribute to the GoFundMe to pay his ransom.
Well, one thing you may not know about Japan is that they reserve sections of even the nicest public parks for homeless people to pitch their tents...
This will have something to do with the lack of crime and drug addiction in homelessness communities in Japan. Draconian law enforcement and social stigma has ensured that.
Not necessarily the lack of drug addiction; meth addiction is sadly widespread among the homeless.
Does Japan have the problem of a drug trade flourishing where U.S. military installations are?
>We need a muscular, realist, rational left that is properly skeptical of dreamers and hippies.
+1000. The left was very successful in the 20th century because it focused on diffuse benefits and concentrated costs - we’ll curtail the power of the aristocracy by implementing universal suffrage, we’ll reduce disease by taxing the rich to provide universal healthcare, we’ll provide education through taxes etc. Now, the left has flipped the formula to diffuse costs and concentrated benefits - we’ll allow our pet victims to engage in antisocial behavior which gratifies us but you get to live in a worse place.
Sure, as long as the cops hold up their end of the bargain and accept proper accountability. Which, in general, they don't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/magazine/police-body-cameras-miguel-richards.html
Paywall-free version, missing the animations: http://web.archive.org/web/20240101191255/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/magazine/police-body-cameras-miguel-richards.html
How can we get to the level of community connection like in Japan? People here in Ishikawa came together after the quake, everyone helps each other and follow the common ordnance... In US we are so addicted to rebelling whenever someone tells us what to do. Fight over a small park... What a shame.
1. This is probably the only column I’ve had a strong negative reaction to. Keeping dysfunctional elements in the public sphere to promote a political agenda is perverse.
2. From Matt Yglesias’ piece (which is a complement to this), we can see how both ends of the spectrum are fine with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs as long as it benefits their constituents. On the right, we see Heritage promoting local NIMBYs and SFH only zoning to benefit incumbents at the cost of making housing expensive, on the left we see the usual progressives promoting the tolerance of antisocial behavior because it benefits their pet victims (I refuse to accept their framing by using the word “marginalized”) at cost to normal people.
Genuine question wrt marginalized; I get if you’re against it’s use for racial dynamics, but it feels like it’s just an accurate descriptor for homeless people? They absolutely aren’t the center of our society. Granted, it’s anecdotal from some first responders I know, but people in the city next to my hometown would literally step over ODd folk on the sidewalk.
Unless you’re really pissed about the change from it’s old literary meaning with like, writing in margins and such. I think that would be maybe silly but I’d get it.
The problem with "marginalised" is that it puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. It implies that society's reaction to these people, rather than the actions of the people themselves, is the problem.
Being "marginalised" is a passive thing, it's something done by others to you. It carries an unspoken implication that if only we'd all stop being so mean to these people then they wouldn't have a problem.
I wrote in an old post here on Noahpinion why I have a problem with marginalization as a concept. As a liberal, I hope people to the left of me in My Tribe will accept it as constructive criticism of a flawed concept.
The notion of "marginalization" can be metaphorically represented by the playground game King of the Mountain. It's where a large group of people form a large circle and the objective is for the winner (or winners) to run into a small circle in the center and hold off other people outside of the circle from pushing them out in order to win the game.
Marginalization is basically any person who falls outside of the winners circle, because the game will necessarily involve someone not only trying to force themselves into the winner's circle, but also must watch their back from an opponent trying to push them outward.
This is not the opposite of a rightwing worldview (zero-sum stakes, might makes right, hierarchy, etc.), but rather a mirror image of it from the standpoint of the game's loser. They see the center and the margin as essential states of the human condition that are unchangeable, but covet not being able to enjoy the glory of being in the center because they can never win by playing the game (they may be small and lack the strength and agility to outmaneuver their opponents).
This harbors ressentiment, or the notion that some outside force is the cause or obstacle to one's personal frustrations and there is a desire but an inability to reflect that rage back to that force.
Marginalization worldviews also foreclose possibilities of cooperation (like: instead of King of the Mountain, let's play a European-style board game that offers multiple strategies and the possibility of multiple winners), sympathy and empathy, mutual respect, fair play, etc.
So I expounded more here:
https://madogiwazoku.substack.com/p/on-pet-victim-protection
Basically, I view “marginalized” as a term to engender sympathy for their pet victims (the same way leftists like to describe riots coming from the same as “uprisings”). Whatever sympathy I have for vagrants is gone, so I refuse to accord them the sympathetic phrase.
As someone who grew up in the chaos and crime of 1960s-70s Berkeley, I strongly disagree with your romanticism here. The initial riots were bad (my school was shut down). The disorder was bad. Walking by the encampment (I won’t dignify it with the term “park”) was always scary. Seeing homelessness is bad: most of them were drug addicts, not avatars of a free frontier. They were there because of a misguided belief in freedom, the freedom to be dysfunctional, criminal, and self-indulgent.
As an adult I reject 1960s romanticism because I saw what it did to children (broke up my family, drew many into destructive cults), our public spaces, and basic social norms. If Berkeley had made the effort to maintain norms of social order, rather than to celebrate their breakdown, perhaps we wouldn’t be in some of fixes we are in today.
Unfortunately most liberals still believe the storybook version of the 60's. "It was all about peace, love, and ending oppression. Shh, don't talk about the sexual abuse at the communes, the decade of violence and rioting that sprang forth from the civil rights movement, the discussion of how young is too young that was the predictable result of the sexual revolution, etc."
Thank you! I often feel like I’m shouting into the wind when I describe my childhood in Berkeley, raised by hippies and cultists, surrounded by constant violence, as a terrible not a fun thing. The mythology of liberation is just so powerful.
I'm optimistic it's coming to an end. You almost never hear anyone mythologize JFK, Woodstock, and a lot of other 60's idols I remember from my childhood in the 90's. I think the sexual revolution is also on its way out as an idol. The tyranny of the Boomer Truth regime will not be forever.
Then it will be Generation X's time in the barrel.
The thing about the Boomers is that their narrative became the gospel of our country. The Gen X'ers never had nearly as much influence.
There's a reason for that. As a Generation Xer, I have to concede that everyone including and especially me that our birth cohort is worthless.
Remember the scene in "Back to the Future" where the principal catches Marty being late to school and tells him he's a slacker who will never amount to anything? Principal Strickland was right!
It was the millennials who ended up delivering the world Generation X'ers sought but failed at.
Millennials and Gen Zers are rebelling against the 1980s and '90s, our childhoods, and it's sad to watch middle-aged or elderly-adjacent Xers cling on to those decades and pick the same fights that have long been settled and the world has moved on from.
Gen Xers either died young and became heroes or lived long enough to become problematic.
You should look into Christiania in Kopenhagen. Originally one of the more developed hippie communes, it’s tolerated drug market has been taken over by assorted criminal elements, which has led to the remaining hippies (by this point old people squatting on prime real estate) to become much less hostile to the police
That sounds awesome.
It's also where those front bucketed reverse tricycle bikes were invented.
They occasionally have police sweeps there.
Apparently people now just get their drugs via MobilPay and some guys doing a GrubHub like delivery (from my friend who was shocked about how open this was at a party he was at.)
Same thing was tried in Switzerland with needle park.
They still need to be "properly ruled and trained". Government, military and police are incapable, on its own, of civilizing even itself. Society (the economy) and Public Force mutually need each other to keep civilization or progress.
+100 ding ding ding we have a winner!
Thanks.
A couple quotes:
𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘚𝘸𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘯, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘯 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺...
Personnel is policy.
𝘐𝘯 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘍𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬, 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘧𝘦𝘭𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘴. “𝘞𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘰 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘣𝘰𝘹𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘯,” 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥. “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘷𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴.”
𝘙𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘨𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴... 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘥𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨... 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 $4.67, 𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘭𝘺 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘧𝘦𝘦 𝘰𝘧... $196, 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘶𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘢, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘴 𝘱𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘴, 𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘣𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴, 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴.
𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘷𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘯𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘣𝘰𝘳𝘴.
Wish I could pick my neighbors.
[Under the new agreement] r𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥. 𝘍𝘰𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦: 𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘸𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦-𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺? “𝘐𝘵’𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴,” 𝘔𝘳. 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥.
Holy cow.
@bomag says, "Wish I could pick my neighbors."
That's how it works at co-ops in NYC!
I think it is fabulous they are removing the blight of "The People's Park." The housing situation is desperate in that area. What would be a grand idea is for the school to partner with the county to open (don't know if it is necessary to build) and operate a group home/halfway house for recovering homeless addicts. I am of the opinion that those addicted to drugs and living on the street are basically at danger to themselves and others and qualify for involuntary medical treatment (detox and drug rehab and mental health treatment with transitional housing afterwards in group homes with therapy). Allowing people to publicly commit suicide day by day is immoral.
Only in CA would a University building a dorm on a small plot of land plus being extorted by pols and activists for some tangential housing be a multi year saga and major news event stimulating odes to new futures and old ways.
Lovely fascism, darling. What's next, reeducation 'camps'????
Is that a place where taxpayers are forced at gunpoint to either work harder or sacrifice consumption so that dissolute, dysfunctional people can live on the streets being catered to by NGO activists?
What the actual fuck are you even doing on a site like this, you pitiful attempt at a
Rapeublicunt troll?
😂😂🤡
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
Actually? I DID know that. What was your first clue, genius?
Perhaps you haven't noticed that Noahpinion isn't one of the not-so-covert Reichswing blogs? LOL
well, if you disclose your suicidal tendencies to me, I will guarantee you I will Baker Act/72 hr admit to mental health to save your life. We just should not discard people who are mentally ill to the vagaries of the street, to live like rats, self medicating on street drugs laced with fentanyl and tranq so they can either literally rot or die of unintended overdose. You want to live "free", be a hermit in some wilderness. I will never feed delusional, antisocial and self harming behavior.
Wow. ASSumptions much? You know less than nothing about me, but I know more than I ever needed to know about you.
Forcing severely mentally ill people into inpatient treatment is not fascism, unless you consider most European nations to be fascist, in which case I don't know what to tell you.
Wholesale use of force is most certainly fascism, and your ignorance of the history of mental 'illness' and its constant weaponization against the poor, women, LGBTs, etc, is so abyssal that this exchange is OVER.
I shall inform the orderlies to quit giving you crayons.
I shall inform them to revoke your Kapo status.
Here's the list of commitments made, which would probably include some of the services you're mentioning.
https://peoplesparkhousing.berkeley.edu/
Granted, nothing happens smoothly in Berkeley so who knows what will actually happen? The developer for the supportive housing portion walked away (protests and CEQA) so the University is looking for a new one.
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/05/11/peoples-park-uc-berkeley-rcd-supportive-housing-project
I think this ultimately comes down to whether you care more about romanticising poverty or alleviating/ending it. For me it's a no-brainer.
I don't think it's romanticizing poverty to want to have some spaces in the world that aren't off-limits to anyone, and also aren't far removed from the general populace.
I agree that we need truly public spaces. But they become a home for the homeless, which essentially means that these public spaces involve other people trespassing on the de facto living space for the homeless, because they can't enforce property rights.
Obviously it's better that homeless people have the People's Park than having to squat under a bridge or whatever, but I'd much rather these people had private spaces, y'know? If they did then the public places really would be more of a level playing field.
I mean...yes, definitely.
Public third places are good (especially since that role has been outsourced to the commercial sector, like coffee shops)! People's Park, unfortunately, had become so inhospitable to the public that it ceased to qualify as a third place.
The thing is, for most of US history in most places the "third place" has been church. Now that the country is way less religiously observant than in the past, what will we do?
Hard to say. The US hasn't been well-designed for unplanned encounters for a while, especially those that don't require money. The Internet is kind of our new public square and that's not been going well recently.
We definitely need more third places, though. Urbanists obviously have a lot of good ways to design a city to maximize encounters. Suburban and rural areas aren't as easy, especially if people don't have kids that can force community engagement.
Just before the pandemic (February 2020) I went to the same indoor mall where my family used to run errands to get a new phone. In the late 90s and early 00s the place on Saturdays was absolutely jammed with shopping families (and Millennial kids), with playspaces and everything. It was comparatively a total ghost town a few years ago.
One of those "abandoned places" Instagram/TikTok pages had my hometown mall on it*. Stores are still open but you can guess how well they're doing based on that.
*The mall has one or two pines depending on the timeline.
That's true of malls in general. It's happening in well-to-do suburbs and exurbs as well.
The department-store anchor model, as well as indoor malls, are both dying formats. Customers have shifted to power centers, where the anchors are Walmart or Target, and the stores are clustered into disconnected "neighborhoods". Lately they've taken on adding things like playgrounds or fountains surrounded by tables where people can eat.
Also, in urban gridded areas, main streets have been coming back into vogue. Wide boulevards are narrowed to slow traffic, and parallel parking becomes diagonal. The parklet, a pandemic-era innovation to allow outdoor dining on commandeered street parking spaces, has proven to be so popular cities are working to make alfresco dining permanent and replace the parking with a garage or central lot where people park once, pay, and walk around.
Public libraries FTW!!! 😊
Yo idk how else to contact you - there’s a bot impersonating you spamming in the comments on this post
I shall ban its ass
We have those. They're called parks. Every city has them, and they should be kept free of open air drug use and violent lunatics.
And how many corruption scandals have ruined projects like the proposed one? "Alleviating/ending" poverty is the opposite of a 'no-brainer' (*vomits at cliche*) ; it is instead a horrendously complex problem entwined with systemic racism and hatred like a tumor wrapped around a vital organ. We'll be lucky if this tumor is even operable.
It may not be a no-brainer, but the truth is liberal groups like the ACLU have completely blocked solutions to the problem. If we could commit obviously insane people and ban outdoor camping the problem would immediately improve.
RIght. sure. Anything you say.
The number of people living on the streets has skyrocketed since the ninth circuit ruled that you couldn't ban outdoor camping in cities.
Bye.
I think the problem of current homelessness is because most people now have zero tolerance for taking in other people as 'lodgers'. When I was a kid growing up in london UK I do not remember seeing homeless people like these anywhere - but many people had 'lodgers', who were sometimes not even family, living in their homes. But people then were living a much more lean life so having a little money coming in from a 'lodger' was a good means to improve your financial standing. Such lodgers often acted as child-minders, did odd jobs around the house or even helped in the garden. In my working class neighborhood all the homes were occupied by multiple people - nowadays so many houses have ONE lone human living in them ! I currently have one son living in my home, but in prior years I too was alone in a 3 bed house - it would not have occurred to me to 'take in a lodger' as the phrase used to be - but that is what many people did years ago ! Food for thought ? Maybe a way the Gov't could get creative with stipends for such ?
Yes, the biggest cause of the housing crisis is often overlooked: plummeting household size. It's causing shortages even in cities with shrinking populations
Having Lodgers is common in many cities, but their zoning has to allow it. Building codes have raised the floor cost and likely destroyed the low end of the market needed to curve homelessness.
A good piece... a mix of changing realities and romantic nostalgia for a bygone time (which mostly never existed).
I’ve never believed in People’s Park. 99% of Berkeley have never stepped foot into the so-called people’s park. They were scared to do so. They were disgusted by the filth and absence of hygiene. Afraid of knifings and violent arguments between mentally ill denizens of the park.
When my grandkids were little, I would never have taken them inside that park.
None of my other Berkeley friends ever took their kids to People's Park -- and don’t now take their grandkids there. Neither I nor any non-homeless citizens ever picnic there, ever take a blanket and read a book while lying in the sunshine. Sane people keep their distance and avoid setting foot in People's Park because it is not safe there.
I understand that there’s a lot of nostalgia that hovers around People’s Park… and lots of thoughts about a people’s revolution that represents feelings of that time -- a people's revolution that never arrived, never had a positive impact..
If People’s Park was indeed a place that Berkeley citizens could and did enjoy for decades, I’d be protesting its demise. Alas, it’s never been a park for the people. It’s time to let that delusion fade away.
Funny - I'm a Lib who needs trees ! That meant when I was a divorcee deciding to buy my own home I looked around for where the trees were - and located a far flung not-quite suburb where trees & almost-mountains prevailed. That meant an hourly+ ride to work, but to me it was worth it, at least at the weekends I could enjoy the trees & my small home is sitting in the middle of an acre of hilly land. This NJ area is still a bit 'forgotten' compared to similar commutes elsewhere over the past 20+ yrs. I dealt with the rush hour crush by simply leaving my house at 6.0am & relaxing the other end ! So yes there are STILL places within a 90 minute commute to the NJ-NYC metro area where you can find countryside & a wonderful air of freedom ! I'm retired now but that ride to work was very enjoyable anyway - music & lots of greenery almost all the way & time to think, not at all stressful !
I commute on the train twice a week. Long commutes but I get lots of reading done.
You should relocate to Sacramento. If you have the means, you could buy your own single-family Victorian home on a tree-lined street ... and live in the heart of downtown!
Or tell everyone you're moving to Poverty Ridge, where poverty is a Victorian home on a tree-lined street with Teslas and BMWs parked out front.
I lived in Warren County NJ. Loved it until Rt78 and Rt80 brought the City to the Country. Evolution is constant. I retired to NM!
Noah, I love your Substack, but I disagree with you most strongly on this one.
You wrote:
"Police are called to the park about five times a day, on average, and there’s about one violent crime there every five days."
And then:
"There are few spaces left in the developed world that exclude absolutely no one."
Ponder those two sentences and notice their inherent contradiction. Do you honestly believe that a place where a violent crime is committed every 5 days excludes no one? It's the difference between *de jure* and *de facto*. Sure, on paper, it excludes no one. In practice, it sure as hell excludes anyone with young children, any frail 5'2" woman who rightly feels she wouldn't be able to fight off an assailant, and more generally, anyone who cares about their physical safety more than a vague feeling of "anarchic chaos," as most middle-class people do. Call me a boring normie, but this park sounds like a net negative for the community and it needs to go YESTERDAY.
"The suburbs of these cities will be speckled with rowhouses and low-rises and duplexes and missing-middle housing of all sorts, while city centers will slowly open themselves to high-rise housing. The country won’t become Tokyo or Manhattan, but it’ll look a little more like Germany."
Yes. This is GOOD. This is a GOOD THING. I want us to look more like Europe, I want more walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, not sprawling-ass suburbs where you have to drive freaking everywhere. I understand nostalgia for a wild frontier, but it can't be the basis of rational public policy in the Year of Our Lord 2024. The world has changed.
I think if Americans go out in the world more and see other cities as they are, we would come to an uncomfortable realization that the answer to "Why are American cities so dangerous?" has to be answered by rephrasing the question as ... "Why are dangerous cities so American?"
You don't even have to go across an ocean. You can go to Canada -- all but a couple of provinces speak English (and the francophone ones are bilingual) and you will generally find the same brands and cars to make it seem less "foreign." Canada has guns and diversity, yet people manage not to shoot one another in the street.
Density is also not making people deranged. Crime does exist, but not at the same scope and scale as American cities. More importantly, it's much rarer to see public displays of vagrancy and dereliction -- those behaviors that don't rise to property or violent crime but signal that individuals are inconsiderate assholes incapable of functioning in society. Like being noisy drunks, men physically and verbally harassing women, people who go on violent rages for making eye contact, and the like.
America incarcerates and punishes more people on a relative and absolute basis than anywhere else in the world, so the carceral state doesn't serve as negative reinforcement for corrective behavior.
Again, you don't see this anywhere in the world except in war zones or in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, where material conditions are much worse and institutional trust is much lower or nonexistent.
Alon Levy pointed this out in his Pedestrian Observation blog, but he focuses narrowly on the abysmal state of transit infrastructure. He notes that the high costs and low quality of American infrastructure is endemic to America (Why is American transit so expensive? is really Why is expensive transit so American? and Levy shows myriad examples). His framework applies to American culture as a whole.
Well, I was going to just hit "like", but it wasn't strong enough. Having been in Tokyo, Seoul, and other far more dense cities, the experience is very different.... And that has been true for a long time - not just in NIMBY time or even since Reagan. "individuals are inconsiderate assholes".....
My son living in Tokyo said something very profound that I like to repeat - "the primary rule in Japan is don't be a dick"
I've never been to Tokyo, and my one chance to go was an invitation from my extended family was to stay with them and attend the Olympics, but 2020 happened. :( After reading Noah's pieces, I yearn to go.
You ask all these questions, but if someone told you the answer then I imagine you'd just call them racist. So I'm not sure why you bother asking them.
Why does the USA have more crime than Canada? Why does Chicago have more crime than Burlington? Why does Oakland have more crime than Mountain View? What could the answer possibly be?
Melvin, I'm not taking your bait.
We live in the era of Donald Trump. Like, a lot of his appeal is from the very same people who want to be able to call the very people you are pointing at by name and not being called out for it. Say it, Melvin. In a nation that sees Donald Trump fit to hold power, his presidency is essentially your permission slip.
I would not describe the '90s IE as "clean, pretty refuges." But there were some nice areas, of course.
Back when I was a student at Cal, I hated walking by People's Park. I didn't really acknowledge its history because I couldn't imagine anything good wanting to claim that dump as its legacy. That hasn't changed.
Also, Dumpster Muffin and her ilk sitting in trees to block the stadium renovations had already got me riled up against the anti-development crowd. Plus, the atrocious Berkeley housing market during DotCom 1.0 was quite radicalizing.
True about the Inland Empire. Even back in the 1990s and before, when there were a lot fewer people, the Inland Empire had a social-geographic caste system. It had various names, but one was the "Bermuda Triangle" (the 15, 215 and 60 freeways), and it encompasses the cities of Fontana, Rialto and San Bernardino. Despite plenty of jobs and lots of single-family housing, this is the area that gets looked down upon as a crime-infested crapsack. Fontana is disparagingly referred to as "Fontucky." Route 66 (Foothill Boulevard) is the Inland Empire's 8 Mile Road, where people living north of it look down upon people living south of it.
I've called it Fontucky forever. But I've spent a decent amount of my adult life in the 909 (and lived just off Foothill). San Bernardino, Rialto, and South Fontana are still pretty rough. Norton AFB closing was crushing. Rancho and Redlands have long been the fancy burbs. Loma Linda is for the Adventists. Riverside is big enough to be pretty mixed, though Mo Valley is still Mo Valley. I can never quite figure out Ontario (but love the airport).
I'm one of the people who consider the IE to start east of the 15 and not at the SB county line (Montclair).
Redlands has great bones, as does downtown Riverside. Redlands is something from another place and time, where there is a private liberal arts university and it's very woody. It looks like a New England college town.
Redlands and Riverside benefitted from the late 19th century citrus farming boom, and the farmers were civic-minded and built a lot of great infrastructure that they still preserved into the 21st century. Today, the Redlands boom is from the geographic information services firm Esri.
On the other side of the county line, the other gem city is Claremont, which neighbors Montclair (see what they did there?). Montclair is generally known for the mall next to I-10 and the Metrolink train station and bus transit center. Montclair was trying to get the mall to colonize the transit center by making essentially a large parking lot an extension of the shopping center, but nothing came of it.
Claremont, on the other hand, is like Redlands, only much more so. The Claremont Colleges are much larger than U of Redlands, and they are integrated into the urban fabric (not a walled garden campus). The train station looks out toward the walkable downtown, and the whole city is an easy walk to the center. It's also got a mix of single-family and multifamily housing, and everything is close by. It's just really expensive.
I lived in Claremont too. I don't consider it the IE but it's beautiful. "City of Trees and Ph.D.s" They were doing outreach for the Gold Line while I was there and some redevelopment projects that I obviously supported. Some of the redevelopment already happened but the Gold Line was cut short at Pomona until they get more funding.
It'll still go to Claremont, but stop there. The San Bernardino County transportation board decided against extending the train past the county line to Ontario Airport. It's planned to be finished by the 2028 Olympics.
And the Gold Line is no more. Last summer, Metro opened its second subway under downtown L.A. The San Gabriel Valley leg of the Gold Line is now run by the A Line, meaning that it would be possible to take a one-seat ride from Claremont to Long Beach. The East L.A. leg of the Gold Line is now the E Line, extending to Santa Monica just two blocks from the pier. The Little Tokyo platform is now a subway station, and that's where the trains split.
If the US housing problem is so severe, shouldn't we be shutting down immigration?
It's better than other Anglo countries and on average is not severe; it's bad in certain specific areas (NIMBY cities in blue states).
And no, getting rid of all the construction workers and people most willing to have roommates would be a pretty bad solution. Especially as the opposite problem of a housing crisis (blight/disinvestment) is worse.
Those folks would have been legal before Eisenhower.
Or, y'know, if they'd just bothered to get visas like everyone else.
Oh good, so then you'll approve of my policy of "Give visas to anyone who asks for one, instead of requiring long wait-lists with low approval rates", right?
No, but I'd definitely support replacing long wait lists with some kind of sensible criteria based on skills, health, genetics etc.
Why is that bad? If construction wages go up, we’ll build even less housing.
People want to make more money than they make? Wow, incredible insight here. You should publish this.
As Noah has written before, anti-immigration people just make everything up in service of being anti-immigration.
This is false twice over. Immigrants don't lower wages (adding people increases demand more than supply), and we've had negative illegal immigration in the 2010s (they've been leaving).
Of course you don't care, because you didn't actually look any of that up before posting it.
Do you have empirical evidence from someone who isn't Borjas? Illegal immigrants are less able to compete with your labor (because they're legal), don't have the same skill sets as you the non-college local (they don't speak English natively), they can weakly support your incomes (because they pay taxes into welfare systems but can't claim from them), etc.
More importantly all evidence I know shows this doesn't happen, not even to these figurative non-college workers. It's not a median argument, it doesn't happen to anyone. (If there's someone whose wages are lowered, it's other recent immigrants. They're the ones with the most similar skill sets.)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-immigration-doesnt-reduce-wages
Why shut down economically beneficial immigration to support housing policies that are economically harmful? Just fix the housing policies.
The same can be said about housing policy on the other side (that's the root of NIMBYism). Not every policy will help every individual person. And by all means replace the illegal immigration with legal immigration.
There's plenty of data to debate the sectoral economic effects of immigration on wages and whatnot but my point stands either way so I'm not wading into it.
Nah, you just want to repeat rehearsed talking points on illegal immigration. I'm not interested in facilitating that further, sorry.
No.
There is absolutely a lack of land to build on. Where, exactly, do you plan to build? You're not building brand-new self-contained cities + suburbs + farmland in the middle of some dessert, you're bulding close to existing such things and changing them, very likely for the worse.
And please tell me at what level of US population this stops, because there really is no more room? One billion? Two billion? Whatever it is, THERE IS A LIMIT, and exceeding it will likely cause a sudden and very unpleasant collapse, an inevitability (read history) always ignored by economists.
Plenthy of ancient civilations collapsed from famine etc. The interconnected devloped world has not -- yet. But perhaps you've heard of "climate change"? There are plenty of challenges going forward, and every additional person on the planet makes them harder, not easier.
The solution to climate change is technological improvements, which benefit from new people so much that I'm certain more people is in fact the solution to it.
The main causes (bad land usage policy) aren't correlated by number of people but by where they live in specific countries.
So somehow the tech utopia we currently have just isn't quite up to snuff because of "bad land usage policy".
And how, pray tell, did we end up with THAT, if we're so good at managing human affairs?
And these "new people" who will be such a boon for technological improvements, who are they exactly?
Hamas, maybe? Houthi rebels? Pakistani rape gangs? https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/uk-grooming-gangs-british-pakistanis-minors-sexual-assault-rishi-sunak-suella-braverman-2356084-2023-04-05#
Insightful post. I was a teen-ager in the 70s and I can say first-hand that we did feel we were casting off pointless constraints in all directions -- companies seemed sclerotic, but so did unions. Marriage looked pretty boring, whether you were straight or gay. I think we felt that previous generations had had no choice but to knuckle under (Great Depression, WWII) but that we could make a more free and more happy world.
Now it's pretty clear that some of the rules and norms that went out the window protected people from all kinds of bad outcomes. But the sense of freedom being created (not inherited) was exhilarating. I guess that is the essence of the Romantic sensibility.
There's a lovely riverfront park on the Hudson here in New York City, west of Greenwich Village. It's nice. But in the 70s (and 80s), when it was an array of ruined piers and sheds, it was wild. People went there, took their chances, did whatever they wanted. I miss that, much as I admit the park benefits more people by far.
This is a very vague statement based on "vibes" as the kids say, but it seems to me that the US has moved far in the direction of the idea that self-expression and self-assertion are the highest and best forms of freedom. The problem is, most people don't have much to say that's useful, interesting, or kind about most things (including you and me). A lot of people have who have nothing constructive to say at all have been elevated to celebrity (and in the former president's case, the highest office on Earth) by the built-in dynamics of reality TV and social media that their creators didn't intend for.
It turns out a high-trust society is nice to have and if you want one your society has to value self-awareness, tact, civic knowledge and duty, and consideration of others as well as self-expression.
A high-trust society has to value self-awareness, tact, civic knowledge and duty, and consideration of others as well as self-expression. The key phrase is "as well as"! Unfortunately, we're at an impasse between those who'd have us value those attributes OVER self-expression, and those who don't value them at all.
That's a losing proposition. In America, Tom Sawyer ALWAYS wins out over Aunt Sally; McMurphy wins out over Nurse Ratched. That's what happened in 2016.
Willie Nelson for President!
“Obviously, the state of California and the city of Berkeley are in a severe housing crisis, caused by stubborn refusal to build new housing.”
This is a such a BS narrative. Nobody has the right to affordable housing to some of the most desirable real estate in the country. And the people who already own real estate in that area can set the rules that maintain their high property values.
Pulling up the ladder is always on one's temporary self interest, but in this case, setting those rules is also a mechanism for denying property rights
of a minority of the owners.
The role of government is not to have men with guns arrest people for *building houses* to protect the economic viability of people who want to sit with their thumbs up their asses extracting wealth for doing fuckall.
Property rights are not the right for you to control your neighbors property, especially when those actions have externalities that affect all the towns around them too.
You didn’t actually refute the existence of a housing crisis, or that it’s caused by a refusal to build housing. You just said that people have a right to not do anything about it. I don’t see how that makes the narrative BS.
Also, thinking about rights is a zero-sum mindset. It’s possible to build more housing *and* increase property values *and* lower rents *and* have more tax revenue to make the community a nice place to live.
There is not a "housing crisis" in the US as a whole. The crisis is that every motherfucker wants to cram into the same five enormous coastal cities.
The solution is simple: just stop doing that. Cleveland can take more people, San Francisco cannot.
It sure can. Preventing infill developments is a choice, and one we don't have to make. If there is something magical about a place that makes a bunch of people want to live there, policies that prevent that don't make sense. Whatever discomfort some may have from having more density around them is greatly offset by the benefit of having a bunch of middle class families being able to make a life for themselves in a great place to live.
Lower density might be an aspect of what's "magical about a place." Nantucket wouldn't be so magical if it were more like Hong Kong. The same is true for much of San Francisco (even those endless rows of quiet bungalows out in the Avenues).
People's Park is another story, however. That pig-sty is no Nantucket. Build the housing.
When I was a kid, I thought that cities grew just based on demand. If more people live in a place, someone buys out lower density residential/commercial properties and builds higher dinsity ones, to meet need. Far as I can tell this is how it used to be, but no longer is. Most of the dense cities that are magnets for people today would not be allowed to be built if we let people have a veto on them back in the day. I'm sure a sparsely populated farmland was someone's magical version of Manhattan too. I'm not sorry we allowed it to get dense though.
"Dense cities are magnets for people today"? You seem to be implying that density makes those places "magnets" -- but (urbanist hype notwithstanding) many (if not most) people don't want to live crammed together, stacked and packed; they prefer private space over living among crowds. Check out Houston's (zoning-free, suburban) Chinatown, or Milpitas, CA. For that matter, Silicon Valley was born in suburbia.
To the suburbanite, Manhattan is great -- as an artifact or theme park. Indeed, many of those charming European "Old Towns" have parking underneath.
Probably with a pleasant medium-density island of about 1.5 million people. I'm not seeing a big problem here.
I still believe that high prices reduce demand and low prices increase demand, even more so with remote work. Zillow says the hottest real estate markets for 2024 are Cleveland, Columbus and Buffalo. People say they are great places to raise a family. We need to fight NIMBYism but having price on your side really helps.
Don't trust "hot" lists. They are mostly SEO-bait.
If you want to move to Cleveland or Buffalo, you should do some due diligence. Understand that for decades, they have been depopulating and the core cities' populations are less than half of what they were at their peaks due to structural Rust Belt economic woes.
Since Zillow exists to service real estate transactions, what's hot for Zillow might be freezer burn for homeowners. If depopulation trends continue, you've caught a falling knife and will be underwater on your home purchase.
Depopulating cities also have the problems of very tough labor markets to break into, unless you are going there to establish a small business from the ground up. Much of the jobs in order to cover the costs of mortgage, taxes and living expenses are likely to be in non-tradeable private businesses or the public sector, so expect a lot of competition for a job you might not like and worry about low turnover in other jobs should you decide to exit.