This remains one of the dumbest and bonkers racist thing ever attempted, but I’ll admit Noah’s paragraph on anarchy not being a form of welfare is probably a fairer take on the minds of the progressives.
The gangs are not very organized,so you just cant use RICO and conspiracy laws to bring them down like the cartel or mob. Two kids can be in the same gang,and not even know each other. There is no central point of control.
Sounds like Chicago gangs have the same kind of cellular structure that terrorist organizations use to confound the authorities: why aren't all criminal gangs organized like that?
You need the hierarchical structure to funnel all the funds to the top. The goal isn't crime for crime sake, but to selfishly profit off crime. A less centralized structure might be more robust against law enforcement but also probably doesn't generate as much money for the leadership.
The thing with militarized approaches to organized crime is that they lead governments to militarize the rest of society, including the political institutions. Eventually you find yourself in a soft authoritarian police state or you spark an actual war with armed gangs like in Colombia and Mexico.
<One could argue that the loss of civil liberties and authoritarianism is worth it.>
True, but that's basically what the Chinese Communist Party (and many other dictators in the Global South) argue: we provide prosperity in exchange for political control. I'm not unsympathetic to this argument, but this line of reasoning kinda undercuts Joe Biden's "democracy v. autocracy" shtick as well as Noah's warnings about an expansionist "Axis of Evil." International human rights don't mesh well with a permissive attitude toward modernizing dictatorships; just ask the ruling communists in China and Vietnam.
Chicago is the one with the pension problem he mentioned - IIRC it's actually a state level issue, but once it comes due their budget is toast unless they default on it.
For the moment though, it actually has lower levels of the other problems; housing is pretty cheap, it's nice enough downtown, you can touch the Bean.
Ironically, one of the reasons Silicon Valley exists is California overpromising on their pensions. It means CalPERS had to accept tons of risk and invest in tech startups.
I understand the impulse, but bear in mind that (A) hardly anyone ever campaigned on "decriminalizing crime" (unless your talking about lighter penalties or decriminalizing drug consumption, in which case you should be more precise in your language) and (B) most of the impetus behind criminal justice reform came from black and brown intellectuals like Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Brown Alexander. White liberals (and leftists) largely hopped on the criminal justice reform bandwagon because they take their political/social cues from the intellectual/educated strata of minority populations.
“White liberals … take their political/social cues from the intellectual/educated strata of minority populations.”
The ethnic activist types claiming to represent the people while holding views that are FAR to the left of those very people they claim to represent, and the white progressives going along with this charade and telling themselves they have the consent of the XYZ people because the clowns at XYZ-studies department agreed with them, is not some minor mistake. It is exactly kind of the cultural elitism being refuted right now.
It kills me that some of those very far left intellectuals who have an outsized voice may not even vote, they have no solutions to any of the problems they pose either, but they can sure spend all day waxing poetic about problems and who is at fault. It's like they love the moral superiority but don't actually care about governing, or care about the real-world impact of their suggested policy stances. For what it is worth I think Michelle Alexander is not nearly as bad as Ibram Kendi, but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say.
I'm not saying it's a minor mistake. I'm saying white progressives didn't cook this stuff up by themselves (or even originally). I'm assigning some responsibility onto upper-middle class minority intellectuals, who by and large are the very "ethnic activists" you seem to be criticizing. This is mainly because many critiques of woke politics lazily criticize white progressives for being too woke without properly identifying WHY they became so woke in the first place.
It's actually a self-perpetuating, elf-reinforcing symbiotic cycle.
Those minority "spokespeople" tapped for membership in the "cognitive elites" get their recognition (and their tenure) from their sponsors -- in academia, publishing, and the same sorts of foundations that sponsor NPR. And THEN their white counterparts (or acolytes) -- the "junior division" -- are ready and waiting to sign on (with guest appearances and glowing reviews).
What else are ANY of these people expected to do with a double major in Nonprofit Management and Ethnic Studies?
SF has a love hate relationship with tech. They love the tax revenues from tech booms but when people in tech are fed up with poor governance and urban disorder and want changes, progressives in charge want them to mind their own business. Progressives continue to demonize the tech industry while using us as their piggy banks.
Sounds like the conservative backlash in FL against Disney for being too "woke". GOP policies against Disney--a rather prominent US corporation, mind you--reduced its profits, and also hurt direct investment in the FL economy.
Or what about the anti-Gay push by the GOP in North Carolina a few years ago? That smart move ended up costing the state literally billions in lost investment.
Being unwilling to reopen the state hospitals and fill them with those folks who have proven unable to care for themselves isn’t an economic issue. IIRC the cost of doing so in SF is several 10s of thousand of dollars less than is currently being spent on the problem. It’s a matter of politicians being captured by activists ideologues who are out of touch with reality.
Are you saying we need to involuntarily commit anyone who is "homeless"? The number of homeless that have nothing to do with mental illness or addiction is very high (and yes, I have worked with the homeless in a semi-rural city). Providing easy to use housing does help the homeless and reopening the hospitals to provide that is a good idea, but dubious about the "proven unable to core for themselves" part.
“The number of homeless that have nothing to do with mental illness or addiction is very high (and yes, I have worked with the homeless in a semi-rural city)”
IIRC 90% of the homeless are homeless for less than a week. They are very often people who have just fallen on hard times, had some kind of crises, etc. Then we have the chronically homeless who have been on the street for +1 years - essentially all of them have substantial mental heath and or substance abuse problems.
Yep. The sleight of hand where one quotes a statistic about all people without a permanent address, then acts as if it refers to perpetual sidewalk or subway dwellers, isn’t fooling anyone anymore.
> IIRC 90% of the homeless are homeless for less than a week.
Not only that, but they can be in a home and yet homeless. i.e. they could be sleeping on a friend's couch, or in a relationship they don't like but can't afford to break up.
Hmm, seen the same problem in some small cities that are quite red as well - more a function of folks generally being somewhat NIMBY IF it protects their property values (or is perceived to protect them)
I can't help thinking that the Great Recession helped screw up blue city governance, as what Noah said about "progressive cities are operated for the benefit of the people who get the money instead of the people who get the stuff" sounds like they were viewing city services as a jobs program.
The things you have been saying recently are really just what most people would call common sense. It's kind of shocking that so few people in politics are saying them. A question I can't seem to answer is why isn't that what we get? A majority of Republican voters and Democrat voters agree, but why isn't that what we get when we elect Democrats or Republicans?
Because people hate problems, and they also hate solutions. Examples:
1. To fix disorder, you need to give the police and citizenry a longer leash to fight back. This inevitably will result in videos of bad stuff (police abuse; security guard killing or being killed by a shoplifter.) The public revolt against this and then we're back where we started.
2. Same as above for fixing public psychosis and drug use - inevitably, there will be stories of people committed that shouldn't be, and abuses within the committing facilities.
3. Immigration - same. You have to make illegal immigration painful to stop it - this inevitably results in bad stuff happening to sympathetic people.
4. Spend issues are even harder - unions, gov't workers and non-profits will not tolerate reductions in $ headed their way without a massive fight, and all of these groups have the power to create real problems for citizens.
None of these are easy problems to solve. I think the only way you solve them is getting a very, very strong head of state (Giuliani, Bloomberg, Trump) who isn't afraid to make a lot of enemies. Progressives, in particular, are not usually comfortable with this style of governance.
It’s worth noting that Giuliani and Bloomberg were not creatures of the NY Democratic machine. They did not owe any favors to unions, government employees, and, in the 90s, declining but still influential mafia connected interest groups. In previous administrations, raids on the South street would have been pointless, because someone in the sprawling Democratic machine would have tipped someone off. Giuliani was a successful prosecutor who came to power through a coalition of outer boroughs types + democratic voters who were sick of crime. Ignoring Al Sharpton, union demands, etc.. was a feature, not a bug. Bloomberg is an insanely wealthy technocrat who ran as a Republican because it was easier, and he could never win in the democratic machine. The city GOP is a joke of an organization; Bloomberg could use it for ballot access but otherwise it was useless. The return of the Democratic machine, under De Blasio, was seen by many within that machine as overdue, with the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations as aberrations. They tried to make up for lost time with the new union contracts and so forth.
Agreed 100%. People want quick and easy solutions to complex problems. Additionally, one of my main gripes with the progressive movement is that they are definitely willing to let perfect be the enemy of good all the time.
One interesting thing about the phrase "common sense" is that it only really appears in conservative writing, and there it appears a lot. It's an extremely right coded phrase and concept. As a quick reality check of my claim compare mentions of the phrase in the NY Times vs the NY Post:
The NY Times used to have a column called Common Sense but it's not really published anything since 2020, and it's a column about business - i.e. a conservative/right coded thing. Beyond that the next results Bing serves me are an article from 2022 titled "A debate over 'common sense' gun legislation" - the concept is so awkward to the left wing ear that they put it in scare quotes. The next result after that is, "A defense of common sense" from 2005 (which is about physics), and then "The trouble with common sense" (2011) and then "The limits of common sense" from 2005 again. Even discussion of the concept is rare, and when it does appear it's treated as a highly debatable thing that probably isn't legitimate at all.
The NY Post in contrast has results like: "How a lack of common sense is killing civilization" (2023), a story from October ("Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top award"), an op-ed from Douglas Murray from January ("Argentinian prez Javier Milei kills ‘em with common sense as he scolds Davos elites") and so on. Way more prevalent and used in political contexts.
To some extent this is just the way different tribes use language as a marker, but it's also a real reflection of differences in beliefs. Is wisdom and knowledge spread out, or is it concentrated in a small elite? Believe the latter and you become a leftist, believe the former and you become a libertarian-leaning rightist.
So when you ask "why is there so little common sense in politics", it's kind of an ideologically loaded question. In blue cities the very concept of common sense isn't talked about, and if you did talk about it you'd be viewed with suspicion. The problem is that an ideology which valorizes intellectuals must also reject ideas that anyone could have come up with, and thus be very prone to capture by clever sounding nonsense, because almost by definition intellectuals must stand apart from what's common. Otherwise they have no value.
The majority of people in both blue and red cities are all highly educated. To make it seem like people in blue cities don't talk about the very concept of common sense is really reductive. I think most of us have way more in common from a beliefs perspective than we have that makes us different. You really think if made a comment that included "common sense" in a blue city you'd be looked at with suspicion? What is this Nazi Germany?
Like I'm not disagreeing that self-proclaimed intellectuals think that the world can be so easily figured out and they are overly idealistic and think they alone can solve complex problems, but the idea that if you say "common sense' or anything like that you'd be viewed with suspicion is a bit much, like that might be true for people in your circle that you met at one time in your life but it is certainly an over generalized comment.
I think if you went to a meeting of a San Francisco local government committee, and objected to a proposal on the grounds that it violated "common sense", or made a proposal and justified it by saying "this is obviously common sense", then the leftists would treat you with suspicion because you'd sound like a Republican. Yes. Try it and see.
Because modern America is based on J.S. Mill and Nietzschean postmodernism.
Mill's insists that regulating human behavior (via any means: social, legal, or economic) is legitimate only to prevent physical harm to someone else. Much of what Noah and you (rightly) call "common sense" is really an assertion that moral standards of some kind exist and can reasonably be enforced by the state. But doing that requires overturning Mill.
Collective definitions of virtue (the common good) also run contrary to postmodernism, which claims that laws in support of "the common good" are really just tools for the powerful to enforce racial or sexual or [fill in the blank] oppression. Postmodernism is the de-facto religion of our elites; the quintessential political dividing line of our day -- "what is a woman?" -- is a question that can only make sense under postmodernism. Besides, if reality is a social construction, then crime is too. (I'm not being facetious; this logic was common during BLM.)
That's why the Democrats (and plenty of old-school Never-Trump Republicans) can't just "adopt common sense" as you suggest. Because they don't believe in the common and they've been indoctrinated into a philosophy that is utterly nonsensical.
Who are these elites and Democrats, or even Never Trump Republicans that all ascribe to postmodernism? So, you are you saying that the only people who have got it all figured out are Trump and the MAGA people like MTG?
Come on Brian this is just an over sensationalized and overgeneralized take you've got here. Half the people who you are probably describing as "elites" and Dems are probably people who you know that still think about common sense and believe reality is not a social construct. Talking about "what is a woman" in abstract philosophical terms or regards to humanism is not same that we can't define a woman biologically.
I don't mean this as a defense of blue-city's terrible track record of building housing but charts like those "apartment completions, share of existing inventory" always feel a bit misleading to me. Because it doesn't really feel fair to compare, say, Pittsburgh with Phoenix. Pittsburgh is old and built-out. Founded in 1758 and a major city more or less from the beginning with a population density of 5,400 people per square mile. All the low-hanging fruit has been taken. Phoenix was founded in 1867, over 100 years later, and famously was a nothing town (only 65,000 people in 1940; Pittsburgh was something like 600,000 people are that time) until air-conditioning became widespread. And even today after all that explosive growth the population density of 3,100 per square mile is still just half of Pittsburgh.
Having lived in both cities there is just a lot more easy wins in Phoenix for housing. Pittsburgh took all the easy wins in the late 1800s. And you start to see this with Phoenix's skyrocketing housing prices as they hit natural & legal barriers. If you go to Google Maps and switch to a terrain view you can see that modern Phoenix has sprawled out to hit all the surrounding regional parks and mountains (and Indian Reservations!) It still has some areas to the northwest past Surprise and southeast past Chandler but all the local areas are soon going to run into the same issues of existing residents not wanting buildings torn down so that denser/taller apartment buildings can be built. Once you get a few blocks away from the downtown of Phoenix I'm not sure I saw anything more than 2 stories tall.
Yes it does seem to me that the red state cities are partially coasting on the fact that they have more room still available to grow. Note that Miami doesn’t make this list of fast growing cities.
And infill densification will never be able to compete on price with suburban sprawl built on virgin land even if all the NIMBYs were blasted from the face of the earth.
Not price per square foot, but it can absolutely compete on price to desirability. Buying a house in freshly built sprawl usually means you have to drive 45 minutes to work.
Which probably explains why anti-sprawl activists tend to be stereotyped as people childless by choice: having kids makes square footage far more important.
It's the parents who decide where to live though (often before the kids are even born): is it (would-be) mothers in particular who are drawn to the big suburban house over the well-located city apartment?
Miami will be under water in thirty years. As will New Orleans. Long-term real estate investment in either locale is not advised.
But it would be interesting to see how enthusiasm for Urbanism (e.g., tall-ish mixed use building centred on transit hubs) plays in terms of Red vs. Blue political affinity.
Maybe you should look up the population densities of NY, Chicago, Boston, Philly, etc and compare to Pittsburgh before claiming “the work is done”. I lived for several years in a city with 40,000+ people per square mile with the majority of housing being only 3-4 stories high. The work is not done. And people live in outlying areas because they prefer suburbs to central cities (which are generally horrible places to raise a family unless one is wealthy and can afford private schooling, overpaying for groceries and basic essentials and eating out at expensive restaurants), not because Phoenix and Pittsburgh won’t build high rises.
But if there is demand for high rises and converting duplexes to apartment blocks- let it happen
You do temporarily displace people when you replace their building with a new one, but you can pay them off and give them right of return, which helps.
Lots of great data as usual, but it does not explain the election results.
Blueprint 2024's post-election interviews of 3262 voters found "Democrats are bad at running the places they control" and "Kamala Harris is too soft on crime" ranked #17 and #18 on a list of reasons voters voted as they did, both for all voters and for swing voters.
The #1 reason for swing voters was "Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class", and this was the #3 reason for all voters, behind inflation and illegal immigration.
That is why my three posts about lessons from Trump's victory were about the things you just mentioned.
Remember, as I said in the post, the main reason to fix blue cities is for the benefit of the people who live in those cities (and the benefit of people who *could* live in them, if they built more housing). National politics is a secondary consideration.
I agree completely about the need to fix blue cities.
Your previous three election pieces did not mention the trans issue at all. I suppose you want to say that it was implicitly included in the "elites are out of touch" piece, but it was the trans issue specifically that broke my 50 year streak of supporting Democrats, and the data shows that I was not alone. If the Democrats ever want to win again, ignoring the #1 issue for swing voters is not a good plan (though most of them certainly seem to want to stick to that plan, look what's happening to poor Seth Moulton!).
And you did write here that "OK, I think I have one more election post-mortem post in me" and "at the national level, the urban revolt against probably helped usher in another four years of Donald Trump", so I think I can be forgiven for thinking that you were arguing that this was a fourth reason for Trump's win.
I promise to write something about the trans issue. But I ignored it completely for so long that it'll be a while before I have anything useful to say.
as a person who failed out of community college several times before getting my degree. I would like you to further comment on your "the non college do not have the time, talent, study habits or funds to go to college."
Because I find it insanely offensive and just flat out wrong. You talk of as every college is Stanford with vibrant night lifes, community support, students living in dorms, engaged faculty, etc. When in reality most people attend commuter colleges that has none of those things.
The graduation rate for public universities is 60%. Could you imagine any business accepting this kind of failure rate? But no, its the workers who are lazy/non talented despite going on to have productive lives and hold down demanding jobs, have families, and start businesses.
Maybe college is not a good investment for the majority of Americans as currently constructed.
Sterilizing, desexing, and mutilating thousands of gay kids each and every year in this country, on the basis of pure medical quackery, is an ongoing crime against humanity, and every Democrat in office fully supports this form of violent homophobia. In Europe, where they have not-for-profit healthcare systems that can evaluate evidence without political bias, this crime is being stopped. Not so (yet) in the US.
> Sterilizing, desexing, and mutilating thousands of gay kids each and every year in this country, on the basis of pure medical quackery, is an ongoing crime against humanity, and every Democrat in office fully supports this form of violent homophobia. In Europe, where they have not-for-profit healthcare systems that can evaluate evidence without political bias, this crime is being stopped. Not so (yet) in the US.
Mark, you do realize you think and talk more about trans issues more than anyone I've ever met right? Why is it you are obsessed with gender studies or people who are experiencing gender dysphoria, depression or may be trans?
Do you have a source for any of this that isn't a NY Post article? Like an actual data source? I've shared the below multiple times with you and yet you still overgeneralize and use exaggerated data. There is nothing wrong with getting medical treatment or support for gender dysphoria, in fact it can help prevent issues and actually in most cases prevents people from wanting to go through any type of surgery. The link you usually provide that references the Post ignores.
There are not thousands of kids that are being mutilated or sterilized each year. It was less than a thousand kids a year according to the Post article (https://nypost.com/2024/10/08/us-news/over-5700-americans-under-18-had-trans-surgery-from-2019-23/) you share a lot that leaves out a lot of context and focuses on 2 de-transitioners. You can advocate for all the things you support and still not think that gets should get surgery. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
It is just flat-out false Mark for you to claim that every person who votes Democrat fully supports surgeries or doesn't know the difference between gender and sex or intersex. Also, these same things were happening in 2016 when Trump was President. You are engaging in bad faith rhetoric. If you want to talk about facts, or how more studies need to be done, or how certain things should be banned after a certain age that is fair, but not every kid getting gender affirming care is gay let alone are they getting surgeries. That is like the last resort. Russia is the only EU country that bans gender affirming care. However, there are other countries that limit puberty blockers, HRT, etc and we can and should have honest conversations about the impact of these treatments and effectiveness for sure. However, the first line of defense is a healthy community that isn't stigmatized and psychological support. GOP politicians wanting to ban all gender affirming care isn't helpful either.
I'm aware of the Reuters data from 2017-2021, numbers are higher now, but here are the key Reuters results:
>The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021.
>Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket..
>At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.
The NYPost article sites its sources, the results are broadly consistent with the Reuters results.
Note that hormone treatment is sterilizing, and 14,726 divided by 4 years is 3681; that's thousands per year.
I'm obsessed with this because it's an ongoing crime against humanity that is being perpetrated by my tribe, the blue tribe: I've been a registered Democrat for 50 years. Because of that, I feel personally responsible to help stop it.
Whatever you think about the topic (I seriously don't know, there should be way more research before policy decisions), pediatric transitions are serious stuff and it's understandable that people care about it.
In SF during Covid, the school board focused on renaming schools and eliminating rigorous curriculum rather than making sure kids got educated and schools were reopened asap. Some of the progressive insanity helped generate a groundswell to replace several school board members.
Re-opening the schools, let alone offering algebra, was deemed racist by the progressive cabal, and anyone even daring to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, all races would benefit from schools being re-opened was canceled with extreme prejudice.
Honestly, progressives need to stay in their echo chambers sometimes. I never understood wanting to get rid of testing or math.... Again not all school systems did this, but I'm not really sure how they thought kids would have better outcomes based on that.
Republicans campaign on crazy and then dial it back in office. Democrats are sneaky and act reasonable during the campaign, then when they get into office out comes the crazy. IMO anybody who believes that men should play in women's sports is disqualified from holding office due to mental insanity. If I thought Democrats would actually govern the way they campaign, I would actually vote for them.
IMO, anyone who thinks that the issue of whether trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports is an issue that needs to be resolved legislatively should be disqualified from voting due to "mental insanity," and for thinking that there are forms of "insanity" that are not "mental."
I see you're one of the people who won't admit to supporting it, but will strongly object to anybody trying to make a rule against it. Your comment shows two classic attributes of lefties. Dishonesty and pedantry.
I provided a source for the Biden administration ordering schools to allow men to compete in women's sports. How can you possibly claim this isn't a part of the Democratic party platform at a national level.
The way highly educated people with backgrounds in science and engineering have been bullied into compliance by social justice warriors in HR departments is one of the most shameful chapters in progressive politics. We're supposed to go all in on climate change because of science but also cannot speak up against all kinds of unscientific claims when it comes to trans.
Yes, I have been a STEM professor for 40 years. I used to believe that my party, the Democratic Party, was the party of science. That this is utterly false came as a terrible shock.
Both parties are theological now. Which isn't surprising if you understand human psychology. As Chesterton said, "if you give up on God, the danger isn't that you'll believe in nothing but that you'll believe in anything."
Your choices going forward are between a right-wing, common-sense, post-Christian theology and a Left-wing, militant, secular, woke theology. Pick your poison.
Democrats who were so terrified of a Christian-Republican theocracy in the 90's were letting a postmodernist theocracy grow right under their nose.
Wait what? The majority of Americans I'm sure are somewhere in the middle Brian. For someone who is very smart, you seem to not be very pragmatic, hopeful or even see any nuance. Not everything is a binary, especially when it comes to spirituality or politics.
They are all in on "science" except biology. But also any "science" that may contradict their world view that the climate apocalypse is always just 8-12 years away. It's been that way for 30 years.
Tipping points are not the same thing as climate apocalypse. One could reasonable argue that climate change is actually impacting hundreds of millions across the world every year, and costing us a lot in a variety of ways. Just because "The Day After Tomorrow" or "Mad Max" hasn't happened doesn't mean that we aren't doing adverse harm to the planet or ourselves.
I voted for Kamala, but listening to certain progressives prattle on about gender being purely a social construct and separate from biological sex sounds nearly as insane as listening to flat earthers. Every time a politician says the phrase 'birthing person' they lose votes.
I voted for Kamala as well. But the birthing person talk was so stupid. This is what happens when most people who are in charge of organizing are terminally online or college kids imo.
From a definition point of view sex and gender are separate. However, I think we should also be able to agree that biological males, shouldn't compete against women or have an advantage over them, we should also allow leeway for organizations to make decisions about protecting their competition. It doesn't all have to be either or ya know?
It's not accurate to paint the picture that "blue cities" were much better a few years ago but have recently become not great. Blue cities have had huge continuing challenges, somewhat interrupted (accompanied?) by an urban housing boom, but it is way oversimplifying to suggest that there has been a meaningful up and down.
The "blue cities are now badly governed" discourse is some pretty bad journalism, in general. It implies that a major change has taken place in urban governance, and that is not true. There are many legitimate challenges and concerns - concentrated poverty, for one - but that is not a new development, and certainly not the reason for the 2024 outcome.
It is very hard to generalize about the performance of urban government. One thing that journalists - and academics, and everyone - cannot do well is evaluate government performance. No one really even tries to do it properly, but that doesn't prevent uninformed takes and generalizations.
Governing - especially at the local level - requires a nuanced and micro analysis of performance in order to even have a legitimate conversation. There are so many potential measures, comparisons and local details - it is actually a great opportunity for new scholarship. If you work in local government, you have an understanding of these nuances, and you can attempt to form an intelligent opinion. But it is not a topic for amateurs.
Yeah the governance story here on New York is simply not what Noah describes at all? Throughout the aughts we were run by Bloomberg, we elected Eric Adams (who has his own problems related to comical levels of old-machine style corruption, but is no one's idea of a leftist) three years ago in an election where the left candidate finished third (Garcia, who finished second, was a moderate technocrat). Even the debt graphic above shows that NYC has been reducing its debts, not increasing them. Now, its true that the MTA is a basket case, but it's a state agency not a city one and the dynamics that make it dysfunctional are distinct for that reason. There are a bunch of other things that he gets wrong about NYC as well (the teens were not fiscal boom times at all in NYC because finance got crushed by the GFC, for one obvious example), but this feels like too much extrapolation from what's going on in SF.
I lived in Jersey for years, and the way people in the suburbs would talk about their state like it was the worst state in the country always baffled me. These were usually the same people that thought me living in Jersey City meant that I lived in a war torn and drug infested city was insane. When some people think of cities, I think they think of the 80's or something.
Nicely said - and again, if you want a real view, you need to look at how red cities are governed (successes and failures) as well as semi-rural and rural. I could rant easily on how my semi-rural city is governed and it is one of the better ones in CA.
Voters may not consciously list this as the number 1 reason why they vote, but it certainly increases resistance to persuasion. When Democrats' claims that they will fix problems can be easily dismissed by "yeah, well look at what you guys did with San Francisco," that's not good for Democrats.
You liberals, please disregard the rantings of this lunatic. It was all about inflation and racism and sexism. It was white men who just can't handle a black woman as president and poor women tired of eggs being too expensive. Double-down on the cultural issues! Sex changes for teenagers are a positive good -- liberation!
What's so weird is that any major political party actually talked itself into having its presidential candidate make genital mutilation a platform issue.
I should just ignore poll after poll that showed that Trump was preferred on the economy/inflation and immigration and these were some of the top issues for voters. If trans was a disadvantage for Democrats, they also had an advantage on abortion. So, the culture issues canceled out.
I think your logic would be spot on 2 years ago. In 2022, abortion was a major issue then because Dobbs was so recent. But it's been almost 3 years and most people have realized that Dobbs didn't actually change much, especially if they live in anything but a deep-red state. The American democratic solution on abortion isn't nearly as restrictive as the pro-choice side feared or the pro-life side hoped.
Trans is an issue now. It was building in 2022, but Lia Thomas broke the dam. The politically disconnected masses stuck their heads up, saw this 6'-1", 200lb "woman" at the top of the NCAA national swimming podium and said, "hold on a minute!" The gender ideology progressives have been short-stacked since that time, but they've kept doubling down. When you do that in blackjack, eventually you go broke, which is what happened last Tuesday. One of Donald Trump's most successful ads (that ran in lots of swing states) highlighted Harris' lunacy on this issue and ended with the tag, "Harris is for They/Them. Trump is for You." That would only have worked if it resonated with what voters were seeing in the media, in HS and college sports, and personally in their kids' schools.
So yes, immigration and inflation were the two most important, but the trans lunacy very much played into the sense that the Dem and media elites have simply lost the thread of reality.
Dobbs did change a lot for people, especially for the state I live now Brian. We have had a couple women die, and others who can't get care, or are now permanently afraid or incapable of having children due to care issues, but frankly other states have protections and people can still travel and it isn't as much of a concern.
That said, Kamala didn't make trans or gender issues central to her campaign, it was things she said in 2019 that Trump and the GOP made central to her campaign and there was no escaping that. She wasn't paying for the ads against herself, so why do you say she made it a central issue?
Your snark isn't necessary, and I get it you aren't liberal, and you spend time on this board to probably feel intellectually superior because you vote conservative or whatever, but I haven't seen anyone on this thread say it was all racism, misogyny or all of that. You can think trans people deserve equal rights but also that girls shouldn't be competing against people that have an advantage. To make it seem like an issue that Kamala made during the campaign when people like you and Trump wouldn't shut up about it, almost feels like gaslighting.
I said elsewhere here that she did not make gender ideology a central issue at all, because she knows how poorly it polls. But she absolutely believes in it (or a least pretends she does). So Trump could take her own words from 5 years ago, the policies that she and Biden put forward in the last 4 years, and argue pretty persuasively that the Democratic Party elites are so out of touch with reality that they think men can get pregnant and boys should be in girls' HS locker rooms.
As for abortion, the polls say that you are a minority. Voters simply weren't motivated by in the same way they were in 2022.
And I'm here because while I disagree with on partisan politics, I have great respect for his economic analysis. I actually think I've been pretty non-snarky this week, considering Trump just shellacked the entire elite establishment of America. Noah was the one wanted to postmortem the election, not me.
> I said elsewhere here that she did not make gender ideology a central issue at all, because she knows how poorly it polls. But she absolutely believes in it (or a least pretends she does). So Trump could take her own words from 5 years ago, the policies that she and Biden put forward in the last 4 years, and argue pretty persuasively that the Democratic Party elites are so out of touch with reality that they think men can get pregnant and boys should be in girls' HS locker rooms.
You literally said above "What's so weird is that any major political party actually talked itself into having its presidential candidate make genital mutilation a platform issue." That was before you are now saying she didn't make it a central issue. I can't imagine any Presidential candidate making gender ideology a central issue to any campaign. You are engaging in a straw man that frankly can never be proven. I am not part of the Dem Party elite and never will be so I don't know how they think, but if the election really came down to trans issues, I think that would be very disappointing since we have much bigger education, inequality, economic, national security, energy, climate change and foreign policy issues we should be worried about.
> As for abortion, the polls say that you are a minority. Voters simply weren't motivated by in the same way they were in 2022.
That is not entirely true, the voters still overwhelming protected the rights to abortion this last election in all the states that Harris lost. So I don't think that's accurate, or at the very least its an oversimplification. There were a lot of people that simply sat out of the election, and in other cases people care about pocketbook issues more and tend not to think about healthcare until they are personally affected... The only state that really didn't support it was Florida but that was because their bar for amendments is 60% higher than pretty much anywhere else but it came in at 57%. Any candidate would be happy to get 57% support on any policy or have a 57% approval rating.
> And I'm here because while I disagree with on partisan politics, I have great respect for his economic analysis. I actually think I've been pretty non-snarky this week, considering Trump just shellacked the entire elite establishment of America. Noah was the one wanted to postmortem the election, not me.
You say you disagree with partisan politics, but most of the time on here you certainly engage with a lot of people that way or bring up partisan politics consistently. The fact that you have to work to be "non-snarky" goes to show you aren't as nonpartisan as you claim to be. To claim Trump also shellacked the entire establishment is a bit much. I bet you didn't claim that when Biden won in 2020.
This is not correct. There is data, interviews with 3000+ voters post-election by a Democrat aligned PAC, Blueprint 2024.
The key findings:
(1) Among swing voters (definition at the site), the three top issues (equal within the margin of error) were inflation, immigration, and transgenderism.
(2) Among all voters, transgenderism was 3rd most important issue, behind inflation and immigration.
(3) Abortion was 21st of 25 issues in importance among all voter cohorts.
Of course she didn't. She knows how "let's slice the boobs off of perfectly healthy teen girls who say they're boys" polls. Like all the rest of her actual positions, she was trying to run away from it.
The GOP wouldn't let her. They used her own words (and then Charlemagne's words) against her with one of the best campaign lines in years: "Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you."
From a retired city manager: your diagnosis is spot on, but needs to include more emphasis on two major factors causing urban governance challenges: the constraints imposed by state law and public employee bargaining “rights.” California used to celebrate “home rule” for cities - no longer. State laws dictate many of the constraints that limit the scope of reform for city leaders.
Agreed. I served on the planning commission of Elk Grove, CA for about 9 years. The affordable housing allocation rules and required general plan revisions to accommodate increasingly out-of-touch rules from Sacramento made local control essentially impossible. Add CEQA into that and we almost couldn't build anything without state approval.
Now I'm on a school board committee. If you think cities are bad, you ought to see school districts. The Dept of State Architects? There's a money pit.
But that’s how California is going to fix its housing problem - my local mayor’s race was won by the person who is trying to fight the state to stop housing. The state seems to be committed to making sure that can’t happen.
People in America are so obsessed with getting their HELOC loans and keeping their property values up that they will pay lip service to affordable housing, but not actually support YIMBYism or simple housing solutions.
One is that the actual issue and its framing are at odds, as this article touches on. Republicans cast the problems San Francisco and New York and Seattle have as "safety" issues. They aren't that. They're disorder issues. That doesn't make them any less real, but it does drive how policymakers should think about them. The Asian immigrant who was murdered in San Francsico and whose murderer the DA said was having a "bad day" was a horrific tragedy, and numbskulled and tone deaf rhetoric, but also not indicative of the actual problem-- San Francisco and New York and Seattle aren't actually dangerous in the sense that people are physically unsafe in them. Violent crime, as noted above, remains low. But disorder is rampant-- people do drugs openly, sleep on the streets, crap on sidewalks (mostly in SF), rant and rave delusionally, etc. People don't like these things. Finger wagging at them doesn't accomplish anything.
But that's also not a problem you're gonna solve by locking up drug users with psychosis or locking up shoplifters for a decade-- that'll just cost taxpayers a few arms and legs. The issue is coming up with common sense solutions that are both compassionate and effective. Mandatory treatment for psychotic people likely makes sense. So does confiscation of street drugs. Businesses should be allowed to place security guards at store entrances who can refuse to allow those that can't produce proof of payment to leave. These aren't difficult fixes (though they are expensive, albeit no more expensive than mass incarceration), but they are focused on solving problems rather than punishing people.
The other issue, of course, is housing. And that's where you similarly have limited appetite for the real fix. Wealthy people are going to have to accept density, including *gasp* poor and/or non-white people living in their vicinity, and leftists are going to have to accept *double gasp* that a real estate developer might make a profit in the process. But you're not going to fix or address housing affordability or homelessness issues without building a lot more housing. Unless your plan is to make your city so ugly that it drives everyone away. Which is kind of like treating the flu by euthanizing the patient.
I live in South bay and once I my friend's family visited SF for one day, and we just can not find any public restrooms to relieve ourselves. I was very angry and suddenly able to relate to those disorderly people crapping on the streets. I would say a lot of these are really consequences of NYMBYism.
This is why I can't take any suggestions of a Gavin Newsom presidential run seriously. In the minds of conservatives (and many liberals), he's the man responsible for California's decent into anarchy. His chances of winning a general election are basically zero.
Not a fan of Newsom - don't want him to even run (or continue as governor). But the notion that there is "anarchy" in California is a pure myth - surprised to see anyone reading this blog simply repeat it (although I shouldn't be).
I lived in San Francisco for years. The two times I rented a car, it was broken into. One of the times was in an underground garage. All of my things were stolen. The police were incompetent beyond belief. It was like they didn't realize that their job was to stop such things from happening, and were confused why I was bothered by it. When I went to Walgreens to buy toiletries to replace my stolen items, someone in a ski mask walked in to rob the place. When I reported my corporate badge stolen at work the next day I was told that I was the fifth employee that had happened to *that week*.
I'm not sure where in California you've lived, but where I've lived "anarchy" is a perfectly apt term.
There is in some places like Oakland, like the In-n-Out near the airport where basically everyone who visits it gets their car broken into. This is mainly because the police have just stopped doing their job and nobody is organized enough to make them start doing it again.
I have no idea who will be the 2028 Dem candidate, and now that Obama has run his course (although I may be wrong on that/this), it won't be him "picking" the candidate anymore. And being the nephew(?) of Pelosi is likely now more liability than a leg up. If she is even alive/active by 2028. Seems to me it is a wide open field, which will be a good thing for Dems and the country.
I don't think most folks in CA would want Newsom to run for President anyway - he is not particularly well-liked. Which goes back to the longer discussion of how the Democratic Party (and its leadership and its donors) pick a major candidate. But when my choice is some off the deep end Republican in CA vs almost any Dem, I know how I will vote. Truly moderate Republicans have won the governorship - but far and away the best we had in a long time was Jerry Brown.
The real question is how do you make housing more affordable when voters are dead set against building more of it? I live in Denver and all the affordable housing initiatives on the ballot were shot down. To me it feels like voters are saying that they are serious about not wanting more people moving to their neighborhoods.
I know some people in Seattle who are vehemently opposed to the affordable housing, and it's because in their minds affordable housing=slums. I think if we solve crime issue, solving housing issue might become easier.
I fully agree with this. I also find that a lot of people though want the “cultural character” of their to be neighborhood be preserved and I think that is a far harder hurdle to overcome, particularly in a large and diverse society like the US. Maybe we need to increase social trust to build more housing?
Look who gets to build state-sponsored “affordable housing” and their connection to the pols backing it. Then look at the cost per unit.
In places like SF where permit fees and required reports can be $150k per unit, nothing is going to be affordable to begin with. Build the affordable housing in Oakland or S San Francisco
Sorry I guess I have a tendency to use both those terms interchangeably. At least in Colorado both affordable housing that is subsidized and building new market rate housing seems unpopular among most people in my personal experience. This is particularly true of high density housing that doesn’t fit the traditional Suburban mold.
I think this can be at least partly achieved by changing the level decisions are made at. Most people want more housing to be built *somewhere*, but not *right here*. Policies that make it easier to build housing everywhere in a metro areas at once are likely to be less unpopular than policies to concentrate building in a particular neighborhood.
I think it's happened in SF and Berkeley, CA near where I live. Both are considered extreme bastions of NIMBYism, yet have elected the most YIMBY state senators in the state (Scott Weiner and Nancy Skinner). I think that is largely down to state senate districts being much larger than city council districts.
It seems like this would be something you could study by comparing votes related to housing construction among at large city councilors, councilors about their own district or councilors about someone else's district. (In SF that would probably be confounded due to a tradition of only voting in favor of construction in a district if the councilor from that district agreed to it, though I presume that's not the case most other places.) IDK if there's any research on the topic, but it would be interesting to see the results.
To your second question, a lot of the legislation passed by YIMBY state senators in California does remove local control over zoning, though it's such a roundabout process that the voters may not have realized it. A particular regulatory body needs to periodically certify each city's general plan affirming that it is in compliance with the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) requirement of how much housing is needed. Several YIMBY bills have made that process less of a rubber-stamp and also made the RHNA requirements more aggressive. When the general plan for a city is _not_ certified by a deadline, then the city's zoning laws cannot be enforced and any projects proposed during the period of non-compliance can be built by-right, even afterwards. (This is called the "builder's remedy".) This is rarely invoked, but terrifies NIMBY jurisdictions and has forced them to make their zoning less restrictive.
(Aside: thinking on your overall question more, I think there's a pretty large voting block of low-information voters who have no idea how difficult it is to build housing in their area. Even if they consider themselves opposed to building more housing, they have no idea what the actual laws are and would in fact consider many of the requirements totally absurd if they realized they existed. NIMBYs have managed to hide extreme anti-housing legislation in mind-numbingly dull details like view corridor requirements, floor-area ratio, design review, historical preservation, environmental impact, etc. Since it is quite boring, I don't really know how to educate people enough to make a difference, but I think if somebody could, it would radicalize a lot of YIMBYs.)
It would help to just make more housing and not qualify that it be affordable. If the housing supply increases, then most housing will become more affordable, and more housing can be built if there aren’t arbitrary price controls added to make it “affordable”.
Doesn't really happen in big cities that have a lot of money flowing in, just attracts more people with money who no longer have to live in the suburbs. It's a nice theory and yes, it may open up more housing far away from the city centers, but that doesn't make more "affordable housing" inside a city.
Another myth at least as far as older dense cities are concerned
Other than NYC, there isn't a US city that's remotely dense by world standards. Let's build the density and then argue about how it's still unaffordable for many.
“Affordable Housing” is often a scam. Ease zoning, planning and building laws and let supply meet demand.
Or get some people together and build apartment blocks (many of which have gone up in Denver) and commit to accepting housing vouchers as rent for the first 20 years. Form a 501c3 and much of the construction cost plus the annual below market rent concessions will be charitable contributions. All it takes is a handful of rich, white progressives to do this. You could sponsor one apartment- say offering $1000/mo rent concession- $12k per year - as charitable contribution. That is one unit and it costs the taxpayers nothing and doesn’t require their approval. Fund your own ideas rather than blaming other people for not wanting to fund yours. This can be done. I know someone who does this to house homeless families.
So maybe progressives should rely more on non-profits like habitat for humanity rather local governments for affordable housing since they don’t require majority consensus?
I don’t know much about San Francisco but as a continuous resident of New York City since the 90s, I don’t think New York is in the same league as West Coast cities that have been struggling notably since the pandemic.
In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that has changed in New York for the worse in the last 3 decades. The city has always had a big tax burden, always been insanely expensive, always had enormous amount ls of debt, always was really expensive to build infrastructure in, and always had hordes of mentally unstable homeless.
But over this time, the city has remained glamorous and culturally vibrant, continues to build beautiful new parks, remains the playground of many, is dotted with cranes and new constructions every other block, and keeps pushing its zones of revitalized and gentrified neighborhoods out further and further from city center.
Cities are for singles and are generally hard on the elderly and children. As for families? We moved out of NYC to start a family.
Cities offer entertainment that is hard to replicate elsewhere. This is why people move outside the city to lower the chaos volume and hopefully find a safe neighborhood and a good school system.
My time in NYC was from 1987 to 2002. I saw the end of the Koch administration and Dinkins Administration. I also saw the renaissance of the city after Guiliani was voted in. The difference was palpable.
The share of poor homeless, EDPs, and drug addicts was out of control in those early days. It made just walking down the street difficult and anxiety-producing. Most Americans function. They go to work, they come home. On the weekend, they do chores and relax or try to have some fun. It is time spent with children and or family.
Commuting in NYC is horrid. This is why people do not want to go back to commuting. I spent about 3 hours a day commuting, depending on the weather. The last thing you want to deal with in your daily routine is to manage the unmanageable.
By that, I mean people who do not function within normal parameters. Cities are hard; what makes them harder is the extra stress of many people trying to do the same thing simultaneously. The added weight of dealing with crazy people or criminals makes the value proposition worse. Add in the extra expenses of living in a city. Food costs more, taxes are higher, transportation costs, entertainment costs. Everything is more costly. It eventually drives away everybody but the ultra-rich.
I still go into the City at least twice a year. My daughter currently lives there, but I highly doubt if she gets married to her boyfriend and they decide to have children that, they will continue to live there.
NYC is ungovernable at the moment. The City Council is more interested in people who don’t function well and in migrants. You are correct. The MTA is a black hole. Phase I of the Second Ave subway started in 1970, it was opened in 2017. That was only Phase I. Phase II is about to start. I think the complete line will cost $17 billion. This is unsustainable.
Bad politics mixed with bad fiscal management equals chaos.
Cities are far better for the elderly who can’t drive who are often isolated and dependent on the suburbs. Cities also (sometimes) offer more independence for kids or teens depending on safety issues. Your view is popular but, in my opinion, wrong. Cities should absolutely be for elders and kids and, all over the world, they are.
Do you mean commuting into NYC instead of Commuting _in_ NYC?
I think commuting within NYC is one of its greatest relative strengths; it's quite easy to find an apartment within a 30min walk/subway ride from work. It does get substantially harder if your have kids though, especially if you're price sensitive.
I'll just say that a lot of changes that Guiliani got credit for started under Dinkins. But the difference in the city was certainly palatable.
Regarding commuting, that is such a difficult issue to solve, because the tri state area, can't decide how to pay, tax or build new infrastructure for commuting. It's so frustrating. The MTA is absolutely a black hole, and it costs way to much to fix or improve anything. That said though, I know lots of older and elderly couples that still live in NYC because of the great healthcare options and things to do for an active lifestyle and social support programs.
NYC is trying to do more greenspaces, but at the end of the day you are right, costs for housing (3 or 4 bedroom places) needs to come down, enforcement on petty crime needs to come down, it needs to be clean and safe, and finally people don't want to spend a ton of money and still have to deal with old trains that are late.
We agreed on a post, there is a first time for everything Earl! lol. Good observations though, real talk.
I don’t have the data to prove it, but I suspect that working-class families aren’t exactly excited about “bike lanes” as the bike activists would have you believe. (Certainly the moderate, elderly Asians in the Sunset who just lost car access to their Great Highway aren’t.) The bike activism strikes me as a little class-deaf.
That’s because it’s not about pandering - it’s about creating something that will actually be helpful for many people and make the city a better place to live for more people.
Without the data, this just seems like fertile ground for us to all project our own values onto another group. I don't really see "too many bike lanes" being the thing that tips a working-class family to move out of a hypothetical city that had plenty of affordable housing, public order, good jobs, and high school quality.
What I think you're really getting at is not so much the bikes themselves but the ease of driving/owning a car, and the assumption that if bike activists lose, drivers will win. But driving in dense places is just going to inherently suck, with or without the bike lanes. Cars are just a bad fit for cities because they need too much (expensive) space, both in motion and at rest.
Bike lanes turned into another culture war issue. It is basically another shibboleth phrase. One of those not-so-secret passwords you have to say to prove you belong to the in-group.
But speaking of class-deaf — you can probably buy 2 or 3 good electric bicycles for the cost of owning a car for one single year. So from that principle it is really weird that cycling is considered an elitist thing.
A working bike lane network is a big deal — a two-way bike lane that is 15 feet can move more people than a 2×3 lane road before it gets congested, with almost none of the noise and pollution that would come from that road, and very little danger, relatively speaking. Parking bicycles takes a fraction of the space of parking cars. A bike lane is much cheaper to maintain than a road way. Etc. etc. etc. etc. Unless your city has piles and piles of unused cash (it probably isn't) a bike network is a pretty smart investment.
The underlying problem is that, if you talk about a city where you can reasonably get by on a bicycle, you might just as well be talking about a Mars base. People have never experienced it. Many will never see it within their lifetimes. How are they supposed to know how it works? That makes it politically almost impossible to get started.
Definitely true, but from the evidence I see in my home town of Cambridge MA, it isn't just working class families that are put out by the bike lanes. It really cuts across class groups.
I agree with a lot of this. And I can see why the absence of new housing would prevent cities from growing. But why would the absence of new housing cause the populations of the cities to decline?
In other words, it seems like factors other than the lack of new housing are causing the decline of these cities. Indeed, the real turning point in the population graph is the pandemic and protests in 2020, which caused a sharp decline in population that has stressed city finances and which also spurred many antisocial public policies that have made the cities less livable. Those explanations are independent of any NIMBYism.
Exactly. In my home town which is famous for its biotech industry, you've got young well paid employees and their families moving here and needing a place to live. Many, if not most want to live in the city, but housing is scarce and very little new is getting built. Since they can't find a nice place, they buy an old triple decker that used to house three families of 5-9 people and gut rehab it into a luxury home for their family of 4. After a couple of these get done in a neighborhood, the prices on all the other houses skyrocket. The end result is a neighborhood that formerly had 200 people on a block has 40.
Exactly, but that also happens when you build new apartment buildings in cities that are expensive. The apartments flow to folks who have money - perhaps moving in from far away suburbs. Yes, maybe that makes housing available eventually in those suburbs with still massive commutes.
“How can we be nice to black people?”
“Oh I know, let’s decriminalize crime!”
This remains one of the dumbest and bonkers racist thing ever attempted, but I’ll admit Noah’s paragraph on anarchy not being a form of welfare is probably a fairer take on the minds of the progressives.
"Learn to govern San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles."
I see Noah left Chicago off the list. That's a hard nut to crack.
Chicago has a gang problem that really just can't be fixed. They do a pretty decent job on housing, and the homeless situation is not really that bad
Why is the gang problem in Chicago intractable in a way that gang problems in other cities are not?
The gangs are not very organized,so you just cant use RICO and conspiracy laws to bring them down like the cartel or mob. Two kids can be in the same gang,and not even know each other. There is no central point of control.
Sounds like Chicago gangs have the same kind of cellular structure that terrorist organizations use to confound the authorities: why aren't all criminal gangs organized like that?
You need the hierarchical structure to funnel all the funds to the top. The goal isn't crime for crime sake, but to selfishly profit off crime. A less centralized structure might be more robust against law enforcement but also probably doesn't generate as much money for the leadership.
Here in El Salvador they managed to sort out a way worse gang problem with way fewer resources.
The thing with militarized approaches to organized crime is that they lead governments to militarize the rest of society, including the political institutions. Eventually you find yourself in a soft authoritarian police state or you spark an actual war with armed gangs like in Colombia and Mexico.
El Salvador is a poor country that needs structure to promote economic development.
One could argue that the loss of civil liberties and authoritarianism is worth it.
I don’t think there’s an appetite in the US for that tradeoff.
<One could argue that the loss of civil liberties and authoritarianism is worth it.>
True, but that's basically what the Chinese Communist Party (and many other dictators in the Global South) argue: we provide prosperity in exchange for political control. I'm not unsympathetic to this argument, but this line of reasoning kinda undercuts Joe Biden's "democracy v. autocracy" shtick as well as Noah's warnings about an expansionist "Axis of Evil." International human rights don't mesh well with a permissive attitude toward modernizing dictatorships; just ask the ruling communists in China and Vietnam.
How is life under Presidente Dude Bro? Better than before?
Way better.
Chicago is the one with the pension problem he mentioned - IIRC it's actually a state level issue, but once it comes due their budget is toast unless they default on it.
For the moment though, it actually has lower levels of the other problems; housing is pretty cheap, it's nice enough downtown, you can touch the Bean.
Ironically, one of the reasons Silicon Valley exists is California overpromising on their pensions. It means CalPERS had to accept tons of risk and invest in tech startups.
And my understanding was that Silicon Valley was originally built mainly on defense spending!
I understand the impulse, but bear in mind that (A) hardly anyone ever campaigned on "decriminalizing crime" (unless your talking about lighter penalties or decriminalizing drug consumption, in which case you should be more precise in your language) and (B) most of the impetus behind criminal justice reform came from black and brown intellectuals like Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Brown Alexander. White liberals (and leftists) largely hopped on the criminal justice reform bandwagon because they take their political/social cues from the intellectual/educated strata of minority populations.
“you should be more precise in your language”
Nah I’m good bro
“White liberals … take their political/social cues from the intellectual/educated strata of minority populations.”
The ethnic activist types claiming to represent the people while holding views that are FAR to the left of those very people they claim to represent, and the white progressives going along with this charade and telling themselves they have the consent of the XYZ people because the clowns at XYZ-studies department agreed with them, is not some minor mistake. It is exactly kind of the cultural elitism being refuted right now.
It kills me that some of those very far left intellectuals who have an outsized voice may not even vote, they have no solutions to any of the problems they pose either, but they can sure spend all day waxing poetic about problems and who is at fault. It's like they love the moral superiority but don't actually care about governing, or care about the real-world impact of their suggested policy stances. For what it is worth I think Michelle Alexander is not nearly as bad as Ibram Kendi, but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say.
I'm not saying it's a minor mistake. I'm saying white progressives didn't cook this stuff up by themselves (or even originally). I'm assigning some responsibility onto upper-middle class minority intellectuals, who by and large are the very "ethnic activists" you seem to be criticizing. This is mainly because many critiques of woke politics lazily criticize white progressives for being too woke without properly identifying WHY they became so woke in the first place.
It's actually a self-perpetuating, elf-reinforcing symbiotic cycle.
Those minority "spokespeople" tapped for membership in the "cognitive elites" get their recognition (and their tenure) from their sponsors -- in academia, publishing, and the same sorts of foundations that sponsor NPR. And THEN their white counterparts (or acolytes) -- the "junior division" -- are ready and waiting to sign on (with guest appearances and glowing reviews).
What else are ANY of these people expected to do with a double major in Nonprofit Management and Ethnic Studies?
Name a single West Coast DA that did not campaign on decriminalizing crime. It was the foundation for their candidacies.
SF has a love hate relationship with tech. They love the tax revenues from tech booms but when people in tech are fed up with poor governance and urban disorder and want changes, progressives in charge want them to mind their own business. Progressives continue to demonize the tech industry while using us as their piggy banks.
Sounds like the conservative backlash in FL against Disney for being too "woke". GOP policies against Disney--a rather prominent US corporation, mind you--reduced its profits, and also hurt direct investment in the FL economy.
Or what about the anti-Gay push by the GOP in North Carolina a few years ago? That smart move ended up costing the state literally billions in lost investment.
Visible decay and homelessness are not things you normally see when the economy is doing well. No wonder people are sceptical.
Being unwilling to reopen the state hospitals and fill them with those folks who have proven unable to care for themselves isn’t an economic issue. IIRC the cost of doing so in SF is several 10s of thousand of dollars less than is currently being spent on the problem. It’s a matter of politicians being captured by activists ideologues who are out of touch with reality.
To what extent are those activist ideologues also grifters?
Are you saying we need to involuntarily commit anyone who is "homeless"? The number of homeless that have nothing to do with mental illness or addiction is very high (and yes, I have worked with the homeless in a semi-rural city). Providing easy to use housing does help the homeless and reopening the hospitals to provide that is a good idea, but dubious about the "proven unable to core for themselves" part.
“The number of homeless that have nothing to do with mental illness or addiction is very high (and yes, I have worked with the homeless in a semi-rural city)”
IIRC 90% of the homeless are homeless for less than a week. They are very often people who have just fallen on hard times, had some kind of crises, etc. Then we have the chronically homeless who have been on the street for +1 years - essentially all of them have substantial mental heath and or substance abuse problems.
Yep. The sleight of hand where one quotes a statistic about all people without a permanent address, then acts as if it refers to perpetual sidewalk or subway dwellers, isn’t fooling anyone anymore.
> IIRC 90% of the homeless are homeless for less than a week.
Not only that, but they can be in a home and yet homeless. i.e. they could be sleeping on a friend's couch, or in a relationship they don't like but can't afford to break up.
Arrest them when they commit crimes (including trespassing, if they refuse to move); let them plead insanity if that's their condition.
I've been destitute and homeless. There's ALWAYS someplace else to go -- and another way to approach life.
Hmm, seen the same problem in some small cities that are quite red as well - more a function of folks generally being somewhat NIMBY IF it protects their property values (or is perceived to protect them)
The answer is simple: bus all the homeless to Blue states and cities! That's been a tried-and-true GOP tactic for years now.
I can't help thinking that the Great Recession helped screw up blue city governance, as what Noah said about "progressive cities are operated for the benefit of the people who get the money instead of the people who get the stuff" sounds like they were viewing city services as a jobs program.
I think you might mean the Great Depression rather than the Great Recession. This stuff goes back at least that far, and more likely to the mid-1800s.
The things you have been saying recently are really just what most people would call common sense. It's kind of shocking that so few people in politics are saying them. A question I can't seem to answer is why isn't that what we get? A majority of Republican voters and Democrat voters agree, but why isn't that what we get when we elect Democrats or Republicans?
Because people hate problems, and they also hate solutions. Examples:
1. To fix disorder, you need to give the police and citizenry a longer leash to fight back. This inevitably will result in videos of bad stuff (police abuse; security guard killing or being killed by a shoplifter.) The public revolt against this and then we're back where we started.
2. Same as above for fixing public psychosis and drug use - inevitably, there will be stories of people committed that shouldn't be, and abuses within the committing facilities.
3. Immigration - same. You have to make illegal immigration painful to stop it - this inevitably results in bad stuff happening to sympathetic people.
4. Spend issues are even harder - unions, gov't workers and non-profits will not tolerate reductions in $ headed their way without a massive fight, and all of these groups have the power to create real problems for citizens.
None of these are easy problems to solve. I think the only way you solve them is getting a very, very strong head of state (Giuliani, Bloomberg, Trump) who isn't afraid to make a lot of enemies. Progressives, in particular, are not usually comfortable with this style of governance.
It’s worth noting that Giuliani and Bloomberg were not creatures of the NY Democratic machine. They did not owe any favors to unions, government employees, and, in the 90s, declining but still influential mafia connected interest groups. In previous administrations, raids on the South street would have been pointless, because someone in the sprawling Democratic machine would have tipped someone off. Giuliani was a successful prosecutor who came to power through a coalition of outer boroughs types + democratic voters who were sick of crime. Ignoring Al Sharpton, union demands, etc.. was a feature, not a bug. Bloomberg is an insanely wealthy technocrat who ran as a Republican because it was easier, and he could never win in the democratic machine. The city GOP is a joke of an organization; Bloomberg could use it for ballot access but otherwise it was useless. The return of the Democratic machine, under De Blasio, was seen by many within that machine as overdue, with the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations as aberrations. They tried to make up for lost time with the new union contracts and so forth.
Neither did Jerry Brown.
Agreed 100%. People want quick and easy solutions to complex problems. Additionally, one of my main gripes with the progressive movement is that they are definitely willing to let perfect be the enemy of good all the time.
One interesting thing about the phrase "common sense" is that it only really appears in conservative writing, and there it appears a lot. It's an extremely right coded phrase and concept. As a quick reality check of my claim compare mentions of the phrase in the NY Times vs the NY Post:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anytimes.com+%22common+sense%22
https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Anypost.com+%22common+sense%22
The NY Times used to have a column called Common Sense but it's not really published anything since 2020, and it's a column about business - i.e. a conservative/right coded thing. Beyond that the next results Bing serves me are an article from 2022 titled "A debate over 'common sense' gun legislation" - the concept is so awkward to the left wing ear that they put it in scare quotes. The next result after that is, "A defense of common sense" from 2005 (which is about physics), and then "The trouble with common sense" (2011) and then "The limits of common sense" from 2005 again. Even discussion of the concept is rare, and when it does appear it's treated as a highly debatable thing that probably isn't legitimate at all.
The NY Post in contrast has results like: "How a lack of common sense is killing civilization" (2023), a story from October ("Scientist who battled for COVID common sense over media and government censors wins top award"), an op-ed from Douglas Murray from January ("Argentinian prez Javier Milei kills ‘em with common sense as he scolds Davos elites") and so on. Way more prevalent and used in political contexts.
To some extent this is just the way different tribes use language as a marker, but it's also a real reflection of differences in beliefs. Is wisdom and knowledge spread out, or is it concentrated in a small elite? Believe the latter and you become a leftist, believe the former and you become a libertarian-leaning rightist.
So when you ask "why is there so little common sense in politics", it's kind of an ideologically loaded question. In blue cities the very concept of common sense isn't talked about, and if you did talk about it you'd be viewed with suspicion. The problem is that an ideology which valorizes intellectuals must also reject ideas that anyone could have come up with, and thus be very prone to capture by clever sounding nonsense, because almost by definition intellectuals must stand apart from what's common. Otherwise they have no value.
The majority of people in both blue and red cities are all highly educated. To make it seem like people in blue cities don't talk about the very concept of common sense is really reductive. I think most of us have way more in common from a beliefs perspective than we have that makes us different. You really think if made a comment that included "common sense" in a blue city you'd be looked at with suspicion? What is this Nazi Germany?
Like I'm not disagreeing that self-proclaimed intellectuals think that the world can be so easily figured out and they are overly idealistic and think they alone can solve complex problems, but the idea that if you say "common sense' or anything like that you'd be viewed with suspicion is a bit much, like that might be true for people in your circle that you met at one time in your life but it is certainly an over generalized comment.
I think if you went to a meeting of a San Francisco local government committee, and objected to a proposal on the grounds that it violated "common sense", or made a proposal and justified it by saying "this is obviously common sense", then the leftists would treat you with suspicion because you'd sound like a Republican. Yes. Try it and see.
Why not Soylent Green as a solution to homelessness? That certainly makes sense, doesn't it?
Because modern America is based on J.S. Mill and Nietzschean postmodernism.
Mill's insists that regulating human behavior (via any means: social, legal, or economic) is legitimate only to prevent physical harm to someone else. Much of what Noah and you (rightly) call "common sense" is really an assertion that moral standards of some kind exist and can reasonably be enforced by the state. But doing that requires overturning Mill.
Collective definitions of virtue (the common good) also run contrary to postmodernism, which claims that laws in support of "the common good" are really just tools for the powerful to enforce racial or sexual or [fill in the blank] oppression. Postmodernism is the de-facto religion of our elites; the quintessential political dividing line of our day -- "what is a woman?" -- is a question that can only make sense under postmodernism. Besides, if reality is a social construction, then crime is too. (I'm not being facetious; this logic was common during BLM.)
That's why the Democrats (and plenty of old-school Never-Trump Republicans) can't just "adopt common sense" as you suggest. Because they don't believe in the common and they've been indoctrinated into a philosophy that is utterly nonsensical.
Who are these elites and Democrats, or even Never Trump Republicans that all ascribe to postmodernism? So, you are you saying that the only people who have got it all figured out are Trump and the MAGA people like MTG?
Come on Brian this is just an over sensationalized and overgeneralized take you've got here. Half the people who you are probably describing as "elites" and Dems are probably people who you know that still think about common sense and believe reality is not a social construct. Talking about "what is a woman" in abstract philosophical terms or regards to humanism is not same that we can't define a woman biologically.
I don't mean this as a defense of blue-city's terrible track record of building housing but charts like those "apartment completions, share of existing inventory" always feel a bit misleading to me. Because it doesn't really feel fair to compare, say, Pittsburgh with Phoenix. Pittsburgh is old and built-out. Founded in 1758 and a major city more or less from the beginning with a population density of 5,400 people per square mile. All the low-hanging fruit has been taken. Phoenix was founded in 1867, over 100 years later, and famously was a nothing town (only 65,000 people in 1940; Pittsburgh was something like 600,000 people are that time) until air-conditioning became widespread. And even today after all that explosive growth the population density of 3,100 per square mile is still just half of Pittsburgh.
Having lived in both cities there is just a lot more easy wins in Phoenix for housing. Pittsburgh took all the easy wins in the late 1800s. And you start to see this with Phoenix's skyrocketing housing prices as they hit natural & legal barriers. If you go to Google Maps and switch to a terrain view you can see that modern Phoenix has sprawled out to hit all the surrounding regional parks and mountains (and Indian Reservations!) It still has some areas to the northwest past Surprise and southeast past Chandler but all the local areas are soon going to run into the same issues of existing residents not wanting buildings torn down so that denser/taller apartment buildings can be built. Once you get a few blocks away from the downtown of Phoenix I'm not sure I saw anything more than 2 stories tall.
Yes it does seem to me that the red state cities are partially coasting on the fact that they have more room still available to grow. Note that Miami doesn’t make this list of fast growing cities.
And infill densification will never be able to compete on price with suburban sprawl built on virgin land even if all the NIMBYs were blasted from the face of the earth.
Not price per square foot, but it can absolutely compete on price to desirability. Buying a house in freshly built sprawl usually means you have to drive 45 minutes to work.
Which probably explains why anti-sprawl activists tend to be stereotyped as people childless by choice: having kids makes square footage far more important.
Sure, but as a city kid the idea that I somehow missed out by not growing up in sprawlsville seems ridiculous.
It's the parents who decide where to live though (often before the kids are even born): is it (would-be) mothers in particular who are drawn to the big suburban house over the well-located city apartment?
Miami will be under water in thirty years. As will New Orleans. Long-term real estate investment in either locale is not advised.
But it would be interesting to see how enthusiasm for Urbanism (e.g., tall-ish mixed use building centred on transit hubs) plays in terms of Red vs. Blue political affinity.
Maybe you should look up the population densities of NY, Chicago, Boston, Philly, etc and compare to Pittsburgh before claiming “the work is done”. I lived for several years in a city with 40,000+ people per square mile with the majority of housing being only 3-4 stories high. The work is not done. And people live in outlying areas because they prefer suburbs to central cities (which are generally horrible places to raise a family unless one is wealthy and can afford private schooling, overpaying for groceries and basic essentials and eating out at expensive restaurants), not because Phoenix and Pittsburgh won’t build high rises.
But if there is demand for high rises and converting duplexes to apartment blocks- let it happen
Where did I say the work is done? Talking on the internet is exhausting when people willfully misunderstand.
There is no such thing as "old and built out." They still build new buildings in Rome. Right on top of the ancient ruins of the old ones.
You do temporarily displace people when you replace their building with a new one, but you can pay them off and give them right of return, which helps.
Lots of great data as usual, but it does not explain the election results.
Blueprint 2024's post-election interviews of 3262 voters found "Democrats are bad at running the places they control" and "Kamala Harris is too soft on crime" ranked #17 and #18 on a list of reasons voters voted as they did, both for all voters and for swing voters.
The #1 reason for swing voters was "Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class", and this was the #3 reason for all voters, behind inflation and illegal immigration.
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/
That is why my three posts about lessons from Trump's victory were about the things you just mentioned.
Remember, as I said in the post, the main reason to fix blue cities is for the benefit of the people who live in those cities (and the benefit of people who *could* live in them, if they built more housing). National politics is a secondary consideration.
I agree completely about the need to fix blue cities.
Your previous three election pieces did not mention the trans issue at all. I suppose you want to say that it was implicitly included in the "elites are out of touch" piece, but it was the trans issue specifically that broke my 50 year streak of supporting Democrats, and the data shows that I was not alone. If the Democrats ever want to win again, ignoring the #1 issue for swing voters is not a good plan (though most of them certainly seem to want to stick to that plan, look what's happening to poor Seth Moulton!).
And you did write here that "OK, I think I have one more election post-mortem post in me" and "at the national level, the urban revolt against probably helped usher in another four years of Donald Trump", so I think I can be forgiven for thinking that you were arguing that this was a fourth reason for Trump's win.
I promise to write something about the trans issue. But I ignored it completely for so long that it'll be a while before I have anything useful to say.
as a person who failed out of community college several times before getting my degree. I would like you to further comment on your "the non college do not have the time, talent, study habits or funds to go to college."
Because I find it insanely offensive and just flat out wrong. You talk of as every college is Stanford with vibrant night lifes, community support, students living in dorms, engaged faculty, etc. When in reality most people attend commuter colleges that has none of those things.
The graduation rate for public universities is 60%. Could you imagine any business accepting this kind of failure rate? But no, its the workers who are lazy/non talented despite going on to have productive lives and hold down demanding jobs, have families, and start businesses.
Maybe college is not a good investment for the majority of Americans as currently constructed.
The "trans issue" is what turned you against the Democrats? Were that not so pathetic, it would be hilarious.
Sterilizing, desexing, and mutilating thousands of gay kids each and every year in this country, on the basis of pure medical quackery, is an ongoing crime against humanity, and every Democrat in office fully supports this form of violent homophobia. In Europe, where they have not-for-profit healthcare systems that can evaluate evidence without political bias, this crime is being stopped. Not so (yet) in the US.
> Sterilizing, desexing, and mutilating thousands of gay kids each and every year in this country, on the basis of pure medical quackery, is an ongoing crime against humanity, and every Democrat in office fully supports this form of violent homophobia. In Europe, where they have not-for-profit healthcare systems that can evaluate evidence without political bias, this crime is being stopped. Not so (yet) in the US.
Mark, you do realize you think and talk more about trans issues more than anyone I've ever met right? Why is it you are obsessed with gender studies or people who are experiencing gender dysphoria, depression or may be trans?
Do you have a source for any of this that isn't a NY Post article? Like an actual data source? I've shared the below multiple times with you and yet you still overgeneralize and use exaggerated data. There is nothing wrong with getting medical treatment or support for gender dysphoria, in fact it can help prevent issues and actually in most cases prevents people from wanting to go through any type of surgery. The link you usually provide that references the Post ignores.
You can look at the data here: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/
There are not thousands of kids that are being mutilated or sterilized each year. It was less than a thousand kids a year according to the Post article (https://nypost.com/2024/10/08/us-news/over-5700-americans-under-18-had-trans-surgery-from-2019-23/) you share a lot that leaves out a lot of context and focuses on 2 de-transitioners. You can advocate for all the things you support and still not think that gets should get surgery. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.
It is just flat-out false Mark for you to claim that every person who votes Democrat fully supports surgeries or doesn't know the difference between gender and sex or intersex. Also, these same things were happening in 2016 when Trump was President. You are engaging in bad faith rhetoric. If you want to talk about facts, or how more studies need to be done, or how certain things should be banned after a certain age that is fair, but not every kid getting gender affirming care is gay let alone are they getting surgeries. That is like the last resort. Russia is the only EU country that bans gender affirming care. However, there are other countries that limit puberty blockers, HRT, etc and we can and should have honest conversations about the impact of these treatments and effectiveness for sure. However, the first line of defense is a healthy community that isn't stigmatized and psychological support. GOP politicians wanting to ban all gender affirming care isn't helpful either.
I'm aware of the Reuters data from 2017-2021, numbers are higher now, but here are the key Reuters results:
>The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021.
>Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket..
>At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.
The NYPost article sites its sources, the results are broadly consistent with the Reuters results.
Note that hormone treatment is sterilizing, and 14,726 divided by 4 years is 3681; that's thousands per year.
I'm obsessed with this because it's an ongoing crime against humanity that is being perpetrated by my tribe, the blue tribe: I've been a registered Democrat for 50 years. Because of that, I feel personally responsible to help stop it.
That's an almost miraculously stupid take on the "issue." But thanks for confirming that you're hilariously pathetic.
Ah yes, responding with no facts and a personal insult, the go-to move of the left.
Whatever you think about the topic (I seriously don't know, there should be way more research before policy decisions), pediatric transitions are serious stuff and it's understandable that people care about it.
In SF during Covid, the school board focused on renaming schools and eliminating rigorous curriculum rather than making sure kids got educated and schools were reopened asap. Some of the progressive insanity helped generate a groundswell to replace several school board members.
Re-opening the schools, let alone offering algebra, was deemed racist by the progressive cabal, and anyone even daring to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, all races would benefit from schools being re-opened was canceled with extreme prejudice.
Honestly, progressives need to stay in their echo chambers sometimes. I never understood wanting to get rid of testing or math.... Again not all school systems did this, but I'm not really sure how they thought kids would have better outcomes based on that.
Of course they didn't campaign on it because they know it's unpopular. But it is the policy of their party https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/03/29/report-rule-trans-athletes-delayed-until-after-election
Republicans campaign on crazy and then dial it back in office. Democrats are sneaky and act reasonable during the campaign, then when they get into office out comes the crazy. IMO anybody who believes that men should play in women's sports is disqualified from holding office due to mental insanity. If I thought Democrats would actually govern the way they campaign, I would actually vote for them.
IMO, anyone who thinks that the issue of whether trans women should be allowed to compete in women's sports is an issue that needs to be resolved legislatively should be disqualified from voting due to "mental insanity," and for thinking that there are forms of "insanity" that are not "mental."
I see you're one of the people who won't admit to supporting it, but will strongly object to anybody trying to make a rule against it. Your comment shows two classic attributes of lefties. Dishonesty and pedantry.
I provided a source for the Biden administration ordering schools to allow men to compete in women's sports. How can you possibly claim this isn't a part of the Democratic party platform at a national level.
Nope, not propagandized, fully informed. If you want to be, you can start here: https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report
Yeah, you really are an idiot.
https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity-project_cass-response.pdf
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-k-s-cass-review-badly-fails-trans-children/. [Be sure to follow the links, clown].
The way highly educated people with backgrounds in science and engineering have been bullied into compliance by social justice warriors in HR departments is one of the most shameful chapters in progressive politics. We're supposed to go all in on climate change because of science but also cannot speak up against all kinds of unscientific claims when it comes to trans.
Yes, I have been a STEM professor for 40 years. I used to believe that my party, the Democratic Party, was the party of science. That this is utterly false came as a terrible shock.
Both parties are theological now. Which isn't surprising if you understand human psychology. As Chesterton said, "if you give up on God, the danger isn't that you'll believe in nothing but that you'll believe in anything."
Your choices going forward are between a right-wing, common-sense, post-Christian theology and a Left-wing, militant, secular, woke theology. Pick your poison.
Democrats who were so terrified of a Christian-Republican theocracy in the 90's were letting a postmodernist theocracy grow right under their nose.
Ah yes, the "common sense" of imposing tariffs and cutting taxes to fight inflation. What were the woke Left-wing militants thinking!
Yes, a postmodernist theocracy complete with child sacrifice.
Child Sacrifice? That seems a little out there...
Over a thousand children, viewed as sacred by the new religion, are ritually mutilated every year here in Our Democracy.
A lot of words and group associations without any data to support it.
Wait what? The majority of Americans I'm sure are somewhere in the middle Brian. For someone who is very smart, you seem to not be very pragmatic, hopeful or even see any nuance. Not everything is a binary, especially when it comes to spirituality or politics.
Are you trolling us???
He is not. I agree with him completely, and I am absolutely serious.
Are you really a Commie? Talk about unsupported notions ...
They are all in on "science" except biology. But also any "science" that may contradict their world view that the climate apocalypse is always just 8-12 years away. It's been that way for 30 years.
Tipping points are not the same thing as climate apocalypse. One could reasonable argue that climate change is actually impacting hundreds of millions across the world every year, and costing us a lot in a variety of ways. Just because "The Day After Tomorrow" or "Mad Max" hasn't happened doesn't mean that we aren't doing adverse harm to the planet or ourselves.
I voted for Kamala, but listening to certain progressives prattle on about gender being purely a social construct and separate from biological sex sounds nearly as insane as listening to flat earthers. Every time a politician says the phrase 'birthing person' they lose votes.
I voted for Kamala as well. But the birthing person talk was so stupid. This is what happens when most people who are in charge of organizing are terminally online or college kids imo.
From a definition point of view sex and gender are separate. However, I think we should also be able to agree that biological males, shouldn't compete against women or have an advantage over them, we should also allow leeway for organizations to make decisions about protecting their competition. It doesn't all have to be either or ya know?
It's not accurate to paint the picture that "blue cities" were much better a few years ago but have recently become not great. Blue cities have had huge continuing challenges, somewhat interrupted (accompanied?) by an urban housing boom, but it is way oversimplifying to suggest that there has been a meaningful up and down.
The "blue cities are now badly governed" discourse is some pretty bad journalism, in general. It implies that a major change has taken place in urban governance, and that is not true. There are many legitimate challenges and concerns - concentrated poverty, for one - but that is not a new development, and certainly not the reason for the 2024 outcome.
It is very hard to generalize about the performance of urban government. One thing that journalists - and academics, and everyone - cannot do well is evaluate government performance. No one really even tries to do it properly, but that doesn't prevent uninformed takes and generalizations.
Governing - especially at the local level - requires a nuanced and micro analysis of performance in order to even have a legitimate conversation. There are so many potential measures, comparisons and local details - it is actually a great opportunity for new scholarship. If you work in local government, you have an understanding of these nuances, and you can attempt to form an intelligent opinion. But it is not a topic for amateurs.
This is true. I can speak for New York being subject to a lot of bad journalism when it is the same city it’s always been.
Yeah the governance story here on New York is simply not what Noah describes at all? Throughout the aughts we were run by Bloomberg, we elected Eric Adams (who has his own problems related to comical levels of old-machine style corruption, but is no one's idea of a leftist) three years ago in an election where the left candidate finished third (Garcia, who finished second, was a moderate technocrat). Even the debt graphic above shows that NYC has been reducing its debts, not increasing them. Now, its true that the MTA is a basket case, but it's a state agency not a city one and the dynamics that make it dysfunctional are distinct for that reason. There are a bunch of other things that he gets wrong about NYC as well (the teens were not fiscal boom times at all in NYC because finance got crushed by the GFC, for one obvious example), but this feels like too much extrapolation from what's going on in SF.
I lived in Jersey for years, and the way people in the suburbs would talk about their state like it was the worst state in the country always baffled me. These were usually the same people that thought me living in Jersey City meant that I lived in a war torn and drug infested city was insane. When some people think of cities, I think they think of the 80's or something.
Nicely said - and again, if you want a real view, you need to look at how red cities are governed (successes and failures) as well as semi-rural and rural. I could rant easily on how my semi-rural city is governed and it is one of the better ones in CA.
Voters may not consciously list this as the number 1 reason why they vote, but it certainly increases resistance to persuasion. When Democrats' claims that they will fix problems can be easily dismissed by "yeah, well look at what you guys did with San Francisco," that's not good for Democrats.
Mark, don't let the cat out of the bag.
You liberals, please disregard the rantings of this lunatic. It was all about inflation and racism and sexism. It was white men who just can't handle a black woman as president and poor women tired of eggs being too expensive. Double-down on the cultural issues! Sex changes for teenagers are a positive good -- liberation!
What's so weird is that any major political party actually talked itself into having its presidential candidate make genital mutilation a platform issue.
I should just ignore poll after poll that showed that Trump was preferred on the economy/inflation and immigration and these were some of the top issues for voters. If trans was a disadvantage for Democrats, they also had an advantage on abortion. So, the culture issues canceled out.
I think your logic would be spot on 2 years ago. In 2022, abortion was a major issue then because Dobbs was so recent. But it's been almost 3 years and most people have realized that Dobbs didn't actually change much, especially if they live in anything but a deep-red state. The American democratic solution on abortion isn't nearly as restrictive as the pro-choice side feared or the pro-life side hoped.
Trans is an issue now. It was building in 2022, but Lia Thomas broke the dam. The politically disconnected masses stuck their heads up, saw this 6'-1", 200lb "woman" at the top of the NCAA national swimming podium and said, "hold on a minute!" The gender ideology progressives have been short-stacked since that time, but they've kept doubling down. When you do that in blackjack, eventually you go broke, which is what happened last Tuesday. One of Donald Trump's most successful ads (that ran in lots of swing states) highlighted Harris' lunacy on this issue and ended with the tag, "Harris is for They/Them. Trump is for You." That would only have worked if it resonated with what voters were seeing in the media, in HS and college sports, and personally in their kids' schools.
So yes, immigration and inflation were the two most important, but the trans lunacy very much played into the sense that the Dem and media elites have simply lost the thread of reality.
I'm looking at recent polls, not more word salad from you.
Dobbs did change a lot for people, especially for the state I live now Brian. We have had a couple women die, and others who can't get care, or are now permanently afraid or incapable of having children due to care issues, but frankly other states have protections and people can still travel and it isn't as much of a concern.
That said, Kamala didn't make trans or gender issues central to her campaign, it was things she said in 2019 that Trump and the GOP made central to her campaign and there was no escaping that. She wasn't paying for the ads against herself, so why do you say she made it a central issue?
Your snark isn't necessary, and I get it you aren't liberal, and you spend time on this board to probably feel intellectually superior because you vote conservative or whatever, but I haven't seen anyone on this thread say it was all racism, misogyny or all of that. You can think trans people deserve equal rights but also that girls shouldn't be competing against people that have an advantage. To make it seem like an issue that Kamala made during the campaign when people like you and Trump wouldn't shut up about it, almost feels like gaslighting.
I said elsewhere here that she did not make gender ideology a central issue at all, because she knows how poorly it polls. But she absolutely believes in it (or a least pretends she does). So Trump could take her own words from 5 years ago, the policies that she and Biden put forward in the last 4 years, and argue pretty persuasively that the Democratic Party elites are so out of touch with reality that they think men can get pregnant and boys should be in girls' HS locker rooms.
As for abortion, the polls say that you are a minority. Voters simply weren't motivated by in the same way they were in 2022.
And I'm here because while I disagree with on partisan politics, I have great respect for his economic analysis. I actually think I've been pretty non-snarky this week, considering Trump just shellacked the entire elite establishment of America. Noah was the one wanted to postmortem the election, not me.
> I said elsewhere here that she did not make gender ideology a central issue at all, because she knows how poorly it polls. But she absolutely believes in it (or a least pretends she does). So Trump could take her own words from 5 years ago, the policies that she and Biden put forward in the last 4 years, and argue pretty persuasively that the Democratic Party elites are so out of touch with reality that they think men can get pregnant and boys should be in girls' HS locker rooms.
You literally said above "What's so weird is that any major political party actually talked itself into having its presidential candidate make genital mutilation a platform issue." That was before you are now saying she didn't make it a central issue. I can't imagine any Presidential candidate making gender ideology a central issue to any campaign. You are engaging in a straw man that frankly can never be proven. I am not part of the Dem Party elite and never will be so I don't know how they think, but if the election really came down to trans issues, I think that would be very disappointing since we have much bigger education, inequality, economic, national security, energy, climate change and foreign policy issues we should be worried about.
> As for abortion, the polls say that you are a minority. Voters simply weren't motivated by in the same way they were in 2022.
That is not entirely true, the voters still overwhelming protected the rights to abortion this last election in all the states that Harris lost. So I don't think that's accurate, or at the very least its an oversimplification. There were a lot of people that simply sat out of the election, and in other cases people care about pocketbook issues more and tend not to think about healthcare until they are personally affected... The only state that really didn't support it was Florida but that was because their bar for amendments is 60% higher than pretty much anywhere else but it came in at 57%. Any candidate would be happy to get 57% support on any policy or have a 57% approval rating.
> And I'm here because while I disagree with on partisan politics, I have great respect for his economic analysis. I actually think I've been pretty non-snarky this week, considering Trump just shellacked the entire elite establishment of America. Noah was the one wanted to postmortem the election, not me.
You say you disagree with partisan politics, but most of the time on here you certainly engage with a lot of people that way or bring up partisan politics consistently. The fact that you have to work to be "non-snarky" goes to show you aren't as nonpartisan as you claim to be. To claim Trump also shellacked the entire establishment is a bit much. I bet you didn't claim that when Biden won in 2020.
This is not correct. There is data, interviews with 3000+ voters post-election by a Democrat aligned PAC, Blueprint 2024.
The key findings:
(1) Among swing voters (definition at the site), the three top issues (equal within the margin of error) were inflation, immigration, and transgenderism.
(2) Among all voters, transgenderism was 3rd most important issue, behind inflation and immigration.
(3) Abortion was 21st of 25 issues in importance among all voter cohorts.
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/
The question is a composite one about cultural issues (including trans). Not specific to trans.
"Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class"
I’m not going to teach a grown ass man how to read and interpret a sentence.
Brian, you post lots of good arguments, but then you mix them in with pure rants. Be nice if you actually stuck to the issues......
Kamala Harris barely even mentioned the Transgender issue in her campaign.
Of course she didn't. She knows how "let's slice the boobs off of perfectly healthy teen girls who say they're boys" polls. Like all the rest of her actual positions, she was trying to run away from it.
The GOP wouldn't let her. They used her own words (and then Charlemagne's words) against her with one of the best campaign lines in years: "Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you."
She knew, or at least was told by advisors, not to lead with her chin on that issue.
From a retired city manager: your diagnosis is spot on, but needs to include more emphasis on two major factors causing urban governance challenges: the constraints imposed by state law and public employee bargaining “rights.” California used to celebrate “home rule” for cities - no longer. State laws dictate many of the constraints that limit the scope of reform for city leaders.
Agreed. I served on the planning commission of Elk Grove, CA for about 9 years. The affordable housing allocation rules and required general plan revisions to accommodate increasingly out-of-touch rules from Sacramento made local control essentially impossible. Add CEQA into that and we almost couldn't build anything without state approval.
Now I'm on a school board committee. If you think cities are bad, you ought to see school districts. The Dept of State Architects? There's a money pit.
But that’s how California is going to fix its housing problem - my local mayor’s race was won by the person who is trying to fight the state to stop housing. The state seems to be committed to making sure that can’t happen.
People in America are so obsessed with getting their HELOC loans and keeping their property values up that they will pay lip service to affordable housing, but not actually support YIMBYism or simple housing solutions.
I think there are two major issues.
One is that the actual issue and its framing are at odds, as this article touches on. Republicans cast the problems San Francisco and New York and Seattle have as "safety" issues. They aren't that. They're disorder issues. That doesn't make them any less real, but it does drive how policymakers should think about them. The Asian immigrant who was murdered in San Francsico and whose murderer the DA said was having a "bad day" was a horrific tragedy, and numbskulled and tone deaf rhetoric, but also not indicative of the actual problem-- San Francisco and New York and Seattle aren't actually dangerous in the sense that people are physically unsafe in them. Violent crime, as noted above, remains low. But disorder is rampant-- people do drugs openly, sleep on the streets, crap on sidewalks (mostly in SF), rant and rave delusionally, etc. People don't like these things. Finger wagging at them doesn't accomplish anything.
But that's also not a problem you're gonna solve by locking up drug users with psychosis or locking up shoplifters for a decade-- that'll just cost taxpayers a few arms and legs. The issue is coming up with common sense solutions that are both compassionate and effective. Mandatory treatment for psychotic people likely makes sense. So does confiscation of street drugs. Businesses should be allowed to place security guards at store entrances who can refuse to allow those that can't produce proof of payment to leave. These aren't difficult fixes (though they are expensive, albeit no more expensive than mass incarceration), but they are focused on solving problems rather than punishing people.
The other issue, of course, is housing. And that's where you similarly have limited appetite for the real fix. Wealthy people are going to have to accept density, including *gasp* poor and/or non-white people living in their vicinity, and leftists are going to have to accept *double gasp* that a real estate developer might make a profit in the process. But you're not going to fix or address housing affordability or homelessness issues without building a lot more housing. Unless your plan is to make your city so ugly that it drives everyone away. Which is kind of like treating the flu by euthanizing the patient.
I live in South bay and once I my friend's family visited SF for one day, and we just can not find any public restrooms to relieve ourselves. I was very angry and suddenly able to relate to those disorderly people crapping on the streets. I would say a lot of these are really consequences of NYMBYism.
This is why I can't take any suggestions of a Gavin Newsom presidential run seriously. In the minds of conservatives (and many liberals), he's the man responsible for California's decent into anarchy. His chances of winning a general election are basically zero.
Not a fan of Newsom - don't want him to even run (or continue as governor). But the notion that there is "anarchy" in California is a pure myth - surprised to see anyone reading this blog simply repeat it (although I shouldn't be).
I lived in San Francisco for years. The two times I rented a car, it was broken into. One of the times was in an underground garage. All of my things were stolen. The police were incompetent beyond belief. It was like they didn't realize that their job was to stop such things from happening, and were confused why I was bothered by it. When I went to Walgreens to buy toiletries to replace my stolen items, someone in a ski mask walked in to rob the place. When I reported my corporate badge stolen at work the next day I was told that I was the fifth employee that had happened to *that week*.
I'm not sure where in California you've lived, but where I've lived "anarchy" is a perfectly apt term.
There is in some places like Oakland, like the In-n-Out near the airport where basically everyone who visits it gets their car broken into. This is mainly because the police have just stopped doing their job and nobody is organized enough to make them start doing it again.
I have no idea who will be the 2028 Dem candidate, and now that Obama has run his course (although I may be wrong on that/this), it won't be him "picking" the candidate anymore. And being the nephew(?) of Pelosi is likely now more liability than a leg up. If she is even alive/active by 2028. Seems to me it is a wide open field, which will be a good thing for Dems and the country.
I don't think most folks in CA would want Newsom to run for President anyway - he is not particularly well-liked. Which goes back to the longer discussion of how the Democratic Party (and its leadership and its donors) pick a major candidate. But when my choice is some off the deep end Republican in CA vs almost any Dem, I know how I will vote. Truly moderate Republicans have won the governorship - but far and away the best we had in a long time was Jerry Brown.
The real question is how do you make housing more affordable when voters are dead set against building more of it? I live in Denver and all the affordable housing initiatives on the ballot were shot down. To me it feels like voters are saying that they are serious about not wanting more people moving to their neighborhoods.
I know some people in Seattle who are vehemently opposed to the affordable housing, and it's because in their minds affordable housing=slums. I think if we solve crime issue, solving housing issue might become easier.
I fully agree with this. I also find that a lot of people though want the “cultural character” of their to be neighborhood be preserved and I think that is a far harder hurdle to overcome, particularly in a large and diverse society like the US. Maybe we need to increase social trust to build more housing?
Look who gets to build state-sponsored “affordable housing” and their connection to the pols backing it. Then look at the cost per unit.
In places like SF where permit fees and required reports can be $150k per unit, nothing is going to be affordable to begin with. Build the affordable housing in Oakland or S San Francisco
By building more market rate housing and relaxing rules around square footage and regulations that make multi-family units expensive.
But in order to do that you need voters to actually vote for those policies and while I am a YIMBY it seems that most voters are not
You mentioned proposals for affordable housing. That’s not the same as market rate housing.
Sorry I guess I have a tendency to use both those terms interchangeably. At least in Colorado both affordable housing that is subsidized and building new market rate housing seems unpopular among most people in my personal experience. This is particularly true of high density housing that doesn’t fit the traditional Suburban mold.
Yes, it requires persuasion.
I think this can be at least partly achieved by changing the level decisions are made at. Most people want more housing to be built *somewhere*, but not *right here*. Policies that make it easier to build housing everywhere in a metro areas at once are likely to be less unpopular than policies to concentrate building in a particular neighborhood.
Is there a specific city you have in mind when you mention this? Also do you think voters would go along with giving local control over zoning?
I think it's happened in SF and Berkeley, CA near where I live. Both are considered extreme bastions of NIMBYism, yet have elected the most YIMBY state senators in the state (Scott Weiner and Nancy Skinner). I think that is largely down to state senate districts being much larger than city council districts.
It seems like this would be something you could study by comparing votes related to housing construction among at large city councilors, councilors about their own district or councilors about someone else's district. (In SF that would probably be confounded due to a tradition of only voting in favor of construction in a district if the councilor from that district agreed to it, though I presume that's not the case most other places.) IDK if there's any research on the topic, but it would be interesting to see the results.
To your second question, a lot of the legislation passed by YIMBY state senators in California does remove local control over zoning, though it's such a roundabout process that the voters may not have realized it. A particular regulatory body needs to periodically certify each city's general plan affirming that it is in compliance with the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) requirement of how much housing is needed. Several YIMBY bills have made that process less of a rubber-stamp and also made the RHNA requirements more aggressive. When the general plan for a city is _not_ certified by a deadline, then the city's zoning laws cannot be enforced and any projects proposed during the period of non-compliance can be built by-right, even afterwards. (This is called the "builder's remedy".) This is rarely invoked, but terrifies NIMBY jurisdictions and has forced them to make their zoning less restrictive.
(Aside: thinking on your overall question more, I think there's a pretty large voting block of low-information voters who have no idea how difficult it is to build housing in their area. Even if they consider themselves opposed to building more housing, they have no idea what the actual laws are and would in fact consider many of the requirements totally absurd if they realized they existed. NIMBYs have managed to hide extreme anti-housing legislation in mind-numbingly dull details like view corridor requirements, floor-area ratio, design review, historical preservation, environmental impact, etc. Since it is quite boring, I don't really know how to educate people enough to make a difference, but I think if somebody could, it would radicalize a lot of YIMBYs.)
It would help to just make more housing and not qualify that it be affordable. If the housing supply increases, then most housing will become more affordable, and more housing can be built if there aren’t arbitrary price controls added to make it “affordable”.
Doesn't really happen in big cities that have a lot of money flowing in, just attracts more people with money who no longer have to live in the suburbs. It's a nice theory and yes, it may open up more housing far away from the city centers, but that doesn't make more "affordable housing" inside a city.
Another myth at least as far as older dense cities are concerned
Other than NYC, there isn't a US city that's remotely dense by world standards. Let's build the density and then argue about how it's still unaffordable for many.
“Affordable Housing” is often a scam. Ease zoning, planning and building laws and let supply meet demand.
Or get some people together and build apartment blocks (many of which have gone up in Denver) and commit to accepting housing vouchers as rent for the first 20 years. Form a 501c3 and much of the construction cost plus the annual below market rent concessions will be charitable contributions. All it takes is a handful of rich, white progressives to do this. You could sponsor one apartment- say offering $1000/mo rent concession- $12k per year - as charitable contribution. That is one unit and it costs the taxpayers nothing and doesn’t require their approval. Fund your own ideas rather than blaming other people for not wanting to fund yours. This can be done. I know someone who does this to house homeless families.
So maybe progressives should rely more on non-profits like habitat for humanity rather local governments for affordable housing since they don’t require majority consensus?
Fully agree with looser zoning laws just FYI.
New York is not San Francisco.
I don’t know much about San Francisco but as a continuous resident of New York City since the 90s, I don’t think New York is in the same league as West Coast cities that have been struggling notably since the pandemic.
In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of anything that has changed in New York for the worse in the last 3 decades. The city has always had a big tax burden, always been insanely expensive, always had enormous amount ls of debt, always was really expensive to build infrastructure in, and always had hordes of mentally unstable homeless.
But over this time, the city has remained glamorous and culturally vibrant, continues to build beautiful new parks, remains the playground of many, is dotted with cranes and new constructions every other block, and keeps pushing its zones of revitalized and gentrified neighborhoods out further and further from city center.
Cities are for singles and are generally hard on the elderly and children. As for families? We moved out of NYC to start a family.
Cities offer entertainment that is hard to replicate elsewhere. This is why people move outside the city to lower the chaos volume and hopefully find a safe neighborhood and a good school system.
My time in NYC was from 1987 to 2002. I saw the end of the Koch administration and Dinkins Administration. I also saw the renaissance of the city after Guiliani was voted in. The difference was palpable.
The share of poor homeless, EDPs, and drug addicts was out of control in those early days. It made just walking down the street difficult and anxiety-producing. Most Americans function. They go to work, they come home. On the weekend, they do chores and relax or try to have some fun. It is time spent with children and or family.
Commuting in NYC is horrid. This is why people do not want to go back to commuting. I spent about 3 hours a day commuting, depending on the weather. The last thing you want to deal with in your daily routine is to manage the unmanageable.
By that, I mean people who do not function within normal parameters. Cities are hard; what makes them harder is the extra stress of many people trying to do the same thing simultaneously. The added weight of dealing with crazy people or criminals makes the value proposition worse. Add in the extra expenses of living in a city. Food costs more, taxes are higher, transportation costs, entertainment costs. Everything is more costly. It eventually drives away everybody but the ultra-rich.
I still go into the City at least twice a year. My daughter currently lives there, but I highly doubt if she gets married to her boyfriend and they decide to have children that, they will continue to live there.
NYC is ungovernable at the moment. The City Council is more interested in people who don’t function well and in migrants. You are correct. The MTA is a black hole. Phase I of the Second Ave subway started in 1970, it was opened in 2017. That was only Phase I. Phase II is about to start. I think the complete line will cost $17 billion. This is unsustainable.
Bad politics mixed with bad fiscal management equals chaos.
Cities are far better for the elderly who can’t drive who are often isolated and dependent on the suburbs. Cities also (sometimes) offer more independence for kids or teens depending on safety issues. Your view is popular but, in my opinion, wrong. Cities should absolutely be for elders and kids and, all over the world, they are.
They are not good if they are not safe.
Do you mean commuting into NYC instead of Commuting _in_ NYC?
I think commuting within NYC is one of its greatest relative strengths; it's quite easy to find an apartment within a 30min walk/subway ride from work. It does get substantially harder if your have kids though, especially if you're price sensitive.
I'll just say that a lot of changes that Guiliani got credit for started under Dinkins. But the difference in the city was certainly palatable.
Regarding commuting, that is such a difficult issue to solve, because the tri state area, can't decide how to pay, tax or build new infrastructure for commuting. It's so frustrating. The MTA is absolutely a black hole, and it costs way to much to fix or improve anything. That said though, I know lots of older and elderly couples that still live in NYC because of the great healthcare options and things to do for an active lifestyle and social support programs.
NYC is trying to do more greenspaces, but at the end of the day you are right, costs for housing (3 or 4 bedroom places) needs to come down, enforcement on petty crime needs to come down, it needs to be clean and safe, and finally people don't want to spend a ton of money and still have to deal with old trains that are late.
We agreed on a post, there is a first time for everything Earl! lol. Good observations though, real talk.
I think you’re just a pussy to be honest. Source: born and raised in NYC.
LOL, hysterical. Nope, born in raised is low cal so cal. I love eating pussy
Emotionally disturbed person.
I don’t have the data to prove it, but I suspect that working-class families aren’t exactly excited about “bike lanes” as the bike activists would have you believe. (Certainly the moderate, elderly Asians in the Sunset who just lost car access to their Great Highway aren’t.) The bike activism strikes me as a little class-deaf.
That’s because it’s not about pandering - it’s about creating something that will actually be helpful for many people and make the city a better place to live for more people.
Without the data, this just seems like fertile ground for us to all project our own values onto another group. I don't really see "too many bike lanes" being the thing that tips a working-class family to move out of a hypothetical city that had plenty of affordable housing, public order, good jobs, and high school quality.
What I think you're really getting at is not so much the bikes themselves but the ease of driving/owning a car, and the assumption that if bike activists lose, drivers will win. But driving in dense places is just going to inherently suck, with or without the bike lanes. Cars are just a bad fit for cities because they need too much (expensive) space, both in motion and at rest.
Bike lanes turned into another culture war issue. It is basically another shibboleth phrase. One of those not-so-secret passwords you have to say to prove you belong to the in-group.
But speaking of class-deaf — you can probably buy 2 or 3 good electric bicycles for the cost of owning a car for one single year. So from that principle it is really weird that cycling is considered an elitist thing.
A working bike lane network is a big deal — a two-way bike lane that is 15 feet can move more people than a 2×3 lane road before it gets congested, with almost none of the noise and pollution that would come from that road, and very little danger, relatively speaking. Parking bicycles takes a fraction of the space of parking cars. A bike lane is much cheaper to maintain than a road way. Etc. etc. etc. etc. Unless your city has piles and piles of unused cash (it probably isn't) a bike network is a pretty smart investment.
The underlying problem is that, if you talk about a city where you can reasonably get by on a bicycle, you might just as well be talking about a Mars base. People have never experienced it. Many will never see it within their lifetimes. How are they supposed to know how it works? That makes it politically almost impossible to get started.
Definitely true, but from the evidence I see in my home town of Cambridge MA, it isn't just working class families that are put out by the bike lanes. It really cuts across class groups.
I agree with a lot of this. And I can see why the absence of new housing would prevent cities from growing. But why would the absence of new housing cause the populations of the cities to decline?
In other words, it seems like factors other than the lack of new housing are causing the decline of these cities. Indeed, the real turning point in the population graph is the pandemic and protests in 2020, which caused a sharp decline in population that has stressed city finances and which also spurred many antisocial public policies that have made the cities less livable. Those explanations are independent of any NIMBYism.
Absence of new housing causes population to decline because rich people can afford more space per person.
Exactly. In my home town which is famous for its biotech industry, you've got young well paid employees and their families moving here and needing a place to live. Many, if not most want to live in the city, but housing is scarce and very little new is getting built. Since they can't find a nice place, they buy an old triple decker that used to house three families of 5-9 people and gut rehab it into a luxury home for their family of 4. After a couple of these get done in a neighborhood, the prices on all the other houses skyrocket. The end result is a neighborhood that formerly had 200 people on a block has 40.
Can confirm. For example in Echo Park 1.5 miles NW of downtown Los Angeles, in past 20 years the population of many blocks has been halved.
Exactly, but that also happens when you build new apartment buildings in cities that are expensive. The apartments flow to folks who have money - perhaps moving in from far away suburbs. Yes, maybe that makes housing available eventually in those suburbs with still massive commutes.
Hallelujah!