I also enjoy linguistics and quite liked Deutscher’s book. It’s been years since I read it but I remember it striking a great balance between giving enough technical information to be interesting but not so much as to be overwhelming. Many general-interest linguistics books are so afraid of the latter that they ignore the former (John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel comes to mind, which I found surprisingly dull).
So your advice to YIMBYs is to lie? Because the only victories YIMBYs will ever get is by overturning local control. At least now they're honest about it.
By the way, plenty of affordable housing available in my hometown of Akron, Ohio, and in zillions of other places around the country like it. Why don't the YIMBYs just move to where the housing is?
I moved for work, as did Freddie, as did millions of other people. And I'm told that lots of people are leaving California because they say it's unaffordable here.
That seems fine with me. Don't like jobs or housing conditions where you are? Then go to where they're better.
I don't know why you're constantly trying to pick fights with me lately, but I specifically said TO DO POLITICS, which you constantly browbeat other people about doing. It's absolute fucking basic electoral politics to express your platform in a way that avoids sounding radical and to instead front the specific material agenda.
Pick fights? I express disagreement when I disagree, and yes I sometimes use sharp language (as you have been known to do, as in "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand").
And I have never advocated lying in politics. I have advocated ACTUALLY ADOPTING POSITIONS THAT ARE POPULAR ENOUGH TO WIN ELECTIONS, and then following through after winning.
Every YIMBY is absolutely on board with the California law that overturned local control. Every YIMBY is pushing for similar laws everywhere. Because they all know that they can't win locally, and because they don't believe in the principle of local control in the first place.
Humans are not robots. There are a trillion good reasons why individuals may not be able or willing to simply uproot themselves and move across the country to a place they've never known in the hopes of finding affordable housing. This is the advantage capital has over workers: mobility.
Substitute "a good job" for "affordable housing". Is it still true?
If housing is truly unaffordable, workers will leave, and then businesses will have to pay more (or shut down). This is how unplanned economies have functioned for millenia.
Planned economies seem like they should be so much better, but experience shows that they're just not.
This relies heavily on the assumption that 'poor' people can easily move. I remember hearing Morgan Freeman once say something along this line of thinking, "There's a bus that leaves every day." Okay sure, but that's a massive oversimplification of the issue. Generally speaking, they cannot just easily move. For all sorts of reasons, but mostly due to simple economics.
Moving requires at least some savings to cover the cost, lower-income jobs generally don't have those expenses 'covered' by their employer. And lower-income people generally (especially now) have little to no savings.
It also requires the time away from work to not only pack-up, move, and pack-out, but also to find a place that suits their needs. Adequate schooling for kids is one major factor, but also public transportation needs. Even owning a reliable car these days is hard for low-earners, so inadequate city transit can often be a deal-breaker. I see Akron has bussing, which is good, but keep in mind that may mean taking multiple buses to work which adds considerably to the commute. Bigger urban centers tend to have more efficient public transit, which is one of the major benefits of living there in the first place.
Another factor is elderly care in the family. Lots of lower-income families tend to be caretakers for elderly parents and such. These people are not easy to move for all sorts of reasons, especially medical. And leaving them behind is usually a non-starter.
Economic (and therefore geographic) mobility is a rarity for low-income workers. And simply telling people to move is not only hard to achieve, it doesn't do anything for the local issue itself.
I understand that there are many practical issues, and I am in favor of massive government subsidies of mitigation efforts (eg moving expenses), and massively higher taxes on people like me to pay for it. Government-mandated housing that locals don't want has a very poor track record overall. Destroying villages in order to save them doesn't work and never has.
It was really cool to hear you on Bad Faith express something on vaccines -- that we have X% of eligible adults vaccinated, and that X is *larger* one would have reasonably guessed.
There's a passage in Franzen's Freedom towards the end --
>He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
Regarding YIMBY'ism: I've been puzzled by the blanket campaign targeting "single family housing." I'm a hardcore leftist. Living in Seattle, where housing prices have soared at one of the highest rates in the nation. I attribute this to factors both national and local. On the national level, we've had the Fed goosing asset prices for decades. Locally, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc have brought in large numbers of high-paid techies from elsewhere, with salaries far higher than those previously on offer to employees of what used to be the two largest local employers (Boeing, and the University of Washington.) There's been a ton of housing built, aimed at the younger cohort of that high-paid techie group. Expensive apartments, primarily. And where those apartments have gone up - units that are not suitable for families with children, for the most part - there aren't schools and other necessary infrastructure should the kids start appearing.
There's housing going up along the recently-built light-rail lines, too. Again, apartments. The historically Black neighborhood (the Central District) which came to be that way due to redlining everywhere else, is now a highly desirable neighborhood very close to downtown. Prices have soared. Houses get knocked down, and replaced by more of the four to six story apartment buildings, also aimed primarily at the high-earning young. The District long ago ceased to be majority Black.
But to me, this push to declare open season on zoning laws citywide comes across as a Developer and/or Libertarian wet dream. This became clear several years ago, when the City Council debated allowing more multi-unit housing in more places. Amendments to limit or outlaw short-term rentals were shot down. So what do we gain by this campaign? High-priced apartments, and AirBnB stuff pushing out actual residents. My response, as a leftist: Fuck that!
Going back to the Central District: most of the housing stock there, when it was the "Black neighborhood," was single family housing. Housing in which the owners took pride. Those residents didn't want to be stuck in little apartments their whole lives. They raised families, which needed some space. The children went to local schools. Many of the other less affluent parts of town have the same history, with successive waves of immigrants replacing previous groups.
Seattle is not NYC. The history, and housing stock, are very different. But it feels to me (I see this is The Stranger, the alt-weekly based in the Capitol Hill area, which used to be "the" gay and lesbian part of the City, now also under huge housing price pressure, aimed at all the young techies with big money) like the goal is to force everyone to live in some idealized dense, vertical, car-less "utopia." That may work for twenty- and thirty- somethings, largely childless, whose workplaces are quite nearby even before Covid-policy shutdowns moved that workplace to a laptop in their apartment. But it sure as hell doesn't work for hundreds of thousands of others. The way it gets pushed ("abolish single family zoning and affordable housing will miraculously appear") comes across very much the way "abolish the police" did just this past year. And we've seen how that worked out...
Haven't leftists, by definition, always put the needs of the working class above the workings of "the market"? Then why should anyone on the left expect "the market" to magically build affordable housing suitable to more than high-earning young singletons? No, this is going to require both zoning changes (we've got accessory dwelling units, "mother-in-law apartments" in many "single-family" areas already, and apartments going up like crazy along certain arterials bordering single-zoned neighborhoods, close to bus lines), but it is also going to require strict regulations on "the market" to ensure that new housing is for actual residents, and not short-term rental hotels-in-disguise. Otherwise, given that banks will issue higher mortgages on the income-earning potential of housing, housing prices will GO UP, not down. And most of all, we will need massive government spending to build housing for all. "The Market" isn't going to do it. "YIMBY's" need to get their act together, to come up with some better ideas, lest they be seen as fronting for the Blackstones of the Wall Street world, which can't wait to snap up all housing, condemning us all into renting for life.
Freddie: how about having a discussion with political economist MIchael Hudson about this?
I especially like: "The way it gets pushed ("abolish single family zoning and affordable housing will miraculously appear") comes across very much the way "abolish the police" did just this past year. And we've seen how that worked out..."
Totally agree that it's generally a mistake to target "single family housing" - since so many successful, married couples with kids live in, or want to live in, such housing.
There's plenty of lower cost housing in places with lousy schools - why don't the childless go live there? Oh, right - also high crime. And dirty; not many nice restaurants nearby...
Trump fan-boy Don Surber writes about Woodside (CA, South SF) and mountain lions:
Aw, thanks for the comment of the week shout-out! I'll have to make sure to work a little flattery into all of my comments from now on.
Your comment was very relatable. Growing up I always felt like I had a tendency to write like whoever I was reading without even trying to.
I also enjoy linguistics and quite liked Deutscher’s book. It’s been years since I read it but I remember it striking a great balance between giving enough technical information to be interesting but not so much as to be overwhelming. Many general-interest linguistics books are so afraid of the latter that they ignore the former (John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel comes to mind, which I found surprisingly dull).
I dream of the day where I never have to read about COVID ever again
“Bernie would have won”
Old jokes are the best jokes.
So your advice to YIMBYs is to lie? Because the only victories YIMBYs will ever get is by overturning local control. At least now they're honest about it.
By the way, plenty of affordable housing available in my hometown of Akron, Ohio, and in zillions of other places around the country like it. Why don't the YIMBYs just move to where the housing is?
I moved for work, as did Freddie, as did millions of other people. And I'm told that lots of people are leaving California because they say it's unaffordable here.
That seems fine with me. Don't like jobs or housing conditions where you are? Then go to where they're better.
I don't know why you're constantly trying to pick fights with me lately, but I specifically said TO DO POLITICS, which you constantly browbeat other people about doing. It's absolute fucking basic electoral politics to express your platform in a way that avoids sounding radical and to instead front the specific material agenda.
Pick fights? I express disagreement when I disagree, and yes I sometimes use sharp language (as you have been known to do, as in "Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand").
And I have never advocated lying in politics. I have advocated ACTUALLY ADOPTING POSITIONS THAT ARE POPULAR ENOUGH TO WIN ELECTIONS, and then following through after winning.
Every YIMBY is absolutely on board with the California law that overturned local control. Every YIMBY is pushing for similar laws everywhere. Because they all know that they can't win locally, and because they don't believe in the principle of local control in the first place.
Humans are not robots. There are a trillion good reasons why individuals may not be able or willing to simply uproot themselves and move across the country to a place they've never known in the hopes of finding affordable housing. This is the advantage capital has over workers: mobility.
Substitute "a good job" for "affordable housing". Is it still true?
If housing is truly unaffordable, workers will leave, and then businesses will have to pay more (or shut down). This is how unplanned economies have functioned for millenia.
Planned economies seem like they should be so much better, but experience shows that they're just not.
This relies heavily on the assumption that 'poor' people can easily move. I remember hearing Morgan Freeman once say something along this line of thinking, "There's a bus that leaves every day." Okay sure, but that's a massive oversimplification of the issue. Generally speaking, they cannot just easily move. For all sorts of reasons, but mostly due to simple economics.
Moving requires at least some savings to cover the cost, lower-income jobs generally don't have those expenses 'covered' by their employer. And lower-income people generally (especially now) have little to no savings.
It also requires the time away from work to not only pack-up, move, and pack-out, but also to find a place that suits their needs. Adequate schooling for kids is one major factor, but also public transportation needs. Even owning a reliable car these days is hard for low-earners, so inadequate city transit can often be a deal-breaker. I see Akron has bussing, which is good, but keep in mind that may mean taking multiple buses to work which adds considerably to the commute. Bigger urban centers tend to have more efficient public transit, which is one of the major benefits of living there in the first place.
Another factor is elderly care in the family. Lots of lower-income families tend to be caretakers for elderly parents and such. These people are not easy to move for all sorts of reasons, especially medical. And leaving them behind is usually a non-starter.
Economic (and therefore geographic) mobility is a rarity for low-income workers. And simply telling people to move is not only hard to achieve, it doesn't do anything for the local issue itself.
I understand that there are many practical issues, and I am in favor of massive government subsidies of mitigation efforts (eg moving expenses), and massively higher taxes on people like me to pay for it. Government-mandated housing that locals don't want has a very poor track record overall. Destroying villages in order to save them doesn't work and never has.
It was really cool to hear you on Bad Faith express something on vaccines -- that we have X% of eligible adults vaccinated, and that X is *larger* one would have reasonably guessed.
There's a passage in Franzen's Freedom towards the end --
>He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn't get along well with others.
-- that reminds me of what you were saying there.
Regarding YIMBY'ism: I've been puzzled by the blanket campaign targeting "single family housing." I'm a hardcore leftist. Living in Seattle, where housing prices have soared at one of the highest rates in the nation. I attribute this to factors both national and local. On the national level, we've had the Fed goosing asset prices for decades. Locally, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc have brought in large numbers of high-paid techies from elsewhere, with salaries far higher than those previously on offer to employees of what used to be the two largest local employers (Boeing, and the University of Washington.) There's been a ton of housing built, aimed at the younger cohort of that high-paid techie group. Expensive apartments, primarily. And where those apartments have gone up - units that are not suitable for families with children, for the most part - there aren't schools and other necessary infrastructure should the kids start appearing.
There's housing going up along the recently-built light-rail lines, too. Again, apartments. The historically Black neighborhood (the Central District) which came to be that way due to redlining everywhere else, is now a highly desirable neighborhood very close to downtown. Prices have soared. Houses get knocked down, and replaced by more of the four to six story apartment buildings, also aimed primarily at the high-earning young. The District long ago ceased to be majority Black.
But to me, this push to declare open season on zoning laws citywide comes across as a Developer and/or Libertarian wet dream. This became clear several years ago, when the City Council debated allowing more multi-unit housing in more places. Amendments to limit or outlaw short-term rentals were shot down. So what do we gain by this campaign? High-priced apartments, and AirBnB stuff pushing out actual residents. My response, as a leftist: Fuck that!
Going back to the Central District: most of the housing stock there, when it was the "Black neighborhood," was single family housing. Housing in which the owners took pride. Those residents didn't want to be stuck in little apartments their whole lives. They raised families, which needed some space. The children went to local schools. Many of the other less affluent parts of town have the same history, with successive waves of immigrants replacing previous groups.
Seattle is not NYC. The history, and housing stock, are very different. But it feels to me (I see this is The Stranger, the alt-weekly based in the Capitol Hill area, which used to be "the" gay and lesbian part of the City, now also under huge housing price pressure, aimed at all the young techies with big money) like the goal is to force everyone to live in some idealized dense, vertical, car-less "utopia." That may work for twenty- and thirty- somethings, largely childless, whose workplaces are quite nearby even before Covid-policy shutdowns moved that workplace to a laptop in their apartment. But it sure as hell doesn't work for hundreds of thousands of others. The way it gets pushed ("abolish single family zoning and affordable housing will miraculously appear") comes across very much the way "abolish the police" did just this past year. And we've seen how that worked out...
Haven't leftists, by definition, always put the needs of the working class above the workings of "the market"? Then why should anyone on the left expect "the market" to magically build affordable housing suitable to more than high-earning young singletons? No, this is going to require both zoning changes (we've got accessory dwelling units, "mother-in-law apartments" in many "single-family" areas already, and apartments going up like crazy along certain arterials bordering single-zoned neighborhoods, close to bus lines), but it is also going to require strict regulations on "the market" to ensure that new housing is for actual residents, and not short-term rental hotels-in-disguise. Otherwise, given that banks will issue higher mortgages on the income-earning potential of housing, housing prices will GO UP, not down. And most of all, we will need massive government spending to build housing for all. "The Market" isn't going to do it. "YIMBY's" need to get their act together, to come up with some better ideas, lest they be seen as fronting for the Blackstones of the Wall Street world, which can't wait to snap up all housing, condemning us all into renting for life.
Freddie: how about having a discussion with political economist MIchael Hudson about this?
Brilliant, thank you.
I especially like: "The way it gets pushed ("abolish single family zoning and affordable housing will miraculously appear") comes across very much the way "abolish the police" did just this past year. And we've seen how that worked out..."
Totally agree that it's generally a mistake to target "single family housing" - since so many successful, married couples with kids live in, or want to live in, such housing.
There's plenty of lower cost housing in places with lousy schools - why don't the childless go live there? Oh, right - also high crime. And dirty; not many nice restaurants nearby...
Trump fan-boy Don Surber writes about Woodside (CA, South SF) and mountain lions:
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2022/02/and-just-like-that-liberals-hated.html
Woodside's a nice place. Good for them.
Fight the YIOPBYs!
Republicans could re-take California on this issue (plus CRT and trans ideology) if they weren't so wedded to Trump.
Me, I'll be going to Democrat candidate forums and pressing hard for a commitment to repeal of SB9. I'll be a single-issue primary voter on this.
YIOPBY = yes in other peoples' back yard
Q: What do you call the useless piece of flesh at the end of a penis?
A: Jessica Yaniv.