Does the left hate upwardly mobile strivers more than the current American right does?
Until recently, the American right talked a good game about striving. But it's also nursed an anti-intellectual streak for a while and serves a coalition with arguably lower human capital than the left-aligned coalition. (By many measures, American "blue country" is more economically productive than American "red country", even if "blue country" government is really annoying.)
To be clear, I don't think it's wrong for striving digital nomads to flee high-cost-of-living "blue" areas. Maybe it'll even help bridge this divide?:
STEM PhDs in America still (perhaps increasingly) lean blue, despite STEM's reputation for rewarding hard work and talent more objectively than other academic disciplines do. The reddest STEMlords I've known seem to loathe their blue colleagues as effete academics who somehow aren't striving even while they're in direct competition in demanding disciplines with these striving red STEMlords.
Ten years ago, even five, if you'd said the American right makes more room for the strivers than the American left does, I would have agreed with you. Now, though?
It also benefits stratum 6 by lowering the crime that nothing-to-lose residents of stratum 1 would otherwise be inflicting on those Airbnb guests, thus increasing the amount of rent than can be charged.
Doing my part by retiring early and drinking way more beer than I should. Hey, we can all pitch in.
Tell you what: When Harvard, Yale and all these other "woke elite" universities turn over their entire endowments to pay off student loans they cleaned up on, with any remainder being handed over to descendants of US slaves, and their land holdings and buildings turned over to the "first nations" from whom the land was stolen, I will happily deed our properties over to the Bannock and Hawaiians. But, I feel pretty safe that's not going to happen.
Only very tangential to your comment but the South End is pretty rich too (I guess not historically in the way Beacon Hill and Back Bay are but it's been well off for a while now)
I think they’re ugly in full view, but on ground level it only feels like the old building and in the skyline it only feels like the new building, so I think for practical purposes it kind of works
Are NIMBYs conflating "new neighbors who are slightly less wealthy than me and live in condos" with "patients in drug rehab treatment facilities"? Reveals a lot about the mindset.
Thinking about how in Toronto, a huge fuss was raised by a bunch of extremely wealthy people, including Margaret Atwood, over a luxury mid-rise condo built adjacent to their neighbourhood (that IIRC was replacing a dilapidated warehouse). One of the issues was that people in the condo might be able to see into their backyard.
"Target just those areas...". No one is trying to upzone Back Bay, Beacon Hill or South End, because they're already dense neighborhoods with successful intense land use that has resulted in high prices. They're also historically protected neighborhoods, which they should be! Boston has a lot of charm. Those density requirements just shouldn't be illegal throughout the rest of the city. What would be great would be allowing 4-6 story rowhouses throughout the rest of Boston with no parking minimum requirements, just as those expensive neighborhoods are currently built. Downtown and the West End should also be unleashed to allow for 700' dense residential towers, Seaport should double their housing units, etc. All of these neighborhoods are already occupied by Rich People, so let's build more housing for them!
Boston has a lot of space that has horrible land use despite being near transit and major roadways. Allston and Brighton come to mind, as do the pseudo suburban parts of Roslindale and W Roxbury. Keeping these as single family homes only is a mistake and NIMBYs are entirely responsible for the issues in these areas.
If the most desirable parts of the city have bad land use, low density, high parking minimums, and restrictive zoning near amenities and public transit, then yes they should be upzoned, at least to the levels of Back Bay and the South End. Clearly Rich People can thrive in such communities! I think Boston and a few other American cities are simply unique that the richest people want to live in the densest areas (for the city per se, leaving out the wealthy suburbs). The idea that zoning regs are "coming for" rich areas doesn't compute, in my opinion, and it has been the opposite for like two generations.
The tired example of Parisian density should be the model for all dense American cities with high demand, and it just so happens that large parts of Boston have already done a good job of getting there.
1. The first part of my comment ironically WASN'T referring to the nicest parts of Boston, because the densest areas are already some of the most expensive. It would be great if that could be applied to other expensive cities in the US. California, Washington, Austin, etc., are much better examples where principles-based zoning reform would have the biggest impact in the "nicest" areas, including dreaded 4-story lux condos. Leading me to...
2. The idea that alleviating restrictive zoning that may impact nice areas is some targeted approach to punish Rich People flies in the face of everything I know about 20th century American life. EVEN IF zoning changed, private property rights do and should trump anything else, and so some rich family in Atherton can just give their house to their children or not move if they don't want to see their neighborhood change. This point is always used as a boogeyman, such as the new zoning nudge that Baker is trying to roll out to MBTA-proximal communities. No one is going to take anything from you!
As someone who was a tourist in Boston like a week ago, your road system was the biggest deterrent for me. I have driven in a lot of big cities and Boston was a nightmare. It seemed like every road was a one-way, often without clear signage if you were turning onto it, roads were curved and winding so you could barely tell if you were going where you wanted to, lanes disappeared, lanes appeared, traffic light timing made no sense, roundabouts were not always "round" and sometimes had way too many entrances/exits, sometimes you were suddenly on a highway and sometimes the highway lead right into a traffic light.
Most young income-rich people got that way by moving away from where they grew up to go to a good college and then moving to New York, Seattle, San Francisco, or LA to get that income. But now they have no way to “stay where they are”, in that it’s essentially impossible to buy acceptable real estate in any of these places without a massive influx of equity from a tech job or wealthy relatives. Americans do not, as a rule, spend their whole lives renting in city centers like Germans, so they’re inevitably going to move somewhere, the question is just where.
I would love to spend my whole life renting in a city center but rent always goes up by insane amounts and moving every year or two in response to rent increases gets exhausting. If there was some kind of cap on how much a landlord could raise the rent in a given year I bet more people would be okay with renting forever. I find myself wanting to buy my own house or apartment solely for the stability...
(says this young person who has a six figure income but cannot afford to live in her wealthy suburban hometown)
Yes, well, of course there is such a cap in civilized cities. But there still aren’t many great places to rent indefinitely in SF or NYC, especially for families larger than 2.
I know that in my case, I literally cannot afford either the urban area where I was born or the suburb where my family moved for the schools. The specific house that I once lived in has more than doubled in price since we sold it in ~2003, and at the time we thought we were getting a lot of money for it!
For comparison, my partner and I bought our one-bedroom condo near the train in Boston for about as much money as my parents got for that house in New Jersey. Yeah, sure, urban real-estate is always gonna cost more, but when my condo was sold in 2004 it cost 2/3 the price my family got for our suburban house. You gonna tell me that a 60% price increase over 15 years for the small place and a 100%+ for the big house is a rational allocation of resources?
I think the only solution is for the affluent to buy new middle income homes in economically mixed neighborhoods, pretend like they're *not* wealthy, donate their extra income to public schools (without expectation of any improvements because white supremacy), and live quiet lives of self-abnegation until death. Simple!
I'm an American citizen born in America, but I'm non-white. This piece is pretty accurate (and frankly, I would say I assimilated better than most of my peers, given how abysmal my fluency in my family's non-English native language is.)
Also shameless compliment, your kids sound cool and your blog is cool too.
It's interesting to me as the child of a white immigrant to notice how similar many of my experiences are to children of non white immigrants. Of course there are additional barriers for non white immigrants, but I had a friend whose mom is Italian and her cultural mannerisms are still very different (and sometimes embarrassing) to her American child.
We have so many commonalities with which to make connections.
My general understanding is no first-generation immigrant really truly assimilates (unless they migrate before their teen years) while by the second generation people predominantly identify with the country of their birth, and by the third they are fully assimilated. Certainly it's working this way for modern immigrants to the U.S. just as well as it did with earlier groups.
The issue with expats from the U.S. and other wealthy countries is with few exceptions they are childless or their children have long since grown. They are not planning on helping to make a new generation in the country they move to - they generally will not unless they are relatively young and happen to marry a local.
There are always obviously exceptions to this, but my impression has always been expats tend to look for something like English-language private schools if they happen to have young kids, which effectively stops the process of second-generation assimilation, since public schooling is the primary method in which immigrants assimilate.
The main thing you really need for cultural assimilation is public school and time.
It's tough for people who immigrate somewhere as an adult to fully assimilate to a country that's very different from their own.
It's tough for kids who grow up in that new country to tightly hold on to their motherland's language, customs, etc -- even if their parents really want them to! -- in the face of wanting to fit in with their peers.
For the grandkids of immigrants, you basically have to go on a journey of trying to "discover" the culture of your family, because you're so damn "whitewashed."
If the government provides incentives for new immigrants to settle in (and stay) in communities where there aren't already very large ethnic enclaves, this happens even faster.
Here's my prob: people with wealth can afford to be "upwardly mobile." Its not unreasonable for lower income people to resent being a social project, or their state in life to be simply a stepping stone that others will temporarily rest on then move on to "better" things. It's another, unspoken way that the financially privileged show their hand regarding their judgment of lower class people.
This is a great starting point for a policy change. It'd be better if they had to purchase an expensive permit to move to a non-affluent area. Maybe we should have a new zoning rule where the affluent need a permit to move out of their area.
My husband's family comes from Lincoln, NE. The family's house was near Bennet Martin's, founder of Bennet Martin Public Library.
Martin's house was slightly nicer (perhaps custom-built), and he was slightly eccentric (didn't believe in trick-or-treating, for example), but Martin's property wasn't conspicuously wealthy. The house wasn't huge -- much smaller than the houses of many poorer, large families that needed more room.
Building a public library with your name on it isn't as self-abnegating as donating to public schools with no expectation of improvement. Putting your name on anything for any reason has an element of aggrandizement. Still, Martin's behavior as a neighbor (at least according to my in-laws' recollection) was "self-abnegatingly" inconspicuous. His role as the "big man" in town seemed limited to the library. Which admittedly is pretty big!
But that was also an era when it was harder to look people up, and neighbors meeting a guy named Bennet Martin about town might suppose the name was a coincidence, or he was named after the library. Though, even these days, how many people, when they stumble upon a plaque naming, say, the gazebo in their local park the Hortense McInerny gazebo bother to look ol' Hortense up?
Oh, you're the one who visited our park recently? I found the same illegible mark scribbled in Sharpie on all the playground equipment. Your handwriting is terrible ;-P
Except the self-abnegation part, there is nothing wrong with not flaunting your wealth and being part of your community. I think that’s what most decent wealthy people do.
I kinda think that we should do a YIMBY subsidy. Cities/States should pay neighborhood residents/property owners when zoning is eased and/or socially useful development is permitted in their neighborhood to offset any real or perceived hit they may take to their property values and/or increased rents.
There is also a brand of, “I don’t want to be a CPA, I want to “make art.” leftism. Kids are attracted to the bohemianness but end up resenting all the economic limitations it puts on their life.
Note: “Make art” leftism includes artists, writers, adjuncts, the people who take great pains to let you know they work for a non-profit, etc.
I mean in terms of temperament. A math adjunct is a great example, they couldn’t get a tenure track position but refuse to leave the academy for the filthy lucre of “industry.”
Adjuncts are treated like shit because the supply wildly exceeds demand. We need to slash the supply of phds until it more closely matches demand and schools are forced to pay better, offer benefits, etc.
I read this article in the LA times and found is fascinating, especially about all the requirements that Mexico has for people getting residency permits (high income, no voting rights or rights to welfare). Every country wants rich people, not poor people, even Mexico. People may not like it, but it is reality.
This story shows that people don't like outsiders moving into their communities and changing them in ways they didn't want and cannot control.
Mexico won't stop it because it wants all the upside (lots of money being spent in the country) without the downside (people needing welfare or voting for policy change). The fact that the left ignore this hypocrisy is not surprising. Maybe it's best for the poor, working class and lower middle class to take their money and move to Mexico for a better quality of life. It would boost the Mexican economy too. Think of the diversity and inclusivity.
Pretty sure you can legally move to Australia - maybe also apply for citizenship, as long as you bring at least $500K along with you. Something like that. No one says "bring us your poor (etc.)".
I think it's one of the fundamental principals of the woke religion that for certain groups of white people, there is no way to be a good person. Not unlike most sects of Christianity, we are all sinners and fall short of grace.
But there's no woke Jesus to offer us salvation. There's no way to expiate the original sin of whiteness except to dig a hole, lie in it and die.
The problem with that is that people get tired of participating in a story where they're always the bad guy. If everything you do is wrong, there's no incentive to do anything right and so you may as well do what you want and screw everything else.
I was not raised in the Church but I do come from a fully Catholic family, and I feel you on the guilt. Very similar to leftist places. Obviously, lefties are my people. But we can do better.
Who is doing better? Give me an example. The bitter and resentment fueled hate of the right? He anxiety of the middle class? We need a positive message but we are by far the best of the bunch.
Look at the shitshow of nonsense from right wingers in the comments section.
I watched Bresson's 'Pickpocket' the other day and really allowed myself to hate the Jansenism of it. The spiritual purity of the aesthetic may be striking, but that aesthetic is part and parcel of a life-denying moral vision that leads to cognitive dissonance, suffering and is bound up with institutional abuse. It felt good to be able to be honest about that, which is the kind of thing that being here has helped with actually!
White people, men, the affluent . . .the supposed reasons for attacking them are self-contradictory because they are just flimsy pretexts for expressing outgroup hatred.
I agree. This is why the PMC discourse is usually the same identity bullshit that the DEI people are pushing. The billionaires and capitalism recede into the background just as reliably when your enemy is affluent--not even rich--white people. And it has to be affluent AND white in this facile critique, even though there is a significant non-white PMC whose equally crappy version of meritocratic identity politics often play a very important role in shaping the politics of newly outraged white liberals.
Both parties and the billionaires they represent want us to identify the PMC as the only bloc that matters. It is horseshit from both sides.
You win at Wokemon when a suitably qualified Bonafide Oppressed Minority formally pronounces you to be The Only Good White Person, yourself an Honorary Oppressed Minority.
That is how you get the power up and win the game, AFAICT.
I recall some discussion (maybe on a podcast) where woke puritanism was the topic and the consensus was that it couldn't be puritanism because there was no forgiveness and no real attempt to save souls.
This forgets that, far more than not much appreciating fun, actual puritanism tended pretty strongly toward predestination (that whether you were one of the chosen few who'd go to heaven or would face damnation was already decided). The view of conversion was that it required introspection, reading the bible, and then the realization ("humiliation") that no good works could earn forgiveness and that salvation was strictly a matter of divine mercy.
It's a fundamentally bad sign when affluent Americans can't afford to live in places where affluent Americans live. The real problem here is that our housing policy is an absolute shitshow. Like, the entirety of San Francisco should be upzoned--if it had the population density of Paris, its population would be 2.5 million (right now it's under a million.)
There's this idea that density means a thousand Manhattans, all over the country--when it reality it means replacing 1 and 2 story buildings with 4-6 story ones.
Also it’s not even “the affluent” doing it, it’s often just the lucky house-rich. You can get mad at young professionals for moving to Mexico City and Spokane and San Antonio all you want but if you’ve got people in the cities they normally would live with a stranglehold on the zoning laws maintaining a 1.2 million dollar average price on a modest suburban home so that they can maintain that value on a house they bought for 170,000 30 years ago, and they won’t allow apartments to be built what on earth are young professionals supposed to do?
Little known fact: the people living in tent cities in San Francisco would be living in 3,500 square foot ranches if they’d just consider moving to the outskirts of Raleigh!
Excellent comment. We bought a house 40 years ago for $79,900 and recently sold it for $1,250,000. I’m personally bemused but personally enriched. California.
As long as you aren’t one of those people telling my generation we should be able to buy a house by giving up Starbucks. Ugh. I swear sometimes I need a trigger warning for discussions about home prices because there is nothing I find more depressing.
If you think it's bad in the US you should see what an utter shitshow things are up here in Canada. Average (and median!) house prices in my city were somewhere around $700-800k and we are a small city (ie. not Toronto or Vancouver and not within commuting distance to either of those big cities).
Commuting distance doesn’t matter anymore. My town was always expensive but used to be somewhat protected form Silicon Valley level prices because it was a difficult commute. Now our median home price is 1.2 million dollars because no one needs to commute anymore.
[standing ovation] Yes! More 4-6-story neighborhoods with small retail establishment on the ground floor! Excellent public transit! Beautiful public parks within walking distance! I love it.
The trouble is that the way Democrats run cities has made any shared public amenities a nonstarter. Public parks? Those will be taken over by encampments and there’s nothing we can do. Public transit? Overrun with crime and there’s nothing we can do. Not to mention post-pandemic fears of sharing air on a train. I used to believe in that stuff before I had a family and also before I watched the latest wave of cities collapsing. Now? Forget urbanism, it’s incompatible with Democrats’ governance. Private yards and cars are more important than ever.
I see your point, but I don't completely agree. I used to live in Boston with my husband and young child until last year (then we moved away for work). Yes, there are definitely homeless people in Boston, but I always felt safe visiting the public parks in my neighborhood, and the public transit was great (until COVID f***ed things up). So, it's an exaggeration to say that all Democratic-run cities are wretched hives of crime and homelessness.
Still, I definitely agree with you that we (= Democrats/liberals) should work hard to make city life more appealing to people, and quality-of-life issues (crime, homelessness, trash, petty vandalism) are a big part of that. Cities should be beautiful and appealing to live in, like the great cities of Europe, where I was born.
With regard to my comment above, this kind of response is much more persuasive because it acknowledges my concerns as valid and agrees that they need addressing.
I don't know where Buttonmasher is from, but for a myriad of reasons, homelessness is just a big issue on the West Coast to a degree it is not elsewhere. For example, a 2017 study found that only 5% of homeless people in New York were unsheltered, but 68% are in California. Thus the local experience with "the homeless" is going to be totally different.
This is all just media scare tactics. Public transit is safer than driving by multiple factors. The vast majority of public parks have not been taken over by encampments.
The media (aside from maybe Fox) tries to avoid and deny this as much as possible. The Democratic approach to everything these days is denial. “Nah, that’s not inflation. That’s not a recession. Crime isn’t really up. Cities didn’t really burn that much.” First of all this is unconvincing. Besides, you could say the same about problems that Democrats are up in arms about. The majority of police interactions are trouble-free! Almost all legal gun owners are law abiding! Yet Dems are happy to make hay about those tiny exceptions. By that standard, if the problems did exist, even on a smaller scale, shouldnt you care? Would you have any solutions? It feels like the whole party line is to downplay, deny, and redefine terms until the problem is out of control, then say there’s nothing that can be done. Selectively of course, based on whether it’s an issue that is correct to care about.
An answer coming from Britain that I'm guessing would satisfy liberal critics: they should do as I've done and move to a smallish semi-rural village with right-wing politics and sanctify it with their left-wing ideas. My own migration's from a traditionally Labour-voting post-industrial city to a village/town not far away which has never returned anything but Tory MPs. Simply by living here, as a beacon of liberal goodness radiating metropolitan values, I make the place turn from blue to red, the polarity of those colours being reversed across the Atlantic.
The displaced? Who can no longer afford houses being bought by work-from-home types in media jobs? Why, they'll have to move to the cities for work, where these unenlightened types will be immersed in left-wing city values and turn from blue to red themselves. Everyone's a winner, as long as they're on my side.
This is a social movement that was applauded in the Obama years, I remember, in Virginia where tech workers made it a Democrat state. There's no sympathy for the rich but nor is there any for the rural white. At best they can be cured; if displacement from their lives, their families and their culture is necessary, then do it. Better than them squatting malevolently out in the Boonies voting Trump. Or so runs the liberal view.
More about drowning them out than converting them TBH. Any idea of political persuasion is really gone in America...certainly within the "liberal" left.
I think there's a much more explicit effort on the right to recruit, with how things like critiques of "ethics in video games" or character usage in Star Wars is kinda used as a tactic to radicalize geeky socially isolated white dudes into becoming part of the alt-right through drip-feeding the politics of resentment. I don't really see the left doing anything to the same degree of sophistication.
If you live in a neighborhood and you use the tools of zoning and regulation to preserve the current state of that neighborhood, you’re guilty of being a NIMBY.
——-
Affluent people could just stay where they are and accept change. Maybe that’s unrealistic, but in that case having this discussion at all is pointless. Affluent people can and do live wherever they want and there really isn’t anything we can do to stop it. But if this is a question about hypothetical ideal behavior of the well-off, then that’s my answer.
2) We should evaluate policies to ameliorate the worst aspects of gentrification (caps on property tax and rent hikes?)
3) Really invest in smart urbanism so as to reduce sprawl and concomitant “white flight,” and to reduce the economic harm of living in a less affluent neighborhood
4) Invest in the kind of policing that can decouple poverty and crime
I have issues with caps on property tax given what Prop 13 has wrought in CA, but other than that I agree. I think capping property tax inhibits the movement of properties that makes housing freely available. If you cap taxes, you should cap home values. It makes no sense to say a person with a million dollar house only has to pay the 1984 tax value. Why on earth would they ever move? Why would they be open to anything that would lower their home value?
Sorry, I should have been clearer: the year-over-year increases should be capped, so that landlords can’t point to those as an excuse to hike rents too quickly.
That said, I’m just spitballing and don’t have a ton of attachment to the idea. After all, eventually the level will get high enough to drive less affluent people out, I should imagine, so it doesn’t exactly solve the problem it’s trying to solve so much as slow it down.
Does the left hate upwardly mobile strivers more than the current American right does?
Until recently, the American right talked a good game about striving. But it's also nursed an anti-intellectual streak for a while and serves a coalition with arguably lower human capital than the left-aligned coalition. (By many measures, American "blue country" is more economically productive than American "red country", even if "blue country" government is really annoying.)
To be clear, I don't think it's wrong for striving digital nomads to flee high-cost-of-living "blue" areas. Maybe it'll even help bridge this divide?:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/09/10/america-has-two-economies-and-theyre-diverging-fast/
STEM PhDs in America still (perhaps increasingly) lean blue, despite STEM's reputation for rewarding hard work and talent more objectively than other academic disciplines do. The reddest STEMlords I've known seem to loathe their blue colleagues as effete academics who somehow aren't striving even while they're in direct competition in demanding disciplines with these striving red STEMlords.
Ten years ago, even five, if you'd said the American right makes more room for the strivers than the American left does, I would have agreed with you. Now, though?
I interpret that as being a direct answer to the question posed by the title of this article.
hat do I win? Membership in the Jacobans?
It also benefits stratum 6 by lowering the crime that nothing-to-lose residents of stratum 1 would otherwise be inflicting on those Airbnb guests, thus increasing the amount of rent than can be charged.
"and they should work to eliminate themselves."
Doing my part by retiring early and drinking way more beer than I should. Hey, we can all pitch in.
Tell you what: When Harvard, Yale and all these other "woke elite" universities turn over their entire endowments to pay off student loans they cleaned up on, with any remainder being handed over to descendants of US slaves, and their land holdings and buildings turned over to the "first nations" from whom the land was stolen, I will happily deed our properties over to the Bannock and Hawaiians. But, I feel pretty safe that's not going to happen.
Only very tangential to your comment but the South End is pretty rich too (I guess not historically in the way Beacon Hill and Back Bay are but it's been well off for a while now)
“ Upzoning them means destroying their charm,”
Objection! Asserting facts not in evidence. Change is not destruction.
Sure - like the Hearst Building in NYC:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59238c363a041193b5459145/1531248758917-1XKQXK8ICW8OLICVGLF0/Hearst+1.JPG
The kept the ground level facade and built a skyscraper inside it.
Or in Boston:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/05/church-condos-the-lucas-sq.jpg
I think they look cool. YMMV
I think they’re ugly in full view, but on ground level it only feels like the old building and in the skyline it only feels like the new building, so I think for practical purposes it kind of works
What does upzoning have to do with halfway houses?
Are NIMBYs conflating "new neighbors who are slightly less wealthy than me and live in condos" with "patients in drug rehab treatment facilities"? Reveals a lot about the mindset.
Also NIMBY’s also don’t like richer people moving in either. That’s gentrification!
Thinking about how in Toronto, a huge fuss was raised by a bunch of extremely wealthy people, including Margaret Atwood, over a luxury mid-rise condo built adjacent to their neighbourhood (that IIRC was replacing a dilapidated warehouse). One of the issues was that people in the condo might be able to see into their backyard.
Agreed. But not all change is progress either.
"Change is not destruction"
Unless the change is Gentrification, Am-I-Right?
No! Gentrification, much like the end of the world, hurts the poor and minorities the hardest.
"Target just those areas...". No one is trying to upzone Back Bay, Beacon Hill or South End, because they're already dense neighborhoods with successful intense land use that has resulted in high prices. They're also historically protected neighborhoods, which they should be! Boston has a lot of charm. Those density requirements just shouldn't be illegal throughout the rest of the city. What would be great would be allowing 4-6 story rowhouses throughout the rest of Boston with no parking minimum requirements, just as those expensive neighborhoods are currently built. Downtown and the West End should also be unleashed to allow for 700' dense residential towers, Seaport should double their housing units, etc. All of these neighborhoods are already occupied by Rich People, so let's build more housing for them!
Boston has a lot of space that has horrible land use despite being near transit and major roadways. Allston and Brighton come to mind, as do the pseudo suburban parts of Roslindale and W Roxbury. Keeping these as single family homes only is a mistake and NIMBYs are entirely responsible for the issues in these areas.
If the most desirable parts of the city have bad land use, low density, high parking minimums, and restrictive zoning near amenities and public transit, then yes they should be upzoned, at least to the levels of Back Bay and the South End. Clearly Rich People can thrive in such communities! I think Boston and a few other American cities are simply unique that the richest people want to live in the densest areas (for the city per se, leaving out the wealthy suburbs). The idea that zoning regs are "coming for" rich areas doesn't compute, in my opinion, and it has been the opposite for like two generations.
The tired example of Parisian density should be the model for all dense American cities with high demand, and it just so happens that large parts of Boston have already done a good job of getting there.
I guess my point is two-fold.
1. The first part of my comment ironically WASN'T referring to the nicest parts of Boston, because the densest areas are already some of the most expensive. It would be great if that could be applied to other expensive cities in the US. California, Washington, Austin, etc., are much better examples where principles-based zoning reform would have the biggest impact in the "nicest" areas, including dreaded 4-story lux condos. Leading me to...
2. The idea that alleviating restrictive zoning that may impact nice areas is some targeted approach to punish Rich People flies in the face of everything I know about 20th century American life. EVEN IF zoning changed, private property rights do and should trump anything else, and so some rich family in Atherton can just give their house to their children or not move if they don't want to see their neighborhood change. This point is always used as a boogeyman, such as the new zoning nudge that Baker is trying to roll out to MBTA-proximal communities. No one is going to take anything from you!
Matt also wrote a book advocating for tripling the US population, so I’m not sure you can point to him as epitomizing mainstream YIMBY views.
As someone who was a tourist in Boston like a week ago, your road system was the biggest deterrent for me. I have driven in a lot of big cities and Boston was a nightmare. It seemed like every road was a one-way, often without clear signage if you were turning onto it, roads were curved and winding so you could barely tell if you were going where you wanted to, lanes disappeared, lanes appeared, traffic light timing made no sense, roundabouts were not always "round" and sometimes had way too many entrances/exits, sometimes you were suddenly on a highway and sometimes the highway lead right into a traffic light.
I'm still recovering.
The Boston road system is built to convey the message that you should go back where you came from.
As a well-off homeowner in Jamaica Plain: if you feel like you couldn't bare to live in our neighborhood because you're too good for us, eat shit.
Most young income-rich people got that way by moving away from where they grew up to go to a good college and then moving to New York, Seattle, San Francisco, or LA to get that income. But now they have no way to “stay where they are”, in that it’s essentially impossible to buy acceptable real estate in any of these places without a massive influx of equity from a tech job or wealthy relatives. Americans do not, as a rule, spend their whole lives renting in city centers like Germans, so they’re inevitably going to move somewhere, the question is just where.
I would love to spend my whole life renting in a city center but rent always goes up by insane amounts and moving every year or two in response to rent increases gets exhausting. If there was some kind of cap on how much a landlord could raise the rent in a given year I bet more people would be okay with renting forever. I find myself wanting to buy my own house or apartment solely for the stability...
(says this young person who has a six figure income but cannot afford to live in her wealthy suburban hometown)
Yes, well, of course there is such a cap in civilized cities. But there still aren’t many great places to rent indefinitely in SF or NYC, especially for families larger than 2.
It only applies to a small number of apartments in NYC, and good luck finding one of those!!
Sure. Seems a bit easier in SF.
I know that in my case, I literally cannot afford either the urban area where I was born or the suburb where my family moved for the schools. The specific house that I once lived in has more than doubled in price since we sold it in ~2003, and at the time we thought we were getting a lot of money for it!
For comparison, my partner and I bought our one-bedroom condo near the train in Boston for about as much money as my parents got for that house in New Jersey. Yeah, sure, urban real-estate is always gonna cost more, but when my condo was sold in 2004 it cost 2/3 the price my family got for our suburban house. You gonna tell me that a 60% price increase over 15 years for the small place and a 100%+ for the big house is a rational allocation of resources?
I think the only solution is for the affluent to buy new middle income homes in economically mixed neighborhoods, pretend like they're *not* wealthy, donate their extra income to public schools (without expectation of any improvements because white supremacy), and live quiet lives of self-abnegation until death. Simple!
Assimilation is a dirty word in the US now. I agree outsiders need to assimilate but that is not a popular opinion.
Hot take: Assimilation is just reading the room
Shameless plug: https://erinetheridge.substack.com/p/code-switching
I'm an American citizen born in America, but I'm non-white. This piece is pretty accurate (and frankly, I would say I assimilated better than most of my peers, given how abysmal my fluency in my family's non-English native language is.)
Also shameless compliment, your kids sound cool and your blog is cool too.
Shameless gratitude: thank you.
It's interesting to me as the child of a white immigrant to notice how similar many of my experiences are to children of non white immigrants. Of course there are additional barriers for non white immigrants, but I had a friend whose mom is Italian and her cultural mannerisms are still very different (and sometimes embarrassing) to her American child.
We have so many commonalities with which to make connections.
not shameless glad i found it
Bob, you’re a mensch
My general understanding is no first-generation immigrant really truly assimilates (unless they migrate before their teen years) while by the second generation people predominantly identify with the country of their birth, and by the third they are fully assimilated. Certainly it's working this way for modern immigrants to the U.S. just as well as it did with earlier groups.
The issue with expats from the U.S. and other wealthy countries is with few exceptions they are childless or their children have long since grown. They are not planning on helping to make a new generation in the country they move to - they generally will not unless they are relatively young and happen to marry a local.
There are always obviously exceptions to this, but my impression has always been expats tend to look for something like English-language private schools if they happen to have young kids, which effectively stops the process of second-generation assimilation, since public schooling is the primary method in which immigrants assimilate.
I began elementary school with a thick Irish accent. One year of half-day kindergarten and it was gone.
The main thing you really need for cultural assimilation is public school and time.
It's tough for people who immigrate somewhere as an adult to fully assimilate to a country that's very different from their own.
It's tough for kids who grow up in that new country to tightly hold on to their motherland's language, customs, etc -- even if their parents really want them to! -- in the face of wanting to fit in with their peers.
For the grandkids of immigrants, you basically have to go on a journey of trying to "discover" the culture of your family, because you're so damn "whitewashed."
If the government provides incentives for new immigrants to settle in (and stay) in communities where there aren't already very large ethnic enclaves, this happens even faster.
Here's my prob: people with wealth can afford to be "upwardly mobile." Its not unreasonable for lower income people to resent being a social project, or their state in life to be simply a stepping stone that others will temporarily rest on then move on to "better" things. It's another, unspoken way that the financially privileged show their hand regarding their judgment of lower class people.
This is a great starting point for a policy change. It'd be better if they had to purchase an expensive permit to move to a non-affluent area. Maybe we should have a new zoning rule where the affluent need a permit to move out of their area.
My husband's family comes from Lincoln, NE. The family's house was near Bennet Martin's, founder of Bennet Martin Public Library.
Martin's house was slightly nicer (perhaps custom-built), and he was slightly eccentric (didn't believe in trick-or-treating, for example), but Martin's property wasn't conspicuously wealthy. The house wasn't huge -- much smaller than the houses of many poorer, large families that needed more room.
Building a public library with your name on it isn't as self-abnegating as donating to public schools with no expectation of improvement. Putting your name on anything for any reason has an element of aggrandizement. Still, Martin's behavior as a neighbor (at least according to my in-laws' recollection) was "self-abnegatingly" inconspicuous. His role as the "big man" in town seemed limited to the library. Which admittedly is pretty big!
But that was also an era when it was harder to look people up, and neighbors meeting a guy named Bennet Martin about town might suppose the name was a coincidence, or he was named after the library. Though, even these days, how many people, when they stumble upon a plaque naming, say, the gazebo in their local park the Hortense McInerny gazebo bother to look ol' Hortense up?
This is why I carry a sharpie with me at all times. You’ll find my name all over this town.
I haven't but I mean it seems like something I ought to have seen. Or starred in.
Oh, you're the one who visited our park recently? I found the same illegible mark scribbled in Sharpie on all the playground equipment. Your handwriting is terrible ;-P
Plausible deniability!
😂😂
Except the self-abnegation part, there is nothing wrong with not flaunting your wealth and being part of your community. I think that’s what most decent wealthy people do.
Suprised they havent done system like carbon offsets. A gentrifier tax to move in to neighborhood.
I kinda think that we should do a YIMBY subsidy. Cities/States should pay neighborhood residents/property owners when zoning is eased and/or socially useful development is permitted in their neighborhood to offset any real or perceived hit they may take to their property values and/or increased rents.
There is also a brand of, “I don’t want to be a CPA, I want to “make art.” leftism. Kids are attracted to the bohemianness but end up resenting all the economic limitations it puts on their life.
Note: “Make art” leftism includes artists, writers, adjuncts, the people who take great pains to let you know they work for a non-profit, etc.
Yes, in the same way that an art teacher is not necessarily an artist.
I mean in terms of temperament. A math adjunct is a great example, they couldn’t get a tenure track position but refuse to leave the academy for the filthy lucre of “industry.”
Adjuncts are treated like shit because the supply wildly exceeds demand. We need to slash the supply of phds until it more closely matches demand and schools are forced to pay better, offer benefits, etc.
I read this article in the LA times and found is fascinating, especially about all the requirements that Mexico has for people getting residency permits (high income, no voting rights or rights to welfare). Every country wants rich people, not poor people, even Mexico. People may not like it, but it is reality.
This story shows that people don't like outsiders moving into their communities and changing them in ways they didn't want and cannot control.
Yep. The Mexican government could stop this anytime they want to, but they don't. In fact, they keep raising the income requirements!
This happens in my own city, Philadelphia, where "New Yorker" has almost become an epithet. Or Portland with California. Etc.
The difference with the "digital nomad" stuff is that they're white people, and its become a progressive shibboleth to hate on yt.
Mexico won't stop it because it wants all the upside (lots of money being spent in the country) without the downside (people needing welfare or voting for policy change). The fact that the left ignore this hypocrisy is not surprising. Maybe it's best for the poor, working class and lower middle class to take their money and move to Mexico for a better quality of life. It would boost the Mexican economy too. Think of the diversity and inclusivity.
Pretty sure you can legally move to Australia - maybe also apply for citizenship, as long as you bring at least $500K along with you. Something like that. No one says "bring us your poor (etc.)".
I think it's one of the fundamental principals of the woke religion that for certain groups of white people, there is no way to be a good person. Not unlike most sects of Christianity, we are all sinners and fall short of grace.
But there's no woke Jesus to offer us salvation. There's no way to expiate the original sin of whiteness except to dig a hole, lie in it and die.
The problem with that is that people get tired of participating in a story where they're always the bad guy. If everything you do is wrong, there's no incentive to do anything right and so you may as well do what you want and screw everything else.
I was not raised in the Church but I do come from a fully Catholic family, and I feel you on the guilt. Very similar to leftist places. Obviously, lefties are my people. But we can do better.
Who is doing better? Give me an example. The bitter and resentment fueled hate of the right? He anxiety of the middle class? We need a positive message but we are by far the best of the bunch.
Look at the shitshow of nonsense from right wingers in the comments section.
Oh I see what you mean now. I was meaning we can do better *as* a Left, not that we can do better *than* the Left.
I watched Bresson's 'Pickpocket' the other day and really allowed myself to hate the Jansenism of it. The spiritual purity of the aesthetic may be striking, but that aesthetic is part and parcel of a life-denying moral vision that leads to cognitive dissonance, suffering and is bound up with institutional abuse. It felt good to be able to be honest about that, which is the kind of thing that being here has helped with actually!
White people, men, the affluent . . .the supposed reasons for attacking them are self-contradictory because they are just flimsy pretexts for expressing outgroup hatred.
Yep you've nailed it. You've described the catch, which is that you can never win this game, and the alternative, which is to refuse to play.
You know, there's a fantastic '80s movie with an almost verbatim Aesop.
I agree. This is why the PMC discourse is usually the same identity bullshit that the DEI people are pushing. The billionaires and capitalism recede into the background just as reliably when your enemy is affluent--not even rich--white people. And it has to be affluent AND white in this facile critique, even though there is a significant non-white PMC whose equally crappy version of meritocratic identity politics often play a very important role in shaping the politics of newly outraged white liberals.
Both parties and the billionaires they represent want us to identify the PMC as the only bloc that matters. It is horseshit from both sides.
You win at Wokemon when a suitably qualified Bonafide Oppressed Minority formally pronounces you to be The Only Good White Person, yourself an Honorary Oppressed Minority.
That is how you get the power up and win the game, AFAICT.
The best status a haole can have on Kauai is "honorary" Kanaka.
I recall some discussion (maybe on a podcast) where woke puritanism was the topic and the consensus was that it couldn't be puritanism because there was no forgiveness and no real attempt to save souls.
This forgets that, far more than not much appreciating fun, actual puritanism tended pretty strongly toward predestination (that whether you were one of the chosen few who'd go to heaven or would face damnation was already decided). The view of conversion was that it required introspection, reading the bible, and then the realization ("humiliation") that no good works could earn forgiveness and that salvation was strictly a matter of divine mercy.
What a crazy ass Straw Man comment. There is no woke religion, it’s a fantasy made up to manipulate insecure and self-righteous people.
Pretty sure that was a metaphor.
It's a fundamentally bad sign when affluent Americans can't afford to live in places where affluent Americans live. The real problem here is that our housing policy is an absolute shitshow. Like, the entirety of San Francisco should be upzoned--if it had the population density of Paris, its population would be 2.5 million (right now it's under a million.)
There's this idea that density means a thousand Manhattans, all over the country--when it reality it means replacing 1 and 2 story buildings with 4-6 story ones.
Also it’s not even “the affluent” doing it, it’s often just the lucky house-rich. You can get mad at young professionals for moving to Mexico City and Spokane and San Antonio all you want but if you’ve got people in the cities they normally would live with a stranglehold on the zoning laws maintaining a 1.2 million dollar average price on a modest suburban home so that they can maintain that value on a house they bought for 170,000 30 years ago, and they won’t allow apartments to be built what on earth are young professionals supposed to do?
Exactly. People are responding rationally to real economic circumstances. What are they supposed to do, go buy a tent and live under the BQE?
Little known fact: the people living in tent cities in San Francisco would be living in 3,500 square foot ranches if they’d just consider moving to the outskirts of Raleigh!
(Too soon?)
Is this a reference to something?
Just the tent cities and the high cost of living in the Bay Area.
Excellent comment. We bought a house 40 years ago for $79,900 and recently sold it for $1,250,000. I’m personally bemused but personally enriched. California.
As long as you aren’t one of those people telling my generation we should be able to buy a house by giving up Starbucks. Ugh. I swear sometimes I need a trigger warning for discussions about home prices because there is nothing I find more depressing.
If you think it's bad in the US you should see what an utter shitshow things are up here in Canada. Average (and median!) house prices in my city were somewhere around $700-800k and we are a small city (ie. not Toronto or Vancouver and not within commuting distance to either of those big cities).
Commuting distance doesn’t matter anymore. My town was always expensive but used to be somewhat protected form Silicon Valley level prices because it was a difficult commute. Now our median home price is 1.2 million dollars because no one needs to commute anymore.
[standing ovation] Yes! More 4-6-story neighborhoods with small retail establishment on the ground floor! Excellent public transit! Beautiful public parks within walking distance! I love it.
The trouble is that the way Democrats run cities has made any shared public amenities a nonstarter. Public parks? Those will be taken over by encampments and there’s nothing we can do. Public transit? Overrun with crime and there’s nothing we can do. Not to mention post-pandemic fears of sharing air on a train. I used to believe in that stuff before I had a family and also before I watched the latest wave of cities collapsing. Now? Forget urbanism, it’s incompatible with Democrats’ governance. Private yards and cars are more important than ever.
I see your point, but I don't completely agree. I used to live in Boston with my husband and young child until last year (then we moved away for work). Yes, there are definitely homeless people in Boston, but I always felt safe visiting the public parks in my neighborhood, and the public transit was great (until COVID f***ed things up). So, it's an exaggeration to say that all Democratic-run cities are wretched hives of crime and homelessness.
Still, I definitely agree with you that we (= Democrats/liberals) should work hard to make city life more appealing to people, and quality-of-life issues (crime, homelessness, trash, petty vandalism) are a big part of that. Cities should be beautiful and appealing to live in, like the great cities of Europe, where I was born.
With regard to my comment above, this kind of response is much more persuasive because it acknowledges my concerns as valid and agrees that they need addressing.
I don't know where Buttonmasher is from, but for a myriad of reasons, homelessness is just a big issue on the West Coast to a degree it is not elsewhere. For example, a 2017 study found that only 5% of homeless people in New York were unsheltered, but 68% are in California. Thus the local experience with "the homeless" is going to be totally different.
This is all just media scare tactics. Public transit is safer than driving by multiple factors. The vast majority of public parks have not been taken over by encampments.
The media (aside from maybe Fox) tries to avoid and deny this as much as possible. The Democratic approach to everything these days is denial. “Nah, that’s not inflation. That’s not a recession. Crime isn’t really up. Cities didn’t really burn that much.” First of all this is unconvincing. Besides, you could say the same about problems that Democrats are up in arms about. The majority of police interactions are trouble-free! Almost all legal gun owners are law abiding! Yet Dems are happy to make hay about those tiny exceptions. By that standard, if the problems did exist, even on a smaller scale, shouldnt you care? Would you have any solutions? It feels like the whole party line is to downplay, deny, and redefine terms until the problem is out of control, then say there’s nothing that can be done. Selectively of course, based on whether it’s an issue that is correct to care about.
What?
Who is this "we" that is going to work through what "we want" from the well-to-do?
and then what?
An answer coming from Britain that I'm guessing would satisfy liberal critics: they should do as I've done and move to a smallish semi-rural village with right-wing politics and sanctify it with their left-wing ideas. My own migration's from a traditionally Labour-voting post-industrial city to a village/town not far away which has never returned anything but Tory MPs. Simply by living here, as a beacon of liberal goodness radiating metropolitan values, I make the place turn from blue to red, the polarity of those colours being reversed across the Atlantic.
The displaced? Who can no longer afford houses being bought by work-from-home types in media jobs? Why, they'll have to move to the cities for work, where these unenlightened types will be immersed in left-wing city values and turn from blue to red themselves. Everyone's a winner, as long as they're on my side.
This is a social movement that was applauded in the Obama years, I remember, in Virginia where tech workers made it a Democrat state. There's no sympathy for the rich but nor is there any for the rural white. At best they can be cured; if displacement from their lives, their families and their culture is necessary, then do it. Better than them squatting malevolently out in the Boonies voting Trump. Or so runs the liberal view.
Yes, it's political evangelism. Must convert the heathens.
More about drowning them out than converting them TBH. Any idea of political persuasion is really gone in America...certainly within the "liberal" left.
I think there's a much more explicit effort on the right to recruit, with how things like critiques of "ethics in video games" or character usage in Star Wars is kinda used as a tactic to radicalize geeky socially isolated white dudes into becoming part of the alt-right through drip-feeding the politics of resentment. I don't really see the left doing anything to the same degree of sophistication.
I’d like to hear more about your program and the strategies it’s employing.
The right doesn’t seem to do a lot of persuading either; what they do is promise relief from an endlessly expanding list of rules.
If you live in a neighborhood and you use the tools of zoning and regulation to preserve the current state of that neighborhood, you’re guilty of being a NIMBY.
——-
Affluent people could just stay where they are and accept change. Maybe that’s unrealistic, but in that case having this discussion at all is pointless. Affluent people can and do live wherever they want and there really isn’t anything we can do to stop it. But if this is a question about hypothetical ideal behavior of the well-off, then that’s my answer.
That’s what crossed my mind.
1) The affluent should be YIMBYs;
2) We should evaluate policies to ameliorate the worst aspects of gentrification (caps on property tax and rent hikes?)
3) Really invest in smart urbanism so as to reduce sprawl and concomitant “white flight,” and to reduce the economic harm of living in a less affluent neighborhood
4) Invest in the kind of policing that can decouple poverty and crime
I have issues with caps on property tax given what Prop 13 has wrought in CA, but other than that I agree. I think capping property tax inhibits the movement of properties that makes housing freely available. If you cap taxes, you should cap home values. It makes no sense to say a person with a million dollar house only has to pay the 1984 tax value. Why on earth would they ever move? Why would they be open to anything that would lower their home value?
Sorry, I should have been clearer: the year-over-year increases should be capped, so that landlords can’t point to those as an excuse to hike rents too quickly.
That said, I’m just spitballing and don’t have a ton of attachment to the idea. After all, eventually the level will get high enough to drive less affluent people out, I should imagine, so it doesn’t exactly solve the problem it’s trying to solve so much as slow it down.
Gotcha, yeah that makes more sense.
Prop 13 in fact caps the increases in valuation, just at such a low rate that they fall behind actual prices immediately and can never catch up.
(Signed, affluent Bay Area homeowner paying 10x the property taxes of all my neighbors.)
Where should the affluent live? Wherever there is easy access for all the illegals to do their mowing, cleaning, cooking, washing, etc etc
That would include the entire U.S., so doesn't narrow it down.