Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo
In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing.
I have lots of friends and family in the area with property. But not a single one has added an ADU. It seems like it should be a no-brainer, so I'll bring up and ask why not? And there are basically two reasons:
- There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.
- They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off. Even though adding a rental could be pretty lucrative, there's just not enough motivation to go through with it.
To me it has little to do with incumbent politicians and everything to do with the incumbent middle class. I'm all for removing red tape and restrictions, but we also need to come up with incentives to light a fire under the butts of individual actors in our economy to actually go out and make things.
I had a tenant who decided that he did not have to pay the rent, it took months of trying to reason with him, we hired a lawyer and went through the process which took several months, in the end the tenant stayed on a few months past what would have been the eviction date but at least he was paying rent. Between that and another tenant losing her shit we lost at least a years rent plus still have a unit vacant even though we have been using the time to catch up on maintainance.
I’ve seen other small landlords in the same situation where they were psychologically devastated by the process of dealing with a bad tenant and evicting them. Right now my wife is helping a friend who inherited two homes from their parents who recently passed away which might have been a takeaway and not a gift because she has yet to clean up the mess left behind and struggles to with precarity (doesn’t have a working car, can’t find the title abstract and will have to cough up a few $1000 to be able to sell, …) renting the place out for a few years made some money but probably resulted in lost value in selling it.
The juiciest gossip in our small town us that the owner of an equipment rental company (probably able to afford to do it right) attempted an illegal ‘self-help” eviction by crashing into the building with a backhoe which is not only an own goal in terms of property damage but could probably cost $10,000 or more in court. (A friend of our who has struggled with homelessness got a settlement of that much for being illegally evicted by the homeless shelter when it closed but then struggled to cash the check because he had no bank account an no id to create a bank account…)
What is often forgotten in these cases is that being a landlord is not an identity, but a choice. It's hard not to feel like the housing market is basically a cartel run by small homeowners across the country conspiring to make home ownership as inaccessible as possible in order to make the value of their property as high as possible. I would love to purchase a home, but even 10 years of a software engineering salary are not enough for that in NYC. And so I will continue to rent, and I will continue to advocate for expanded tenants rights.
This resulted in pretty much zero rent increases across the 15 or so total years renting from such individuals. I had exactly one rent increase during that time due to a large property tax increase which I found to be reasonable.
Sometimes the small time landlords were a bit rough around the edges, but were good people trying their best. All emergencies were handled quite rapidly, and the non-emergency stuff I was quite capable of mitigating myself. I appreciated not having to do basic home maintenance due to my lifestyle at the time. I traded money for time.
I did not live in a city with good tenant protections whatsoever. If you stopped paying rent, you were evicted within 45 days or less.
Corporate landlords were the direct opposite experience. I avoided them like the plague until I bought my own home.
Tenant protection laws in some states have gone far too far in the tenants direction. I think societal incentives need to be reset to make rental units much less subsidized and lucrative, but I can't really fault individuals engaging in the practice. We setup the tax code on purpose to incentivize such behavior. Roll that back and you will see incentives re-align.
Tenants rights should not include the right to basically be a nuisance and a leech upon society. Professional tenant grifting should not be the profession it actually is today in many localities. It harms the rental market and society itself. A single bad tenant should not have the ability to ruin a small time landlord no matter how you feel about the ethical position landlords happen to be in.
I can't think of a mom and pop landlord I had a poor experience with. Financial incentives generally aligned fairly well for me.
I can think of a couple who were absolute nightmares. I can think of a couple others who were an absolute dream. The worst small-time landlord was WAY worse than the worst big property management firm, but the best small-time landlord was far better than the best big property management firm I've been a tenant of.
And yeah, I'm also a low-maintenance tenant. Unless something's broken, I never want to talk to you, nor do I want you in the space that I'm renting. EZ money for them.
Tenants rights should not include the right to basically be a nuisance and a leech upon society.
The thing about strong tenants' rights laws is they're not protection against reasonable landlords; they are a shield against scumbag landlords who would treat their tenants very poorly.
For example, in San Francisco, someone who stays in a place for thirty days without a lease becomes a month-to-month tenant that requires an eviction to remove. Why? Because scumbag landlords would refuse to provide leases to tenants and toss them out into the streets on a moment's notice.
Similarly, I recall regulation preventing hotels from requiring tenants to check out and then check back in during extended stays.[0] Why? So that scumbag hotel operators can't prevent the long-term rental regulations from taking effect for renters who are -in fact- long-term renters.
To point at an analogous situation: the same rules and regulations that generally prevent cops from putting very, very careful wrongdoers who should be imprisoned (but haven't left enough evidence to prove their wrongdoing) behind bars generally also prevent cops from imprisoning folks who have done nothing wrong just on those cops' say-so.
[0] Though, I'm unable to muster the effort required to locate this regulation.
There should be mechanisms where through a process tenants can legally withhold rent if basic repairs or maintenance aren't being done. If a landlord can't or won't do it, they shouldn't be a landlord.
Evicting a tenant should be hard or expensive for any other reason (selling the property, landlord wanting to move in, etc).
I have mixed feelings around rent controls, though. In a healthy, competitive market they should be unnecessary over the long term, but if cities are going to restrict housing construction...
If you stop paying, you should be out within 60 days that your security deposit should cover.
Sure, if you stop paying, and if there isn't some sort of temporary hardship that you could reasonably fight your way through to make good on back and current rent. Given what you've written, I expect that you know that that's part of what the eviction process is for... determining if the landlord is lying about the state of the tenant/landlord business relationship and determining if letting the tenant stay in the place for a while longer would result in a far, far better outcome for the tenant and minimal harm to the landlord.
I have mixed feelings around rent controls...
I don't. Rent controls are godawful price distortions that should not have any reason to exist. However, I'm very glad I live in a rent-controlled San Francisco apartment. Why? Because every landowner in the state of California has property tax control, regardless of whether their property is their personal home, a residential rental, or most any other commercial property.
It's massively unfair that landowners across the state get to control a huge part of their costs, but it's illegal for all but a very few cities in the state to permit residents to do the same.[0]
Get rid of the property tax control across the board, wait a year or four for everything to shake out, then I'd be fine with getting rid of rent control in California.
[0] Seriously, Costa-Hawkins can go straight to hell.
Unless it's public housing (which for the record I do support, though I think that in practice it should be at the margins in most jurisdictions), landlords shouldn't be part of the social safety net (unless they have some extra tax advantage in exchange - fun fact is that as much as hospitals whine about the costs of having to treat everybody in the ER regardless of ability to pay, they actually have a very generous tax benefit for it). Having temporary unemployment/hardship vouchers up to some max is one thing, but if you can't pay after a certain amount of time you shouldn't be in private housing. Maybe 60 days is too soon, but in many jurisdictions it can be far, far longer. I am not at all opposed to a due process in withholding rent if the landlord side of the contract is not being upheld, my example was for "I can't or won't pay for some non-housing reasons".
I pretty much agree with everything you said about rent controls, which is why I said "mixed feelings". California, arguably the greatest state in the union, is ungovernable due to the fact that the government literally can't govern when it comes to taxation (and even mandated spending). If there is a healthy market where supply and demand can be balanced, there should be no need for it.
...I'm also not a rabid capitalist...
Oh, I very much am. But I'm also keenly aware of the need for strong, well-enforced regulation in order to maintain functional markets so that we continue to have a strong capitalist system. The US is sorely lacking in the "strong, well-enforced regulation" department, so...
...landlords shouldn't be part of the social safety net...
This is a distinction that's not at all clear.
In nearly all jurisdictions, landlords give up very many of their property rights when they rent it out for folks to live in. For example, they are expected to meet basic habitability requirements (and cannot fob responsibility for this off to their tenants), and are very often barred from wandering into their property whenever they feel like.
Some landlords out there would argue pretty strenuously that the raft of restrictions they're burdened with means that they already are part of the social safety net.
I would argue that providing rental housing to people who can't afford to buy in the area is totally being part of the social safety net.
...unless they have some extra tax advantage in exchange...
Man, landlords (especially ones in "hot" areas) get so many financial advantages. I'm disinterested in giving them more.
...if you can't pay after a certain amount of time you shouldn't be in private housing.
Perhaps this is what you meant by "vouchers", but what if if The State covers the missing part of the tenant's financial obligations to their landlord? If the tenant's fallen on hard times (but is otherwise a fine tenant), why should the landlord care where the money comes from? The problem with "Just go live in public housing" is that in so many places, public housing just doesn't exist.
The TL;DR is of course there are edge cases for everything. There are reasons that are perfectly "fine" for rent being late, etc. I could have had a personal emergency. My bank could have had computer problems, etc. There are also reasons it can take time for a landlord to fix something. I may as a tenant willingly prioritize cheaper rent, knowing that my plumbing issue may take longer to fix as a wait for a cheaper plumber not on call 24x7 can take longer.
There are deadbeat landlords and there are deadbeat tenants. IMHO, whatever the law dictates should make it suck to be either. If a rule needs to pick a side, it should probably tilt to the tenant as a landlord should otherwise know what they're getting into with risks, etc.
In nearly all jurisdictions, landlords give up very many of their property rights when they rent it out for folks to live in. For example, they are expected to meet basic habitability requirements (and cannot fob responsibility for this off to their tenants), and are very often barred from wandering into their property whenever they feel like.
This is not true everywhere. In many parts of Europe, the tenant is responsible for almost everything after it exits a wall, including in cabinets, a good chunk of plumbing, utilities, and appliances (this is particularly true in Switzerland and Germany - there are many stories of perplexed foreigners moving into apartments they saw that was still being used by the previous tenants and seeing striped down kitchens, etc).
Some landlords out there would argue pretty strenuously that the raft of restrictions they're burdened with means that they already are part of the social safety net.
This is true. Like many people, I've lived in sub-standard housing in my student days. Hilariously, I look fondly on that era of my life because I knew it was temporary and of course we prioritized alcohol, fun, etc.
There's a very real problem that if one removes "rundown" housing that it usually just removes the cheaper rung of the ladder, making it harder for poor people to live anywhere. Some jurisdictions provide specific programs (vouchers, tax advantages, etc) for providing "low-income" housing to cover this. Some, in particular "champagne socialist" groups, use it to push out undesirables.
I would argue that providing rental housing to people who can't afford to buy in the area is totally being part of the social safety net.
Then I think landlords should totally get supports, either directly or indirectly. I just don't think a rental unit that's geared to professinals, etc should be part of that.
Man, landlords (especially ones in "hot" areas) get so many financial advantages. I'm disinterested in giving them more.
I agree with what you're saying. Any new policies should be holistic and take full stock of what rules are already present and replace a lot of bad ones.
Perhaps this is what you meant by "vouchers", but what if if The State covers the missing part of the tenant's financial obligations to their landlord? If the tenant's fallen on hard times (but is otherwise a fine tenant), why should the landlord care where the money comes from? The problem with "Just go live in public housing" is that in so many places, public housing just doesn't exist.
I meant vouchers or public housing as an example of a long term policy, I don't think it should be a short term solution to sudden rent issues. Taken holistically, temp housing support could happen via unemployment benefits that could take rent into consideration (I'm assuming there's also a good reason the tenant doesn't have savings or can't move in with relatives, etc). The issue is that employment insurance, housing, welfare, etc are often the responsibility of different levels of government, making holistic policies more difficult.
I have mixed feelings around rent controls, though. In a healthy, competitive market they should be unnecessary over the long term, but if cities are going to restrict housing construction...
They're a (terrible-outcome-causing) band aid over a combination of too many people and not enough construction.
A simple cap on rent does not work, true. But comprehensive policies to keep rent down and local people housed, can work
They're a (terrible-outcome-causing) band aid...
Look into California's state-wide property tax control law commonly known as Proposition 13. Then look into California's anti-rent-control law commonly known as Costa-Hawkins.
I do agree that rent control should never, ever have a reason to exist. But sometimes there are super fucked-up situations on the ground that make rent control better than not having it.
I can think of a couple who were absolute nightmares. I can think of a couple others who were an absolute dream. The worst small-time landlord was WAY worse than the worst big property management firm, but the best small-time landlord was far better than the best big property management firm I've been a tenant of.
This is basically my experience I wrote about above, the downside risk for mom and pop landlords is way way worse than corp landlords in my experience (and pretty much everyone else I know).
1. New landlords bought a place I was living in and wanted to do in their words "minor upgrades to the house", but during the construction they would "keep it livable" and not require me to move. I came back after work one day to my water being off (and a toilet removed), and they didn't turn it on for two weeks after that (and kept the toilet removed). I had to get a lawyer involved for rent reimbursement.
2. My water heater broke and flooded my house in the middle of the night. The landlord took 1 month to start fixing the completely flooded apartment, and then the landlord tried for a year (threatened legal action as a bluff) to get me to pay for the new water heater despite it being their property, and maintenance being in the lease as their problem. I obv never paid because it was basically just a shakedown.
3. My landlord tried to just not pay me a month of rent owed after they sold the property with me living in it. He called me several times trying to "make a deal", and I told him that it was a cost associated with him selling the house and that I would not leave until he paid me the month owed. He waited until literally the last possible day to pay me and yelled at me on the phone that I was being unfair despite it just being money he owed me.
Every corp landlord I have had has been by the book. Yes my rent has gone up marginally, but at least there is a paper trail and they do not try to do any of the crazy stuff I just described.
That being said, I did have one mom/pop landlord who built me a deck with a bike locker over the course of a summer once, that guy was great.
I would never want to be a renter again, and I also have no interest in becoming a landlord.
It's a regulatory moat as much as it is tenant protections.
I'd love to rent out my current home
Sell it
I'll probably end up selling it. Then it will get torn down and replaced with 4-6 units at US $800k+ each. It's hard to walk away from $4.8 million in development potential. I would be lucky to clear $900k selling it.
This resulted in pretty much zero rent increases across the 15 or so total years renting from such individuals. I had exactly one rent increase during that time due to a large property tax increase which I found to be reasonable.
I tried to rent most from mom and pop landlords but the ones here in the Bay Area have been mostly terrible to deal with. I even had to take one to court. I think you’re extremely lucky to just have one increase over 15 years. Conversely, the corporate ones were much easier to deal with it (although the promptness of repair is 50/50).
> I would love to purchase a home, but even 10 years of a software engineering salary are not enough for that in NYC.
You now have an investment returning a fairly steady ~10% annually, which matches the returns on some pretty bad junk bonds, however on paper your risk is much less. Or you could live in it and just get the 6-7% annual return, with even lower risk.
That's why the apartment costs $1M.
* Rent control means that tenants are paying less than market rate.
* Extremely low property tax rates combined with anti-development policy mean that asset price appreciation exceeds rents by a significant amount.
Stop controlling rents, tax the hell out of these people, and one way or another spend it on residents, and you are exacting a redistribution of wealth that doesn't distort the market in a way that leads to slumlords.
Additionally, I can’t think of any homeowner who will vote to increase their property tax, especially if it’s already based on a $1M house.
It's pretty black and white - either the landlord asked a price in line with local wages or they didn't. If they go too far,the landlord gets punished with expensive vacancies, or they loosen rent/income requirements and get punished with even more expensive evictions.
Point is, landlords aren't gangsters who can demand whatever number they pull out of their arses. They have to keep rent a reasonable ratio of local wages or they feel the pain.
In New Zealand the only accessible way for the moderately wealthy to save is property (a failed financial system)
So there is a proliferation of "mum and dad" landlords who have huge political power, two "investment" properties, and they make life hell and insecure for renters
I rented until I was in my forties, and that is what it was like. They are not all bad, but many cannot believe that their tennents own their home, if not the property it is in. A landlord can not "drop by" for any reason, legally, but most importantly, morally
Being a landlord should be a business. Nobody should have tenants in an "investment" property. It is a conflict of interest and a power imbalance that immiserates the tenants
On top of that the poorest 60% are handing over the lion's share of their income to the richest 15%
So much needs to change....
If mom-and-pop can't cope with the responsibilities of being a landlord they should sell up to someone who can, not expect to be let off the hook when they make someone's life a misery.
Also, if a property did have an ADU in it, and someone was renting it out, a prospective buyer who didn't want the responsibility of being a landlord would find that a huge negative, which would decrease the value of the property to the existing owner, and provide additional incentive to avoid constructing the ADU at all.
If I were looking to buy a home, then a home with a tenant-occupied ADU is less desirable than an otherwise identical home without the ADU. The hassle and risk outweighs the rental cash flow.
Landlords generally can't suddenly increases rents. It happens only at the end of lease, and everyone knows when the lease is going to expire, and you have 1-2 months at a minimum to negotiate the lease renewal. If a landlord suddenly increases the rent by a lot (although most leases, or city laws, cap max rent increases), it will be disruptive to you. But your worst case scenario is to move to another market price rental in 1-2 months.
For a landlord, a tenant who stops paying rent, damages the place, etc is a much bigger financial and logistical risk. In most places, it's a lengthy, high-effort process to evict a bad tenant even when you have documented evidence. This is a very difficult scenario for a mom and pop homeowner, hence rules should be different for them at least, compared to large corporations.
And in your good (but overzealous) intent to protect the general majority of good tenants, you're not realizing that thenet result of the above is:
- Landlords are hesitant to rent their places or ADUs unless they really need the money, which reduces supply, thus increasing rents
- Landlords have to charge higher to account for the risk of a bad tenant, as well as for a complex eviction process, thus increasing rents
Rent control like laws benefit current renters, in their current properties, while harming both landlords and importantly for your pov, future renters, including current renters in their next rental. But since this cost is diffused to the future, it's easy to ignore and forget.
Small mom-and-pop should be allowed to do many things that extremely wealthy landlords and/or corporations are not allowed to do.
The problem is, then you end up with structuring/smurfing. It's already a common thing in real estate to have one LLC per each building in a development to prevent creditors from clawing money back from the actual developer corporation/fund, no need to entice this even more.
Besides, small landlords already are notorious for egregious violations of regulations. Creating effectively two classes of renters doesn't solve the problem, at all.
That's not realistic in most cases but we saw one rental property which looked crazy profitable that was full of Section 8 tenants. We passed on it because it was really buying yourself a job as a social worker and the fact that we were bleeding hearts would make it harder, not easier. I think my wife and I have gained the maturity that we might be able to handle that now but we've also gotten better at setting boundaries such that we wouldn't.
Some Section 8 tenants have complex interactions with their neighbors and their environment, and I think eviction of Section 8 tenants is harder too.
Unfortunately the local mom and pop landlords get wrecked by this while only the big corporate landlords have the resources and scale to weather these situations.
If, say, 5% of the population is crazy, and make for bad tenants.. then owning 10-20+ units puts you in a position of always having 90%+ of your revenue coming in.
If you have 1 unit then most of the time you are OK, but every once in a while you may lose 100% of your revenue for 3-12 months, while you have to keep spending on mortgage/tax/utilities, plus lawyers, repairs, etc.
People don't fall for drugs on their own - the utter, utter majority fall for drugs to self-medicate for whatever crisis they're facing. Be it perspectivelessness, losing a family member or one's job - across the Western world, governments have completely given up supporting people who hit a rough patch in life, and now it's a situation that is very, very hard to resolve.
The key thing would be the government finally go and improve the situation around mental health care accessibility and a proper social safety net.
You're right but we are so far from this now I can't imagine it being possible until one or two full generations of people die out and we start teaching empathy
The dwelling rental niche is far beyond over-farmed and is definitely overhyped. As with so many other things in our economy, the big players are usually the only ones with decent margins, and even they have to cut corners and be somewhat lucky on dice rolls to get them.
Exception: one guy, well aware of these issues, had a hack for it—he only owned houses near medical or nursing schools. Nursing and medical students pay their rent and don't trash the place.
* There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.*
This is a big problem in a lot of places. It's really hard for cities to strike a good balance between renters and owners, and I think few do it well. Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters).
That's it. Works like a charm. No bullshits like rent control or whatever.
Also, while reasonable people can agree that there's room to improve the balance on tenants rights, the idea of swinging from "total" to "0" rights based solely on payment status doesn't strike me as the debate's end.
If you lose a job and miss a paycheck this month, maybe you need an extra month to get back on your feet. If you lose housing right away, it's gonna be harder to find a job ("why is your suit wrinkled? why do you smell like you haven't taken a shower in a week?"), which makes it harder to get an apartment that would stabilize things.
We have safety nets so the smallest bump doesn't shoot you right to the bottom.
It shouldn't be indefinite, and the problem is finding how many months of friction should exist before we reach "this aint gonna get better", but instant-cutoff quickly becomes a feedback loop of shit.
I can stop paying my electricity bill in november and our state's utility companies CANNOT cut me off until the spring, because without heat I would literally die in Maine. There are similar laws for gas utilities.
I can have a billion dollar bill with Verizon, but if I dial 911, they are legally obligated to connect me to emergency services.
Also, ask people who work for utility companies how well any of this works to actually compel payment from the kind of people who are good at abusing debt.
Answer: Fucking not at all. My brother worked for the cable company, rather limited regulation in terms of requiring the company to continue servicing someone who was delinquent. 95% of his job was still disconnects, often involving someone showing up to the door with their rifle to make a point.
Yeah, I know, Berkeley. Rent control was very anti-landlord. But "rents have total rights as long as they pay" sounds too harsh to me.
The effect is that honest people find it difficult to rent an apartment because abusers run rampant and the system protects them. In some European countries you need to prove you have stable job and get recommendation from the previous landlord to even be in the consideration and then you basically have to go for an interview. It's a ridiculous and humiliating process which wouldn't exist if landlords could throw out abusers without much hassle.
There is no reason either should take 6 months+ to litigate (real world example). I even had an email from the tenant stating they would start paying again if we would reduce the rent.
No damage, no question about the facts, just someone who knew that worst case scenario is 6 months free housing for them, simply because that’s how long paperwork apparently takes.
End result? I’m even more selective to who I rent out to, and the costs are borne by innocent people who just don’t happen to have sufficient history.
> The courts should be speedy at forcing landlords to rectify problems just as the courts should be speedy at forcing out squatters.
They’d much rather pass on the cost of higher rental insurance, or failing that an income tax hike.
But anyway, generally speaking, I think they benefit on average more from a slow and inefficient judicial system. The occasional 6+ month eviction battle is a rare negative outcome that comparatively few landlords have to deal with.
In France it can take years to evict people who stop paying rent. So now 90% of all rental contracts have an insurance for non-payments included in the contract.
A few bad apples forced every other tenant to pay more in rent just because politicians decided that squatters had more rights than the owners. And god have mercy on your soul if you decide to take back what is yours when you get tired of waiting for the justice system to do it's job. If you do, you'll be the one the cops will come for, not the squatters.
> now 90% of all rental contracts have an insurance for non-payments included in the contract.
Then what happens in practice is that the owner will contract an insurance policy via the real estate agency that manages the rental property. As a result of this, in the end if the insurance company deems you to be too high risk, then they won't insure you and the owner will not take the risk to rent his dwelling without it even if they like you and want you to live in their rental.
So what we have is a de-facto rental market that is controlled by a few insurance companies who decide the fate of the tenants. The owner, the real estate agency don't really have much power in terms of decision.
For the owner it makes things easier, they don't really have to think too much. Their rent is guaranteed by the insurance company and for the real estate agency, they can always turn down "undesirable" tenants by claiming that the insurance company rejected their application.
The tenants most of the time have no idea about this stuff.
As you put it, it is a hidden tax on the tenants because the price of the insurance is now baked in the rent that is paid by everyone, good tenants or bad tenants alike. When I was working in RE 11 years ago, the insurance cost something like 2 to 3% of the monthly rent and then another 5 to 7% got paid to the real estate agency managing the rental.
Today, I reckon, after all the inflation from the past few years, most likely 15% of the rent is gone before the owner sees a dime each month. As you can imagine this is not a very good incentive to put your apartment on the market. And that is not even touching on the various rent control policies that have been rolled out in the last few years in certain cities which have exacerbated the rental crisis.
If you as a tenant want to lock a rate - sign long term contract. Then a year or six months before expiring start renew talks. Don't forget that market also changes - you may be in a better position too.
Look - I support the idea of people owning their own homes and renting being the exception than the norm. But you can't solve housing shortage by making the market for whatever stock there is even more inefficient. The brejnevki in the soviet union were terrible quality wise, but they get the job done in providing shelter from the elements for the rapidly urbanizing country.
In East and South East Asia they are also quite proficient in building massive 30 stories high rises.
This can have lots of issues. Imagine something like a good school zone changing, an event that may not be accounted for by the index. Insurance and taxes are determined by current value, that is partially determined by market rent, but the landlord cant adjust.
This also hurts a specific landlord when it comes time to sell, making a tenanted property potentially less valuable (and reducing the incentive to take on a tenant at all). This does not impact the general property value mind, as the tenant only benefits and creates this problem if the index is below the market.
If you want a fair balance, "its mine as long as I pay market rent" is pretty good. "its mine as long as I pay indexed rent" is not great, as it removes the financial benefit of capital investment from the landlord.
You always renegotiate at market rates.
As long as RealPage and friends exist, market rates are whatever they say they are. There’s no free market in real estate.
Sadly, courts move slowly so it will probably be years before a decision.
I'm a renter and always have been a renter, but it has always been crazy to me that the cost of people without a house is dumped on the unlucky landlord. If the decision is that this cost must be put on society, at least it should be spread among all citizens/landlords (e.g. with a tax on rent).
Not having the government paying while waiting for the eviction is the same as now: the government can just take ages.
The risk to landlords when the renters doesn't uphold the contract needs to be limited. This is also the reason why an insurance would be an inferior solution: there is still no incentive for the government to intervene fast.
We might find out that it's preferable to build social housing rather than paying rent to landlords, and the government starts actually doing something about it
as long as the property is not damaged
According to who? Landlords already tend to exaggerate to try to keep your security deposit, tenants would have no motivation to admit to damages after the lease ends. If the answer is "go to court", then "evictions are fast" will have to be amended.
They seem to want the landlord to take on the government's role to provide social housing and therefore you shouldn't be able to kick them out for non-payment, contracts should be very long (>5 years, or even indefinite), there should be rent control instead of market rates etc.
Plus, the policy goal of allowing small-scale stuff like ADU's is to encourage people to become landlords. "Your tenant has total right" rules have the opposite effect.
This is a big problem in a lot of places
Where is your evidence of this "big problem"?
No state allows what you describe. This being some sort of widespread problem is a myth that's been running around for decades after Pacific Heights which was part of Hollywood cashing in on white fright in the late 80's early 90's.
For example, in super-liberal Massachusetts: if you are one day late with your rent, the landlord can start eviction proceedings. The tenant is given time to find legal assistance and respond - shockingly, you can't just slap an eviction notice on the door and bounce someone onto the street. You have to prove to a judge that your tenant isn't doing what they should be doing, or is doing things they shouldn't be. Shockingly, your tenant has a right to defend themselves. Do people abuse the process? Sure, some do. They get away with it at most once, because...there's a record of it all in housing court and eviction proceedings are pretty much a deathblow with any landlord doing their homework.
the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.*
...which is why landlords screen tenants for employment/income and renting history, search for records under their name in housing court, and google them to see if they have any arrests in the news, etc. Come on.
Especially for the edge cases (really bad owners and renters)
Bad landlord far outweight bad tenants in this housing market. Whereas one tenant might make one landlord's life difficult, one bad landlord can make hundreds if not thousands of people's lives miserable and dangerous. Daniel Ohebshalom is a great example:
https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/017-24/nyc-s-infamous-wors...
That press release is the culmination of something like a decade of housing rights advocates trying to get the city to do something about him. And what did he do? Soon as he go out of jail, he started harassing his tenants:
https://nypost.com/2024/05/01/us-news/nycs-worst-landlord-in...
This isn't some anecdote.
Barry Singer, with an average of 1,804 open HPD violations across seven buildings
Alfred Thompson, with an average of 1,285 open HPD violations across 15 buildings
Karen Geer, with an average of 1,193 open HPD violations across seven buildings
Melanie Martin, with an average of 1,132 open HPD violations across four buildings
Claudette Henry, with an average of 1,130 open HPD violations across 15 buildings
That list is a "hundred" of the top violators and it's likely the list of landlords with more than a dozen violations is probably more like "thousand" range or higher.
In my city, landlords are infamous for charging all sorts of illegal fees and also stealing people's security deposits under the guise of made-up cleaning and repair expenses; the courts have repeatedly ruled normal cleaning and simple repair (like fixing picture hangar hooks) is not valid reason for using someone's security deposit - it's part of the cost of doing business.
You can take them to housing court - and maybe eventually get your money back - but in the meantime you're definitely not getting your lease renewed so you're left needing to find a new place...without a reference, which pretty much tanks your chances of finding another apartment because the market is so tight.
Do people abuse the process? Sure, some do. They get away with it at most once, because...there's a record of it all in housing court and eviction proceedings are pretty much a deathblow with any landlord doing their homework.
The problem is that for large corporate landlords this is a statistical risk that can be priced in and accounted for across hundreds of units.
For small mom-and-pop landlords renting out their basement, it's a roll of the dice on whether any given tenant will completely ruin their life and be impossible to get rid of.
Of course many people will respond to this by saying that the rights of people to have a place to live are more important than the rights of homeowners to have a bit of side income, but if the law makes it too risky to rent out a second suite, nobody will want to do it -- which makes the housing crisis even worse for renters as there will be fewer places available to rent.
Being a small-time landlord is unreasonably risky due to tenant friendly laws and backed up courts.
Similarly, I've found renting from small-time landlords to be a worse experience. They tend to do things that a large corporation would eventually face lawsuits over - discrimination, demanding more money up front, keeping deposits, poor upkeep of units, etc.
So I'm not even sure I want to encourage small time landlording anyway.
Some things maybe really are better managed by big, lawsuit-averse, emotionless companies.
It's an interesting problem I'm not sure what the solution is.
The solution is to make the rules different for small landlords.
How do you quantify small - number of units or dollar value? What is small - 1 unit? 2? 5?.
What stops a larger landlord setting up 1000 LLCs each managing 3 unit?
As soon as you get into "different laws apply to different people" you run into problems.
As soon as you get into "different laws apply to different people" you run into problems.
But when you don't do that, you run into different problems, which is what we have run into already.
Every time US tax code gets more complicated, it usually doesn't help the bottom 50%.
The problem is that in cities that have regulated apartments out of existence it's the only existing place for renters to live, so we should be mindful of things that will squeeze its availability before enough apartments can be built to take up the demand.
In expensive Brooklyn all the dense, high-rise new construction is along the water front .. 15 minutes walk from the trains. The buildings are so far from the trains, that many of them advertise private shuttle services to entice buyers/renters.
Meanwhile the subway stations that the shuttle take you to are surrounded by blocks and blocks of 3 story buildings.
Its all completely backwards, except that there was no existing constituency living on the water front to protest & block new development.
Some things maybe really are better managed by big, lawsuit-averse, emotionless companies.
Completely disagree. Every poor experience I had renting was with a big emotionless company. I have never had a poor experience with a small time landlord.
Just like landlord vet their prospective tenants, you should be vetting your prospective landlords. Someone with a few units is pretty easy to track down folks for references.
The problematic ones tended to be the ones in the "midrange" - between small time and big company. Using horrible management companies as contractors to farm out the dirty work, and generally getting away with it since they were big enough to throw their weight around - but not big enough to care about being squeaky clean to the letter of the law.
I'd rent out my basement mother in law unit, but due to tenant rights in my city there is not a single chance I will ever do so. From direct personal experience I know how difficult it is to remove a problematic tenant from a living situation no matter how much impact they may have on your life.
The outcome is that there is one less extremely affordable unit in the area for living in.
What this means is that you can rent somewhere, not pay, it will take a minimum of 6 months to get rid of them since they can request RAFT and you must wait until the application is processed before the trial can proceed. After they're successfully evicted, after 4 years of no evictions, they can have it sealed, regardless if the judgement is paid or not.
Or, you can pay the judgement and have it sealed immediately, effectively getting a free loan. Not to mention, if you don't pay and proceedings are brought against you, if you pay to cure, prior to going to trial, you can have those sealed immediately with or without the landlord, so other landlords can't even know about that either.
Repeat. Free rent.
The risk of legal costs are basically passed along in the cost of rent. And bigger corporate landlords are naturally going to have a bigger advantage because they can pool their risks.
The point isn't that there are bad landlords. It's that you are creating a treadmill. The more you add tenant protections, the more costs you add to housing. And the more incentives you give landlords to screen tenants and otherwise behave badly.
One of the most eye opening discoveries for me on my urbanism journey is how Amsterdam got better. It wasn’t always a bicycle paradise; its city center had massive parking lots, huge roads, and a poor pedestrian environment.
But today it’s much different — because policies were enacted decades ago which ensure roads are re-configured when it’s time to replace them. So over time, the city has become better.
These long-term policies are deeply important. We didn’t get into the current situation because someone woke up and decided housing scarcity would be cool. It happened after decades of planning and building under policies which seemed like the future 60 years ago, but have become unsustainable. Parking minimums don’t instantly turn your town into a parking lot — it takes decades as buildings are replaced and more and more land is carved out for parking.
So yes, YIMBY doesn’t instantly solve the crisis, and we need to do more. But over time, as houses and lots sell, people remodel and build, the financial incentive to make more housing units available is very strong —- so over many years, things will definitely densify.
lied knowing once they dug a big hold the sunk-cost fallacy would pull them over the finish line.
That's essentially what the CA high speed rail folks did. It remains to be seen if it ends up working out for them.
We didn’t get into the current situation because someone woke up and decided housing scarcity would be cool.
I mean, in a way, we did.
CEQA didn't become the monster that it is now because the California legislature intended to enact a monster. It was effectively an accident of an interesting, and arguably activist, interpretation by the CA Supreme Court in a case called Friends of Mammoth v. Board of Supervisors:
In 1972, the California Supreme Court broadened CEQA by interpreting a "public" project as any development that needed government approval.[4][5]: 1 Since then, CEQA has become the basis for anyone with a grievance against a project to file lawsuits to slow projects by years or kill projects by imposing delays and litigation costs that make projects infeasible.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Environmental_Quali...
https://casetext.com/case/friends-of-mammoth-v-board-of-supe...
Some of this reform is also stupid, like Austin attempting (and failing) to mandate 9 ft ceilings in the name of "affordability".
My observation has been that if you're looking for an observable change in the next few years - just move somewhere else. It's less headache and the results are instant.
In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing.
Yeah, see, this mindset is exactly the problem.
Letting anyone put a granny flat on their property if they have space for it is radical? Come on, that's a moderate change at most.
And yeah, that kind of thing is never going to make a big difference over the short or even medium term. You want a big impact quickly, you need bigger changes: allow for higher density "missing middle" housing across the whole city, drastically streamline the approval process to be "as of right", get rid of all mandatory parking minimums, invest tens of millions of tax dollars every year into new public housing, etc.
invest tens of millions of public dollars every year into new public housing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-room_occupancy
An SRO costs 25% as much to build as a studio apartment.
The real obvious solution is to take all of the money we are pumping into "long-term" affordable housing options into basically just dormitories. If it's good enough for college students, it should be good enough for anyone looking to get off the streets.
I think people really underrate how much of a knock-on affect there would be if we built enough SROs to meet demand. It would essentially establish a housing "floor" in any housing market, and undercut the ability to rent-seek up the rest of the housing market.
People have this mistaken idea that there are a ton of shipping containers that need to be recycled (there was a brief period in the mid aughts where this may have been true). But a used shipping container is neither cheap nor a great material to build a home from.
There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.
Yes, there's no chance I'm going to rent an ADU under these incredibly tenant-biased regulations as in California. I have to be able to evict people at the end of their lease for any reason if they are going to be in an ADU on my property.
I would not want to rent a separate property in CA as an individual, especially as counties start banning criminal background checks.
many of the Tennant rights are waived for it if the primary property is owner occupied, aside from some cities like oakland
And this can change overnight... CA cities have made some pretty drastic changes quite suddenly in the past. Not worth it. Eg: https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2025/01/29/mountain-view-stren...
Judgement proof Tennant mean that comes out of retirement and college funds. Makes me wish criminal charges were viable.
True YIMBY policy would be zoning for six-story apartments by-right citywide, with density going up to 20 stories near rapid transit.
But even policies that sound great on paper are often sabotaged by cities with unworkable affordability requirements that prevent anything from being built.
This is in a suburb just north of Seattle. I am currently 4 miles from the nearest light rail station, which is a 5 minute walk + a 10 minute bus ride that comes along very frequently, then a 40 minute ride to downtown Seattle, so by US suburban standards the foot/transit access is already pretty darn good. There is a small neighborhood market and a few restaurants a 5 minute walk away, and a large supermarket is really only 15 minutes walk. (but yeah, we usually drive there.)
So far, zero occupied single-family houses have been knocked down to build high density developments. There were a few dilapidated/abandoned old houses on large parcels along the freeway that were bulldozed for apartments, which was an improvement. But even if you put policies and incentives in place to encourage re-development, it can take decades for market forces to reach a tipping point where developers are actually willing to make cash offers at or above the market value on existing properties to make these changes happen.
As a YIMBY, ADUs are an introductory "first step" policy that should obviously be legal, but were never expected to have any real effect.
This is such a weird thing to say. Why would lawmakers ever want to support a new YIMBY policy when the people that support them openly admit that it was never meant to achieve what they claimed was going to achieve?
we also need to come up with incentives to light a fire under the butts of individual actors in our economy to actually go out and make things.
I've been watching something similar happen in LA with Measure HLA, a "safe streets" bill that was supposed to require the city to include safety improvements for pedestrians and cyclists during regular road maintenance. The bill passed with broad support but none of the people in charge of the agencies seem to want to do any of that stuff, so they either drag their feet or simply don't comply, leading to lawsuits and delays. (Just today, Metro voted unanimously to not include a now-legally mandated bike lane along a major new busway, claiming it's not their problem. Which might be true — and that's a separate issue — but playing hot potato with safety & mobility improvements feels like a leadership problem, not a legal problem.)
I like designing good incentives but in this case just passing laws is not working. You also need the actors to want the change. (I personally would be focusing on installing new leadership.)
2. Your issue with what I said seems very dependent on something you chose to “add in” — Why am I being asked to defend something I never said?
The United States has plenty of vacant housing. It just doesn’t have plenty of free or nearly free vacant housing in the downtown sections of our dozen largest cities. Maybe the issue is that we don’t want every single person on earth living in San Francisco or New York. Encouraging remote work was probably a step in the right direction on relieving that demand, but I think maybe there is some structural problem about hyper concentration of capital in a few extremely large cities that we are trying to fix with zoning ordinances, or, I guess stealing from the perfidious Kulacks to give to the noble proletariat.
https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san-...
So I'd anticipate places with tenants rights laws to associate with huge amounts of housing inventory while the incentives really catch up. Then the tenants get pushed to move somewhere else and the laws go away as the renting bloc loses numbers.
Rent to people you're comfortable evicting/taking legal action against if things sour and then if you're so inclined, help your friends out by subsidizing outings/entertainment etc.
Alternatively, the tiny home bubble has popped, and you can buy a used, pre-built tiny home and just park them on your property.
You still have all sorts of laws against doing the thing you just supposedly legalized.
It’s the same for new apartment buildings. Next time you drive over the Fremont Bridge look at the skyline. 5 years ago there were 13 visible cranes mostly constructing high density apartment buildings. Today there are none. It’s the same reason, Portland has made it simply unprofitable to develop new high density housing.
They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off.
This is a part of the problem which I think isn't discussed often enough. Because of the varying marginal utility of money, if the divide between rich and poor becomes big enough, owners will not want to rent out in their own homes, because nothing the tenant can pay will make any significant difference to their personal budget, and certainly not enough to make up for the stress/risk.
Maybe they can find someone non-threatening enough where the benefit of having someone living in the cellar apartment, to discourage break-ins when they're away etc. makes up for the risk. That is, I guess, how I managed to get a rental in one of the most expensive parts of Oslo ~20 years ago. But I really doubt I'd gotten that if I wasn't extremely non-threatening, let alone if I had been a minority of some sort.
Low property taxes are highly conducive to this use-case, and notably, tenant residents can vote on raising property taxes and overseas sovereign wealth funds can't.
We have an answer to building more housing at a lower cost and it's apartment buildings. We need more apartment buildings. We don't need them everywhere, there will still be plenty of places with predominantly single family homes, but we need them in more places than they are today. They don't have to be big high rises but there needs to be a enough number of units in a single building to make projects pencil.
There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights
Yes, these laws also increase the cost of housing.
That's a HUGE ask for someone to build an ADU! If you feel so strongly about it, why don't you just become a developer? The answer is obvious: capital. But that applies at every scale, and thus to a whole lot of those homeowners you're showing disdain for too.
People complain the rents in my area are too high. But the costs of the underlying real estate, maintenance, construction, and repairs are so high right now that it barely pencils out if at all. Most houses in the area were constructed in the 70's or the 90's and have not been well-maintained. So there's added costs of trying to bring old structures back up to snuff. New construction, even medium/high density stuff doesn't make sense unless you have 40-50% down or access to some ridiculously low interest loan.
Something has to give. Either prices need to come down on land, labor and construction materials, or rents need to go even higher.
I happen to have chatted with the head of a large commercial contractor in Portland a few months ago. He told me Portland's unattractive to developers because, compared to other cities, rents are low and the cost to build is high, so the flow of real estate investment dollars into Portland is slow.
Since the problem we're trying to solve is making rent cheaper, conditional on the current state of the economy, the solution here is making it cheaper to build dense residential in Portland in the urban core and improve transit options.
what I would really like to see now is allowing owners to sub-divide and sell the ADU. This could bring back the "starter-home" that no longer exists and has kept me out of the market
One thing that I think would be interesting would be allowing the sale and transfer of unused development rights (AKA "air rights.") That lets somebody take advantage of the development capacity without the landowner having to make a gamble on what could be a very risky development. A lot of jurisdictions have something like this allowed already but generally limit it to certain districts, or only landmarked properties get to sell development rights like this, or something else.
I don’t know that anyone has claimed allowing ADUs is all you need to do to solve our housing crisis. But in a lot of places it’s the only thing the NIMBYs will let you get away with. So if you can’t middle housing, at least allowing ADUs gets you something more.
If the demand to live in your city dramatically outstrips the any possible number of ADUs that can be built, then it won’t help on its own, the cup still runs over.
I have my own property because I don't want to share it with someone else. If I wanted to share, I'd rent a room or get a townhouse or some other form of housing where sharing space is common.
Fourth:
Building an ADU is actually very expensive and the payback time is quite long. You have to dig for sewage and water, pour a foundation, and so forth. If doing it at a high level, it's going to be as intensive as building a house... It's just smaller. Most people are not handy at all and therefore will need to hire out every bit of it... Which is very expensive.
I have some pretty radical views about the benefits of land value taxes, but I don't think it's a good idea to immediately change all taxes by a large amount because disruptions are very painful. If you can enact positive incentives slowly with gradual changes then you can avoid disruptions while moving towards a better future.
They don't need the money
Yeah. At a certain affluence, I'd rather have extra space and privacy than extra money. I can't think of a reasonable amount of money that would incentivize me to rent out an ADU in my backyard. $10k a month? idk my kids play in that yard...
Noah Smith (left wing blogger) has a fascinating article on it: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta...
In Austin, TX, rent has been falling for 2 years because they've been building so much new supply: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
I'm super curious about why you think YIMBY-ism is passive. I feel like the main criticism we've often gotten is that we're too in-your-face with our advocacy.
Say more.
Whatever it is, it will probably make you or any politician who advances it very unpopular.
There's a general fear of being a landlord
Yes. And this is fixable, if there is political will. There is a long list of locales where I'd never want to be a landlord due to how little recourse you have in cases of tenant misbehavior/nonpayment. CA is near the top. Portland is too.
Until this is fixed, however, those locales will tend to lose independent landlords, as they cannot afford the rent losses as they are not diversified enough. Big faceless companies like Avalon will grow cause they can.
radical new zoning lawsADUs on their property
If this is "radical" then it just shows how far we've fallen.
Yes in my backyard shouldn't mean literally yes, you can live in my actual physical backyard, more than there shouldn't be undue restrictions on building more densely nearby
Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations, would create a huge and lasting political win across a broad section of the electorate.
Also you're misreading my point, campaigning on these things isn't a panacea, but delivering on them just might be.
Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her.
She had less charisma than Hilary. Probably even less than Al Gore or Zuckeberg before his new software update was installed. And she had a history of bending the knee to the progressives.
No one cared. One of the better things a president has done for the country in quite a while, and no one cared, and no one remembers.
If the Democrats have a fight between an abundance agenda and populist leftists who are really inclusive like Bernie Sanders I think that will be great.
[1] Clinton was always as far to the right as she could get away with, probably to compensate for being a woman, but paid the price for her mindless hawkish in 2008 when she lost the primaries to Barack Obama
Whites didn’t shift at all from 2016 to 2024. Latino moderates shifted 23 points to the right, and Asian moderates shifted 11 points to the right.
It’s hard to explain how inflation would cause a racially unbalanced shift like that. The 2016 election was a pretty neutral baseline—the economy was fine and had been for years. So if inflation was the cause, why didn’t white voters shift right compared to 2016? It doesn’t make sense that inflation would only cause hispanics and asians to shift right.
Likewise, if race was the reason, why didn’t white voters shift right, compared to 2016 when the candidate was a white woman? And why did black conservatives (a bloc about the same size as black liberals) shift 8 points to the right?
I feel like the "voting against their best interests" trope exists because people don't realize that conservative minorities vote as far right as the GOP will let them. Because they're conservative.
The bigger signal here is racial depolarization. Historically, moderate to conservative minorities tend to vote Democrat anyway, which leaves them as disproportionately the more conservative wing of the party. What you saw from 2016 to 2024 was significant racial depolarization—moderate to conservative blacks, hispanics, and asians voting more their ideology and less their race.
My perception was that she ran on "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" and something vague about protecting women's rights.
It's almost like you need more than a couple months to run a serious presidential campaign. Despite being the VP for 4 years, most people didn't know what to expect from her. Almost nobody was enthusiastic about her and she had no real momentum. That's obviously what killed her campaign.
There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.
Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.
Did you look up her platform at all? Or do you insist this because it wasn't spoon fed to you?
I know her actual platform was more detailed than that, but it doesn't matter what I know. The point is it was not communicated effectively. Go out on the streets and ask the common folk what her platform was. Aside from "I don't know", the answers you'll get will be all over the place - mostly just generic DNC talking points. The average liberal/moderate/independent voter was not excited about Harris.
Do you honestly think most voters are researching candidates? Honestly? Of course they aren't. They expect it to be spoon fed to them.
There was a platform document pretty early on in her campaign.
Good luck insisting voters should RTFM. Professionals don't even RTFM most of the time.
Meanwhile Trump in 2020 did not have a platform at all and yet the voters didn't give a shit.
Trump lost in 2020, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. But regardless his platform was the same as it was in 2016 and 2024 - "Make America great again," "drain the swamp," these are household phrases. And just as Trump's platform resonated better with voters in 2016 and 2024, Biden's "return to normalcy" platform resonated in 2020 amidst the pandemic. There's more to these platforms than a catchy slogan, but that's the part people remember. It's effective marketing.
Look man, I want the Democrats to put forth a strong candidate and an effective campaign but this whole "blaming the voter" thing is not going to get them there. It's just going to continue alienating the people they need most.
Did you look up her platform at all?
I did. I also knew what she campaigned on during her brief presidential campaign in 2020. I also know her Senate record. I also know what she did as AG and DA. Harris' problem is that her platform was inconsistent with past actions. I'm all for politicians having a change of heart, but they have to be able to articulate what they believed before, what made them reconsider, and how they got to their new position. She failed spectacularly in that task which made her look inauthentic and the GOP seized on that weakness.
Her platform ended up looking like the output of a focus group with the express intent of winning votes rather than having any real policy positions. GP's "more of the same but also different... nevermind, look at all these celebrities telling you to vote for me!" is pretty spot on.
I'm so sick of people saying "I have curated an information diet that explicitly excludes anything from a democrat or a liberal or anyone who is even kind of empathetic to their causes and beliefs, but I'm angry that I didn't hear about all the things democrats claimed they were offering" as if they didn't fucking do this to themselves?
Like, at any point, google "Harris platform" and it would have been first link. Ballotpedia has been around for a decade and makes this utterly trivial, even in local elections.
Americans ignore anything a democrat says, while taking blatant lies from a second trump admin at face value. What the actual fuck is the democrat party supposed to do about that? They have no editorial control over Fox News, and certainly don't have any power in Musk's Twitter
"The democrats didn't do good outreach" say people who consistently turn off and ignore any media that even repeats a democrat campaign promise, and have scientifically demonstrated that they will INHERENTLY distrust anything coming from someone with a (D).
This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work.
It's what Obama ran on, and it worked for him. The fact that he achieved very little there is a different issue.
Kamala's 2-month long campaign wasn't very convincing.
Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.
One of them is that there really is an infrastructure to communicate what the Republican party stands for that which is connected to the party on an everyday basis. The absence of the Democratic party that potential supporters are complaining about right now is structural. Baudrillard might say "The Democratic Party doesn't exist"
Secondly the left has to work a lot harder for the right because the left's slogan is "another world is possible" which is a constructive project (you have to prove it, you have to build it) and the right's slogan is "there is no alternative". It's not fair but it's the way it is.
The lunatic fringe of the left also has envy for the lunatic fringe of the right. If somebody says "there are only two genders" they don't really need to justify it or explain it any more than saying that my dad believed that and his mom believed that and... People who say the opposite today expect to be to be a fait accompli and manifestly true because they said it and who could dare disagree with them and punish anyone who says otherwise but that's just a position that would be easy for their enemies to defend but impossible for them -- but they circle their wagons and form some tiny world in which it is true. The attack on JK Rowling for instance shows that they've got Kiwi Farms envy, that they think the highest form of activism is the methods of their enemies. Thus it's not so clear that the lunatic left is really left at all, it's certainly not "inclusive".
There's no winning everyone, that's for sure.
she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked
Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.
Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.
I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.)
People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies.
The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump.
Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.
People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else.
Republicans haven't?
She was running on an abstract, classical centrist non-program of "we've done great under Biden and we're going to keep doing the same". That is the exact opposite of what GP was suggesting.
prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds.
Nothing about what you mentioned at all. Nor did I ever claim Kamala ran on what you said. The fact that you and the commenter have different ideas of what rational policies are and assume politicians should be running on that platform is part of the bias. You assume that most people want the same thing as you but most people don’t. The majority actually enjoy social issues.
Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations
So I interpreted the first part in a more revolutionary direction, though you may be right that they were thinking a different direction than I was.
Hillary wasn't super popular, but what really killed her was being forced on us from the political Democratic establishment.
Biden only won because Trump is such a turd for many.
It's been since Obama that the Democrats actually had a candidate that people liked. I do not understand this strategy.
Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why?
Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why?
Do you think declaring their preferred pronouns helped liberal politicians? Who did it ultimately help? Probably the Trump campaign.
Also, "defund the police" is easily the stupidest political slogan ever. It's bewildering. Did no one think "Reform the police" was a winner? And yet liberal politicians lapped it up.
[We] made record investments in public safety, putting more police officers on the beat; today, violent crime is at its lowest in 50 years
Democrats provided funding for communities to hire more police.
since day one, President Biden has been working to make sure police officers have the tools they need to protect their communities, including more police officers on the street. We need to fund the police
Democrats passed and President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, with the largest ever federal investment infighting and preventing crime, reducing violence, and investing in public safety. That funding enabled cities and states to invest more than $14 billion in public safety and violence prevention, putting more police officers on the beat for accountable community policing.
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
Why is it that when looking for examples of what some are doing wrong, you're casting back over 5 years to an activist slogan that even then was treated as a poor expression rather than "lapped it up"?
It's almost like what you're here to do is actually reinforce the unproductive association rather than point the direction to a better way.
You want to talk about what's "bewildering"? What's bewildering is that your apparent confidence (or deliberately mislead?) confusing very online cheer-squad discourse from some corners over stated positions of most officeholders or candidates.
One could charitably assume that it's because you have some acquaintances or media follows who represent themselves or others as you've described and you've accidentally made parasocial promotion into an unfortunate wider partisan caricature. One could also warily assume you're an operative who is here to actively reinforce the associations you were ostensibly fighting against. Perhaps uncharitable, but hardly implausible these days.
The majority of liberal politicians are classic liberals who spend their campaign and policy time as you said you wanted, and it seems you haven't noticed.
"pronoun" doesn't appear in that 2024 D platform document. Also can't find it in a CBS news summary[1] of the Harris campaign. You know what does show up, though? Housing issues. Actual working class tax cut proposals. Child tax credits (pretty pro birth, very pro parent).
And those are what I think about when I think about liberal officeholders and candidates. Because that's what I see them talking about when I follow them and what's discussed in the media coverage I follow.
Where are you directing your attention?
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-platform-policy-p...
I'd say stated policy positions don't matter period. Nobody reads policy documents, it's all vibes.
fully exploited by Republicans in a media system that is largely theirs
Sounds like one answer to my question about why people don't recognize it when Democratic politicians do prioritize "housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds."
Democratic politicians do prioritize "housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds."
Have they (notably and visibly in the public consciousness) managed to get results regarding such issues such as housing in areas where they are uncontested?
As an outsider looking in i'd say if i had to imagine a democrat voting area i'd imagine an urbanised area, more progressive but also consistently more expensive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/which-democrats-voted-agains...
Yet "tangled up in social issues" remains a popular misconception. Why?
It’s not a “misconception.” Democrats choose to spend their political capital changing the status quo on social issues. For example, Americans overwhelmingly oppose affirmative action: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...
Affirmative action was banned in California in 1996. Which party tried to repeal the ban in 2020? Republicans didn’t pass a law to ban affirmative action even more!
I was a CA voter in 2020. The focus I saw from candidates and citizens alike were things like democracy, rule of law, housing costs/policy, and police reform. Prop 16 was a footnote, not a focus, which is probably one of the reasons it lost (alongside the fact that its language made it difficult to tell if it was allowing for civil protections or tearing them down).
And democratic domestic policy focus since has been pretty clear: economic stimulus, infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and various kinds of working class relief. Pretty standard "promote the general welfare" stuff, sometimes joined with efforts to protect "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (even for people who look or love differently). That's what you'd expect from classic liberals who still believe in enlightenment values and ideals. Or even just anyone who wants those things for themselves and realizes that to guarantee it to anyone, you have to support it for everyone.
This was definitely all over the 2024 democratic platform.
The problem isn't that people don't like the policy and values they'd get from the Democratic Party and its candidates. It's that they're increasingly mislead about what the difference is. As evidenced by the polling on relative policy popularity last fall:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/22/trump-har...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/tru...
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-t...
At the end of the day, the Biden administration built way more DEI departments than EV chargers. And Democrats own that.
Voters don’t take campaign platforms at face value
Huh. That sounds like validation of my original point that the Democratic Party has been "prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds", so dkjaudyeqooe's suggestion that candidates/officeholders should do that seems ... idempotent at best.
Maybe people should pay attention to what candidates campaign on and the policy they enact instead of going off vibes and trigger phrases.
Certainly that would give candidates and officeholders more electoral incentives to produce policy that serves voters.
And voters are correct to connect the employment practices they are seeing to Democrat policies. Democrats have interpreted civil rights laws to allow particular practices with respect to black and hispanic applicants that would be deemed illegal if applied to white applicants.
And of course, voters are entitled to weight platform points based on likelihood of achievement. They might put more weight on a “footnote” if they think the candidate will actually make that happen, and less weight on promises they think won’t transpire. Democrats who voted for DEI have gotten what they voted for. But the ones that voted for high speed rail in California have not.
It’s pretty shocking that this extremely fringe issue is the only thing you can find to support the narrative that dems are “spearheading” radical social change.
Whats actually happening is that conservative fear monger about random various minority groups, as they have for all of time, and then enact policies intended to harm them. The dems have no choice but to respond.
You would think that conservatives continuing this playbook for, well, ever, would cause people to stop and say “wait… are the conservatives really the ones stirring up the culture war?” But no, somehow it hasn’t. Somehow, we’re all still living under the delusion that conservatives just maintain the status quo and oppose radical change, and not that they’re the ones creating the need for opposing action.
I hardly think most (any?) democrats or their constituents are talking about affirmative action in this day and age.
In my state - WA - there's a prohibition on affirmative action written into the constitution (originally passed in a referendum in the 90s). Democrats have been talking of repealing or otherwise constraining it for ages, and in 2019, it culminated in another referendum:
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1000,_Affirmat...
You can see who supported it in the linked article. It was an indirect initiative so it went to the legislature first, which voted it in as law along party lines. A veto referendum was then held, in which it was repealed:
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-...
Again, you can look at the article for details on who supported and opposed it.
I can assure you that many people do remember this whole brouhaha and the names associated with it, at least the most prominent ones (like the Dem governor).
I hardly think most (any?) democrats or their constituents are talking about affirmative action in this day and age
Kamala Harris: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/harris-forgivable-loans-lega...
Biden’s SBA: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/court-rules-biden-admin-di...
Biden’s USDA: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/white-farmers-chall...
Obama’s FAA: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jan/30/faa-diversi...
Also, politicians are on the hook for their reaction to what the private sector is doing. The cached blurb for Google’s equal opportunity web page still says this: “Google is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.” Google got rid of the “affirmative action” part recently. Democrat politicians supported these programs. Republicans promised to end them.
> Americans who had heard the phrase affirmative action in the Center’s December survey were asked whether they saw it as a good or a bad thing. Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.
> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.
I am a pretty liberal person, but watching a white male candidate pass the interview but not get a job explicitly because he was a white male (because the only slots left were for "diverse" candidates) even makes me uncomfortable. That's a lived experience. I watched it in real life.
Jon Stewart has had two guests that he pushed back on that were both right while Stewart was wrong.
The first guest was on his Apple TV show, and he said something to the effect of "there's more of us [who disagree with reparations]," and Jon Stewart spoke over him and generally denied his opinions as rational. Current events show that that wasn't something to ignore.
The second was a guest talking about how these "social issues" are bad democratic strategy. Social programs are popular when they help the disadvantaged, but not popular when they help a particular group (which I think is in some way related to "intersectionality"?). Jon Stewart became emotional focusing on the injustice rather than pragmatically solving the problem.
I think that is where democrats often run foul of average voters.. they see very wealthy democrats pushing something. It won't hurt the wealthy democrats, but it could hurt them. Average non-wealthy people don't want to be punished for the sins of past wealthy people who happened to have the same skin color as them.
He is the populist voice of the educated left and I find lots of echo's in my own social circles/education.
Stewart is coming around and waking up to the idea that "woke" policies were rejected, and the democrats need re-framing/a reckoning. IMHO, he is largely the voice of democratic reckoning. Biden wasn't kicked out until Stewart's public evisceration and declaration that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes. He at least adapts with increasing information.
Stewart is coming around and waking up to the idea that "woke" policies were rejected, and the democrats need re-framing/a reckoning. IMHO, he is largely the voice of democratic reckoning. Biden wasn't kicked out until Stewart's public evisceration and declaration that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes. He at least adapts with increasing information.
I just finished watching his interview with Ezra Klien, and as an on/off viewer of the TDS from back in his anti-war rants from 2003 or so (still in HS so kind of fuzzy on dates) to today I have seen a noticeable difference; he has finally realized that it's not that 'fraud, waste, abuse' in government doesn't occur on both sides of the isles (that much is probably always clear) it's that the two-party paradigm have in fact insidiously profited in their own specific ways from their respective MOs, and political theater aside are entirely complicit with it as it maintains the status quo.
Anything that deviates from the norm (eg Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul) is to be brandished too extreme, or unelectable and a loss to the other isle is a better result as it is something that detracts from the business as usual approach in modern US politics. The faces/names might change, but the tactics are the same, denying access to RNC/DNC platforms removing or outright denying delegates etc... it's all been done on both sides.
Just look at the face of the man melt when he hears how the Rural Broadband Bill process purposely rendered itself moot, and perhaps made the cluster** of DOGE become an inevitability--the obvious profiteer in chief Musk being the only one to really 'win' because of his innate and impeccable ability to award himself and his corps Govt contracts while championing and branding himself the best CEO the private sector has to offer.
Not only that, watch the interview with Maria Ressa when he realizes that the same Zuck that got Obama elected and then cozied up to Trump when he needed to has been the cause and reason why extremes of political fascism in the Philippines has risen, via Cambridge Analytica, and is part of the same agenda that has been playing out in US elections since 2016.
I don't know what to say about the TDS Host alumni, I reserve judgment on their POVs at this point, but I was a big fan of John Oliver since his days on The Bugle but if/when both him and Jon get together on a stand-up tour like he did with Chappele targeted at their primary demographic I think they can exert their collective influence to their hard-liner leftist audience to see that in actuality the Left-Right paradigm is in actuality a very parasitic symbiosis where the host (The US populace and perhaps World at large) will always suffer if it is the only form of governance we can either fathom or implement.
It's clear that resources and technology aren't the limiting factor in solving a large amount of Humanity's problems, it's that entrenched power (and those who benefit from it) refuse to relinquish any of it and will sooner destroy itself, and us with it, before it ever corrects itself.
Public attitudes about affirmative action can also vary depending on the specific context in which it is being discussed, such as in higher education or the workplace.A larger share of Americans disapprove than approve of higher education institutions taking race and ethnicity into account when admitting students, according to several recent Center surveys.
In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity. Around a quarter (24%) said companies and organizations should take a person’s race and ethnicity into account – in addition to qualifications – to increase diversity.
The unpopular approach of considering race is what Democrats have pushed recently. E.g. Prop 16:
A "yes" vote supported this constitutional amendment to repeal Proposition 209 (1996), which stated that the government and public institutions cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to persons on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.
And I didn’t cherry pick anything. I quoted the portions of the article that said support depends on context, and then the paragraph discussing the college context and the employment context. The article itself happens to specify a percentage in text for one but not the other.
Then I mentioned Prop 16 as a concrete example of a Democrat-supported policy. But you can’t compare that number to the 74% because Prop 16 was a vote by a very liberal state, while the Pew poll is nationwide.
But people answering polls don’t necessarily know that. Which is why you need to look at polls that are worded more specifically.
Note that the questions for both admissions and employment specify diversity as the goal. For example, the options for the employment question are:
Only take a person's qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversityTake a person's race and ethnicity into account, in addition to qualifications, in order to increase diversity
People support the end of increased diversity, but oppose race conscious admissions and hiring as a means to that end. That’s entirely consistent.
> That’s not a conflicting opinion. People support diversity, but oppose the principal approach to achieving diversity.
That is a conflict! You are describing a conflict! I don’t see how the discussion proceeds from here.
You see a similar pattern on many issues. E.g. people support balancing the federal budget. But most would say that they oppose cutting entitlement spending to balance the budget. That is, people’s specific opposition to cutting entitlement spending outweighs their general support for balancing the budget. In practice it just means that people’s preference in favor of the general issue is weakly held, while their opposition on the specific issue is strongly held.
How are they supposed to wrangle corporate power, when that is exactly where their power comes from?
"Social issues" are a godsend for oligarchs because they allow for effort to be spent on issues that don't challenge corporate power. They provide a sink for democratic efforts that ultimately don't move the needle for most of their voters. It gives a pathway for "positive" change that doesn't threaten corporate power. It insidiously disempowers the people who would be most likely to wrestle with corporate power. Most of all it provides the illusion of opposition and therefore the illusion that I have representation because I have someone who has the appearance of representing my values (like empathy), but none of the substance of it.
Democrats have a choice. (1) don't threaten corporate power and focus on ultimately pro-corporate social issues that are ultimately dis-empowering (2) threaten corporate power/land owner power/Israel power and immediately have their campaign financing removed and their challengers funded.
Even if you believe that democrats are focusing on issues that meaningfully change people's lives, like build back better or CHIPS, they are doing it without challenging corporate power. Which is why no matter which regime is in power, it feels like democracy is in decline.
Then you get sad, because you realize there is no way to get actual representation for the issues you care about other than to run yourself, but if you ran explicitly to challenge those in power, those in power would fund your opposition. So then you realize that it's hard to get into power without expressing loyalty to those who grant power, and then you have a cogent explanation for why things are the way they are.
Then you get sad, because you realize there is no way to get actual representation for the issues you care about other than to run yourself, but if you ran explicitly to challenge those in power, those in power would fund your opposition. So then you realize that it's hard to get into power without expressing loyalty to those who grant power, and then you have a cogent explanation for why things are the way they are.
For a practical example, see Bernie.
He was giving a speech to some super privileged college kids not too long ago when one of them asked something like "why should we work against a system that benefits us" and he said change likely isn't going to come from the government/rich kids so he's working on organizing unions because that's where meaningful change will come from.
Solidarity/Collective bargaining is how you challenge power.
How are they supposed to wrangle corporate power, when that is exactly where their power comes from?
I chuckled at this since Trump himself and entire squad of people he has surrounded himself with are the literal definition of "elites" and "corporate power."
So democrats find themselves abandoned and powerless at the most important time to have power -- the ability to do something when someone does something you don't like and says "what are you going to do about it?"
The worst part is how much this parallels 1930's German history.
Pitchforks don't work without a supporting institution, and the Intelligence state, corporate and governmental, is very very capable of preventing free association by people who might wish to supplant an illegitimate government with a new one.
No it will work until the economy is properly destructed and we are defeated when our war machine is incapable of production, we become incapable of importing necessary goods, or the nuclear taboo is broken causing entire industries to disappear in the a flash.
If we are lucky some brave military officers will uphold their oath to the constitution before it's too late, but that seems unlikely. Pitchforks were for the last 5 months. Historically speaking if there aren't pitchforks in the next month it's over and we are on the fascism train until catastrophe.
without challenging corporate power.
Why would expect this in a capitalist country?
There is a strong legacy of checking corporate power.
Unfortunately now that almost all media is oligarch owned it's hard to understand corporate abuses of power because both politicians and "journalists" are on the oligarch's payroll, quite literally.
Despite how big a problem healthcare is in the US, most voters fear any change that may put their current health coverage at risk. Most people under 65 have (or feel like they have) decent-to-good health insurance through an employer-sponsored plan and don't necessarily see a big benefit to throwing that away. People over 65 are fiercely protective of their Medicare benefits and tend to worry that Medicare for All is going to make their healthcare worse. (Judging by the amount of "shocked Pikachu face" we see lately from Trump voters who expected him to fix the economy, there's a critical group of swing voters who seem unwilling or unable to accurately judge candidates based on their policies vs. their vibes.)
I don't agree with those people. I'd love to see our healthcare system dramatically overhauled. But between the polarization and risk aversion of American voters, "a quality National Health Service" has not proven to be a winning platform so far and is unlikely to be in the future.
I’ve heard it frequently claimed, but where has a progressive Dem won where a moderate didn’t?
They seem to lose badly. The Sanders people were all in on Paula Jean Swearengin in WV and even tried to primary Manchin with her.
WV has all the supposed demographics Sanders appeals to. White working class people mired in poverty.
She was the worst performing Democratic nominee in West Virginia history.
You would be floored by how many Obama 2008 voters are now Trump voters. Obama beat Clinton in the 2008 primaries and people believed he did it by running to left of her. People thought he was going to burn for-profit health care to the ground and deliver a single payer system, and that he'd throw the bankers who triggered the 2008 crisis in prison.
The disappointment when he governed like it was a third Clinton term did major damage to the party, and it let Trump pick up the populist mantle.
Populism, however, is like candy. You can add it to something wholesome, like Sanders does, and get virtuous results. Or you can add it to antifreeze, like the Musk/Trump regime, and get what we're getting.
Obama voters who voted for Trump didn’t vote for better healthcare. They voted to hurt healthcare insurance workers. They then voted to hurt someone else with Trump.
As they first seemingly voted for universal healthcare and then voted for abolishing what public healthcare the USA had. That’s not consistent with caring about it as an issue at all.
I can accept that politically, the Dems may need an enemy. Shared hating of someone is a potent bonding agent.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/17/trump-aoc-vo...
I’ve heard it frequently claimed, but where has a progressive Dem won where a moderate didn’t?
I'm not american but i remember looking into this because of all the drivel and distinctly remember polling finding bernie was actually more popular in notable swing states than his dem counterpart but actually a bit less popular in states that were going to vote dem regardless.
If bernie would take more undecided voters and republicans over to his side where it actually mattered I think it's not conclusive that he would have win but no far stretch to say he would have had a better shot at winning.
What's worse is that they'll inevitably be attacked by those same centrist incumbents while they do run: Jeremy Corbyn was a great example of this. One of his fiercest critics is now a minister for health, another was made a Lord, others are now safely pickled in think tanks which will tide them over nicely until they can return to the fold.
The only way to fix this is to do as the right have done across Europe: to accept that it'll be a very long haul indeed until your people get power, and to start insurgent, radical parties. This sidesteps the big incumbent parties as a filter, and makes it clear who one's friends are. That's what needs to happen in the US on the left, but the odds of it paying off in anything less than decades are staggeringly low.
as do the Socialist party in France
I don't agree with you here. On the right of the Socialists, you have Macron's party. These two parties vote together on some things but disagree on others.
Also the fact that the socialist were part of the downfall of the previous French government is telling that they are not on the same side and their respective electorate are very different.
So to say that the socialists are hostages of their right leaning members is not correct. All the right leaning socialists have already jumped ship to Macron's party a long time ago.
Obama wasn't elected with a super-majority. He had 58 votes, but Al Franken's race was contested, then Robert Byrd got sick, then Ted Kennedy died.
He did have one briefly for about 20 working days the Senate was in session about 9 months after he took office.
The republicans STILL claim to have "A concept of a plan" when it comes to healthcare. The one time they claimed to have an actual bill, it wasted 10% of it's text to strip government healthcare from people who win the lottery, like that's fucking worth it.
But they STILL get elected, because the same electorate who didn't want to lose their healthcare to goons killing it for profits for some reason go right back to them just a few years later, despite republican politicians lying TO THEIR FACES about it from day one.
Meanwhile, Democrats can come in with an entire presentation and plan and stats and graphs and all sorts of things and the electorate doesn't care because Fox News didn't tell them to vote for it.
Instead of getting tangled up in social issues
It's not that they're getting 'tangled up', it's that reactionary activists (whose ultimate goal is repealing the Civil Rights Act entirely) use strawman social issues as a wedge and the press is led around by the nose parroting these controversies that are brazenly ginned up.
Liberal politicians don't really have a great strategy for this because the majority of media (and I'm talking about the real media: influencers with more following than all legacy media combined) is right-wing these days.
Progressives end up barely treading water while reactionaries run circles around them, and then are blamed when reactionaries make everything worse.
This is analogous to the hyper-religious wing of the republican party. They also like to get involved and volunteer, but they demand a certain stance on social issues, too.
There are some fringe issues supported by some democrats, but the real base of the party is black voters and their civil rights are the real target. Conservatives still haven't forgotten about being forced to end segregation in schools, nor have they giving up on trying to re-segregate.
The number one civil right that American conservatives are after is your reproductive freedom. Number two is your right to access [medicine/drugs/foods] you choose.
Why not talk about one of the civil rights that they openly oppose?
They openly oppose black civil rights; that's what the war on “Woke"/”DEI” is about, its what the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act protections (also through the courts, but gets less attention than dismantling of abortion rights) is about, and there are many other aspects of it.
There could theoretically be anti-DEI political party that is pro-equality, republicans are not that.
Adherents like Ibram Kendi argue that the only solution to historical racism is present day racism (Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019), p. 19). In other words, the "woke" believe in applying institutionalised racism and other forms of discrimination to realise a world in which outcomes are perceived to be equal. As this method and goal are antithetical to Enlightenment and democratic principles, there is a large contingent of people who oppose woke ideology.
In brief, “woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice.
This is wildly wrong; for starters, “woke” predates critical theory; for another, there is no such thing as “Critical Social Justice”, which is just mashing together two terms right-wingers don’t like and misrepresent.
The word "woke" only attached to critical theory long after both had come about.
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. Over time, woke came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
So I encourage people to do their own research and make their own decisions from first, rather than second or third-hand principles.
You have far right and then many far right enablers who will always blame the democrats and left for what conservatives do. Then you have comparatively less few pro-democracy moderate and small far left.
Unless your policies go out of their way to exclude the groups they hate, you aren’t going to get their support.
But as other commenters are pointing out, many liberals are already trying this, but conservatives misrepresent them as being focused on social issues (and misrepresent their opinions on such issues) anyways.
IMO, here are the problems liberals face and solutions to regain popularity:
- Liberal politicians may say the correct things, but what matters is what they do, and specifically how it's perceived. As vice-president, Harris did practically nothing, and the overall perception of the economy under Biden is negative. Meanwhile, Trump is doing almost exactly what he said, even small things like pardoning Ross Ulbricht. Fortunately, you don't need to be the party in power, or even elected, to have well-perceived actions; I believe community-building is the best and easiest way for liberals to regain appeal.
- Liberal politicians may say the correct things, but they don't open themselves up to criticism enough. Liberals (and conservatives, and corporations) have learned to say almost nothing for fear of misspeaking, but this is backfiring; they get attacked for policies they don't state because they don't explicitly denounce those policies, and the policies they do state get misrepresented because they don't clarify or broadcast the clarifications enough. Harris should've went on Joe Rogan's podcast and should've agreed to a debate in Fox News; she would've been judged for her responses, but by not going, she was judged for imagined responses*. Meanwhile, Trump agreed to the debates on CNN and ABC, and he posts and speaks much more often and unscripted (so it's him posting and speaking).
- Wrt. social issues (trans, woke. etc.): "live and let live", and ask for clarification, particularly examples. This area is where people imagine and misrepresent others' opinions the most; so when a liberal politician is asked their opinion on XYZ, they should answer unambiguously, even if it makes them look bad, then debate and clarify. I really think the overarching policy should be "live and let live", and finding ways to accomplish that with minimal federal intervention; because I believe (and hope) it's something most people would agree on**, and because "getting X done" is strictly easier than "getting Y to do X".
One thing that must be said, because the above problems and solutions have been discussed before, but this has been discussed less: these also apply to "the far left", perhaps the same or more than they apply to conservatives. Many people get attacked by the far left who are completely on their side (recent example: ProtonVPN); many others get attacked who I believe are on their side, but must clarify their policies.
In summary: people choose the worst interpretations of their political opponents' speech; if they oppose you, they'll choose the worst interpretation of your speech. However, if you don't speak, your opposers will choose an even worse interpretation of your silence. The ways to remove bad interpretations are: clarify, and far more significantly, act in a way that disproves them. Also, if your general actions benefit people, they'll gradually stop opposing you, so they'll start choosing better interpretations; the same speech is more or less controversial when it's spoken from different people,
* If someone asks you a question and you don't respond, they're not going to forget the whole scenario, they're going to imagine your response based on their existing perception of you. Even if truthfully answering the question lowers their perception of you, if lying or not answering lowers it more, it's the correct choice.
** At minimum, I believe most people would allow any group happiness, if it didn't affect them, said group wasn't hurting another group, and doing so meant they themselves were better off. If most people believe liberal politicians will help their quality-of-life more than conservatives, I don't think they care about social issues; but vice versa is also true, most people won't protect victim's rights if they believe they must non-negligibly sacrifice QOL to do so.
But you know who is easily offended? The people who pretend to be offended by the term "happy holidays" every year. The people who pretend that a child seeing a gay person is somehow going to groom them. The people who pretend that seeing a black person in a starring movie role is really upsetting them. The people who pretend that mentioning that trans people exist is causing some sort of societal collapse.
And I am saying "pretend" very deliberately, because I genuinely do not think that anyone is actually offended by the term "happy holidays". I think that literally every single person who says they are is actively lying.
It's utterly ridiculous. I am pretty left learning, at least by American standard, and I am generally speaking pretty hard to actually "offend". I will generally discuss basically any topic no matter how taboo, I make jokes that most people would consider offensive, I say curse words, and I don't pretend to get offended when a conservative says something really dumb.
Where I am in Canada, we typically do not prioritize canvassing neighbourhoods with more renters as they usually don’t vote.
I imagine that tenant rights and rent control transform many renters into essentially homeowners for purposes beyond the asset itself. They also aren’t impacted by prices.
Unless you have some sort of government that plans for “long term”, good luck. On the bright side, decreasing birth rates around the world will solve this problem by itself, if people can wait long enough.
It’s the same in Japan. Tokyo house prices are going YoY because of foreign investments and growing population, but all other prefectures not so much (excluding special zones where they are building big semiconductor factories).
In this very forum, some asinine person supported Trump administration axing the free tax submission programme of the IRS on the basis of them owning shares in the tax software companies.
Politicians are beholden to the members of their district, not would-be members. Sure, more affordable housing would benefit many people, but it wouldn't benefit the members of the district, particularly the wealthy and powerful, since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as perceived by voters). Sure, renters would in theory benefit, but real estate prices aren't rental rates, and the renters have to move to capture the improvement in pricing, often outside of the district.
Essentially, the status quo of real estate pricing always increasing in a district serves everyone within the district well enough. Any change to that is a massive financial risk to property owners, so it will be vigorously opposed.
Since more affordable housing is very nearly equivalent to real estate values decreasing (at the very least, as perceived by voters)
Wrong!!
Please get this right, because telling people they need to loose wealth to fix society is a horrible place to be in.
They own the land and the land will appreciate in value (unless your house as a shit location, but then you area poor-ass republican anyways, statistically speaking).
This is the great positive some outcome:
- Housing unit costs go down
- Land values go up
So long as it is economical to density by a greater ratio than the ratio land prices grow by, this works out.
I’m not sure how helpful a mental model of “shit location [of] poor-ass republicans” is: last I checked those suburban and exurban landholdings contribute a fair chunk to the state and county property tax bases. Though I’ll grant that I don’t know the nuances, and I don’t know how to think about how to tease out the housing component of urban-dwellers’ land-tax-related contributions, as distinct from those buildings’ commercial functions.
Anyway, your “shit” “poor-asses” certainly are able to muster political opposition to measures that devalue them, even if they are “poor-ass” relative to their, uh, “betters” like you. In fact, your “shit” “poor”s who have accepted an iffy location in order to invest in a home they can afford… those might be even more sensitive to losses affecting their life’s biggest investment, and more likely to think of it as the anchor of their financial security.
For that matter casually condescending attitudes like the one you display here seem to have a lot to do with those constituencies’ political potency, and their reflexive opposition to YIMBY sorts of ideas…
Does this preserve the land values of currently-economical exurban plots?
Probably not, but those people are not powerful enough on their own to stop it.
The dense suburbs are vastly more powerful. Once they realize densifying makes them richer, it's game-over.
For that matter casually condescending attitudes like the one you display here seem to have a lot to do with those constituencies’ political potency, and their reflexive opposition to YIMBY sorts of ideas…
A lot of people say shit like this, but how can you look at the last 15 years and think that pandering and fake-magnanimity wins elections? I'll be honest in my condescension that exurbs are bad, thank you.
Please get this right, because telling people they need to loose wealth to fix society is a horrible place to be in.
This is often the reality. Massive wealth inequality won't be fixed by making everyone billionaires, it'll be fixed by getting rid of billionaires
The effect you're describing is not nothing, but I think you're overstating it. I'd rather see the homeless housed than see my property value go up by another 10k. It would be worth more in that case, market evaluation be damned.
Whether I get mugged while I'm walking home from the grocery store... that's real, and it's a function of whether there's affordable housing available.
Also, these are not independent variables. My house would be worth more if it were not in an area where you get mugged on the way home from the grocery store.
Leftists in Ithaca have learned that high property taxes drive up the rent and voted down a bloated school budget because they realized that we all pay taxes.
I personally think people should not work for a wage less than they need to buy the crappiest home in their town which would negate this need, but the lower-classes haven't developed enough self-esteem or entitlement for that.
The real problem is-- this is a problem of a diffuse absence. There is, generally, no simple focused location to complain about, and the problem does not lend itself to a roll-up-our-sleeves-and-spend-some-money solution. Those are called "housing projects" and they are a tool of last resort.
In addition, this is a failed policy built on the shoulders of a failed transportation policy. Government is stuck on the developmental cul-de-sac of rubber tires and individual vehicles, and the housing crisis is intrinsically linked to this. The modern generation has demonstrated no profoundly increased enthusiasm for investment in mass transit, and instead prefer unproven technology fixes always just beyond the horizon.
Of course the early 20s demo is dominated by college students which has some positive but also negative effects. He found it was easy to meet boomers at rock concerts and poker tournaments but once he cracked the code of meeting people his own age he was told by townies that townies leave because they can’t afford the rent. It is one thing to move on to seek fame and fortune but if you’re going to be one of the people who construct and maintain housing (can’t outsource that work to India, won’t be replaced by LLMs) it is a step down to move to a blighted area where you can afford to live.
[1] shapeshifting lessons taught him how to be an ambivert like myself
That thinking works if you don't feel any obligation to the future or society, which has been the direction of US consumer / libertarian culture for decades. The impacts are obvious. The public school I went to now has to bus students in from different neighborhoods because the housing is so expensive few young families can afford to live their. It's become for wealthy people aging in place and people all over the US and the world investing in real estate.
It's also a culture of fear, for the young and the old. People are scared and they worry, but they are blind to how much they really have. For the young they worry about not being able to afford a car and a house in their thirties. This was never really possible for everyone, and when it was the houses and the cars were so much less than we would consider normal today. It's a feeling that the present that you know well isn't as good as a rose colored past.
I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, the polling says that members of every district are substantially more pro-housing than politicians believe they are. That's one of the points that I'm trying to make in this article: people in your district will reward pro-housing work and economic growth more than incubants believe they will.
On the other hand, 80% of the work we do at YIMBY Action is organizing visible constituencies in districts to incentivize politicians taking pro-housing positions. The phrase I always say is "politicians get to the heads of parades; we are building a parade."
And on a third hand, I do think we can build an ever-bigger parade by getting people who think they benefit from the status quo to realize they don't actually. Small businesses benefit from housing. Suburbanites complain that teachers can't afford to live in the school district and they're loosing people. etc etc etc. I think those arguments are permeating and softening a lot of housing-resistant districts.
real estate prices aren't rental rates
Sure, but they are heavily correlated. Price changes in real estate are reflected in rental rates (not 1 to 1, but still reflected)
Also, many of those renters in each politician’s district would like to purchase a home in the same district if the prices came down enough, so the politicians should (in theory) be beholden to their interests, too.
Of course, in reality, real estate owners are a much more powerful (per capita) political force than renters are, so politicians are not automatically catering to the larger majority of their constituents that are not real estate owners.
More abundant housing would be better for society in general, in the long term. But it's definitely true that less abundant housing can be financially superior for existing landowners right now, I don't think anybody really disputes that.
Politicians are beholden to the members of their district
In a perfect world with informed voters this would be the case. It is not. In America, you can get away with literally killing your constituents as long as you have the right party affiliation next to your name.
In my neighborhood, I'm quite sure that the overwhelming majority of the population are either renters and owner's kids. The minority have control over their shelter, many of those aren't even shy about asking for cash to dodge taxes while collecting pensions and old age security, and it's disgusting. Renters make up a significant enough voting segment, but no matter what we're voting for people who actively try to screw us in order to create more wealth for the wealthy.
It's more common than not in my social circle that anyone under the age of 40 is renting from an individual who owns a house on the comically, needlessly large plots that make up the neighborhood.
We are witnessing the collapse of Liberalism in real-time. Liberalism has outlived its usefulness as a tool of containing class conflict. The US ruling class has nearly consolidated absolute power and is disposing of Liberalism because it was only ever a tool used for their benefit. This is not just some Commie "zero-sum" perspective, the Silicon Valley E/ACC guys like Thiel have admitted this.
Because of this, there is no liberal/reformist solution to our current crisis because Liberalism denies the existence of class struggle -- the root cause of our current crisis. It is like trying to model quantum gravity with classical mechanics. It cannot be done, you will never arrive at the truth.
Denied was the fact of growing impoverishment, the process of proletarisation, and the intensification of capitalist contradictions ... Denied was the theory of the class struggle, on the alleged grounds that it could not be applied to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc.
Your rhetoric sounds like the doomerism I constantly heard around 2009 during the great recession, ala "THIS time capitalism's done for good! No coming back from this one!" And then after a few years things largely went back to normal and the doomers pretended they'd never made any predictions, that would require them to actually introspect, you see.
So what is it gonna take for Americans to demand universal healthcare? Idk, but 1 pandemic didn't do it. Maybe 3-5? Similarly real (inflation-adjusted) wage growth has been largely stagnant for most American workers, so eventually things will get bad enough, but not today and not tomorrow.
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
Around 2030, based on a simple linear trend.
a few years things largely went back to normal
The US is deporting random immigrants to a concentration camp in El Salvador without due process claiming all of them are "gang members" with zero evidence.
If you are unable to tie the expansion of the executive power and capture of the courts to the class conflict in the US then idk what to tell you man.
But they are not robust long-term solutions.
Why not? Sure, they could be undone, but that's true for any law in a democracy.
The US is deporting random immigrants to a concentration camp in El Salvador without due process claiming all of them are "gang members" with zero evidence.
Got some bad news for you if you think abuses of executive power like this aren't largely normal here.
Yes, it sucks, but my point was that the doomers couldn't disentangle a few very bad economic years from their highly motivated belief that the whole rotten system is gonna come crashing down Any Day Now, I Swear.
Why not? Sure, they could be undone, but that's true for any law in a democracy.
Not a democracy, and you just answered your own question. They can be undone because the people do not wield absolute power. They can be overturned by the state government, or federal government, or local lobbying groups.
Yes, it sucks, but my point was that the doomers couldn't disentangle a few very bad economic years from their highly motivated belief that the whole rotten system is gonna come crashing down Any Day Now, I Swear.
I never said the whole system was going to come crashing down. I said Liberalism is over.
Got some bad news for you if you think abuses of executive power like this aren't largely normal here.
I don't understand your point. You acknowledge that things are bad and also seem to acknowledge that they are getting worse, but you also claim that I am being "doomer". I am simply stating that whatever remained of the liberal framework, like:
- separation of powers
- due process
- representative democracy
- constitutional law
Is going bye-bye. I don't think it is "doomerism" when it is literally happening right now and has arguably been happening since the GWOT. I think you just want to be contrarian and look at everything bad happening and feel superior because you are aloof about it.
"Overly restrictive rules (zoning) and elaborate process (permitting and planning) create chronic shortages driving prices higher and creating an angry populace. That’s the TLDR thesis of a lot of the abundance books.
This is just the same concern-trolling anti-government neoliberalism that's been "eating state capacity" since at least the 1970s.
"The moon and the sun revolve around the Earth, the moon is closer, and sometimes it is interposed between the sun and the Earth" is a story that works if the coordinate frame is Earth-centric or sun-centric.
(I know this wasn't the point of this comment, but identifying the problem while missing key details that end up mattering in the long run is, arguably, where Leninism falls down as effective political philosophy, so it seemed relevant. Lenin identified the problem of class consolidation, but attempts to reconcile it just moved the class barriers around instead of breaking them).
but attempts to reconcile it just moved the class barriers around instead of breaking them
Sure and we have made many advancements in theory since then. But the issue still remains that you have to admit the root cause even exists before you can think about how to solve it.
I will edit my parent comment to remove the heliocentric example.
This is only one way that Klein and Thompson would have us focus on outputs instead of on inputs. Progressives love to focus on the number of dollars the government spends on high speed rail or green energy; Klein and Thompson would have us focus instead on how much actually gets built as a result of that spending.
Unfortunately, we have one party that wants the government to get some stuff done
From what I’ve seen in university, Western governments don’t really care about getting anything done. But I don’t know who is responsible exactly. As I see it, all parties since there hasn’t been much done to align incentives again in academia in the last decades (even while papers such as Why most published research findings are false by Ioannidis is getting thousands of citations).
and people decided to reelect him four years later anyway.
Underlying to your sentence seems to be the idea that “people” are dumb, which is also a widespread belief in some political circles. I think this idea is very unhelpful. Maybe some civilians are making bad decisions. Yes that’s probably true. But it’s still better than having some select few decide what is best for us. Politicians have to listen to and respect the people. And not push opinions of certain groups away just because they are “uneducated” or “uninformed”. That’s not politics. Or at least it’s how you get people to vote for the other side.
My experience when growing up on a farm is that farmers typically aren’t highly educated. But I can tell you they are typically damn smart. I would probably even go as far as saying that it’s in general harder to fool a farmer than a programmer. Because a farmer that is easy to fool is not a farmer anymore. The farm will have gone bankrupt already. And it’s similar to self-employed painters I guess. Maybe they are not academically smart, but they are certainly not dumb either.
So that’s my main problem with this “I’m smart they are dumb” mindset which is the default in academia. It diminishes large parts of society and for no good reason. I think it would be way more fun if society can respect all the players in the system.
Maybe some civilians are making bad decisions. Yes that’s probably true. But it’s still better than having some select few decide what is best for us.
So then what do you call it when people make bad decisions that are specifically about putting the charismatic "select few" in charge to decide what's best for us? Cuz that's kinda what the 2024 Republican platform basically is...
I really hope we can find a way to make voters actually believe an abundant future is possible, and that it'll benefit them and their families.
It's the biggest difference I see in societies like China, there's this pervasive optimism about technology, progress and abundance (~700 million people have first hand experience). No idea if they can keep up the growth but we sure won't.
I agree with you re the need to convince modern western voters of an (actual) abundant future, but china seems like they're not doing so hot either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping
But right now they are in the acute/fallout phase of a massive economic disruption (the deleveraging of a highly indebted real estate sector, no less severe than the GFC, they overbuilt to a massive degree). No matter what folks are going to be struggling bad atm.
The trillion dollar question is what does this look like in ten years? It could go either way. A Japan style lost decade, or they manage to find and exploit new growth opportunities. I guess we'll see whether having pretty much the cheapest energy on the planet and impressive logistics allows them to get through this.
Do not discount the tremendous potential of electrification, and cheap renewable energy.
It is encouraging what we see with their EV boom, but a car industry alone cannot sustain a nation with declining population levels. China has sold so few technological innovations over the decades that I do not see them innovating their way out of this.
What the immigration argument overlooks is domestic migration, particularly urbanization. It's zero sum for sure and rural communities will be hollowed out but I think there's a real possibility that they'll be able to soak up much of the excess capacity in the coming decade.
Urbanization massively increases productivity, reduces infrastructure costs etc. There's a real economic beauty to scale. Downside it suppresses fertility even further.
Elder care will be a real nightmare though, but the Chinese elders are willing to accept far more modest conditions and outcomes than their western counterparts. Confucian values for better or worse really help here.
It could go either way at this point.
The bigger the housing crisis gets, the more people are going to change things on the state level instead of the local level.
This isn't a pendulum shifting event, it's a cascade, and that's why Abundance is doing so well, and that's why things are getting ugly on the left.
We have the tools, it's just going to be inter-generational warfare, and nobody really wants to say it out loud.
No, it's not. The people who own houses pass them down to their kids. As people invading a neighborhood, YIMBYs may be new, but they are not that young. They are early middle-aged and wealthy. They are trying to move into elite neighborhoods and cities that they can't afford, not trying to avoid homelessness. That's not a crisis. All of them can afford property, just not the best property in the world, (not coincidentally) near the jobs that pay them the most.
The problem is normal-case housing affordability, not elites wanting to build high-rises. Normal housing affordability is ruined due to the asymmetry between resident homeowners as buyers and wealthy buyers. Wealthy buyers are trying to extract wealth from housing. Resident homeowners and renters are the extractees.
The YIMBY goal is to make somebody in e.g. SF refusing to sell, and/or refusing to allow the houses on the corner to be demolished and a high-rise put in, the enemy. I have no idea why YIMBYs think they are either more rational, more likeable, or more victimized than that homeowner. Maybe all of the self-praise.
The people who own houses pass them down to their kids.
Pass them to one of their kids, who will likely be 65 or older when they inherit it. That leaves about 45 years where these kids will need to find housing.
As people invading a neighborhood
That's an interesting way to say "moving somewhere for a job and to build a life."
They are trying to move into elite neighborhoods and cities that they can't afford
Yea, this is absurd. People just want a decent place to live.
Hopefully over time yimby can take hold in some pockets and gradually expand out from those strongholds.
On a purely numbers basis the older generation of homeowners far outnumber the young.
The point is numbers of voters. There are more young voters now than older voters, this is why we are seeing things change at the state level. Now that many millennials are in there 40's with no real shot at home-ownership it's starting to freak people out. Which is why we will continue to see the YIMBY and Strong Towns movements, not just grow, but accelerate in growth.
Acceleration is great hope/source of optimism.
10 years later, the governor is a self-proclaimed YIMBY (even though he isn't), a book on YIMBYism is a national best seller, and nationally, folks are finally realizing that the reason why we're losing the working class on the left is because the left cares more about their own property values than about helping working folks. All the while, there is the parallel center-right focused Strong Towns organization that is making the exact same argument for the exact same movement in more conservative areas.
If that's not extreme acceleration I don't know what is.
It won't be pretty I'm afraid; not much else we can do however.
China prevents dissent through suppression, while the U.S. redirects it into endless debates that never challenge the underlying system.
As a capitalism enjoyer this is good for me, these systems only exist to waste the time of "idealists" and reactionaries. The hands off approach used to be better, but with more technology population control becomes much cheaper, and now all the wasted time from arguing about politics and political decisions becomes a real cost center for the US.
I'll add... I think idealizing single family housing as the default, over generational family housing (mostly as a response to industrialization wanting worker movement, and the advent of automobiles) is going to eventually be seen as an unforgivable mistake.
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky And they all look just the same
I watched all but one of my grandparents go absolutely bankrupt from elder care costs (dementia on one side, alzheimer's on the other), then I watched my parents shell out on the order of 10k/month in long term care costs for years, and that was just their portion of costs, after splitting among siblings (7 total siblings across both sides).
The only one who didn't go bankrupt had long term care insurance that you literally cannot buy anymore, at basically any price.
So I'll add that expectation to my future payments. Combined with the 4500/m I pay now for child care for 3 children. Not to mention the possibility of 100k/year private education costs as we dissolve federal funding for education in public schools, and see declining school quality in general.
All told... I firmly expect to end up housing my elderly parents anyways (and in-laws) because they simply didn't have as many children, and were the first generation to be completely pension-less, combined with what appears to be a truly incompetent admin in the US gutting the last shreds of our social nets and drastically increasing living costs.
That doesn't change that single family homes are essentially making childcare and elderly costs skyrocket.
Personally, I'd much rather deal with the inconvenience of having family in my house than pay more than the mortgage on my property for childcare, and have my parents die bankrupt because of long term care costs.
Single family households bleed generational wealth, and that's somewhat ok during a period where the house itself appreciates enough to offset that... but otherwise... it's a bad deal.
Side note... it really helps if you don't hate your family. Sounds like you have personal issues on that front.
In many ways, Jerry was ahead of the curve. He was lamenting “everything bagel liberalism” and “process over outcomes” before it was cool.
Process over outcomes is a great way of putting it.
For example, California has a well known environmental law, often referred to as its acronym, CEQA. Intended to protect the environment, it was certainly well intentioned, and surely much of what it accomplishes is good. But as the Wikipedia article notes:
CEQA lawsuits (and threats of CEQA lawsuits) are frequently used by groups that want to block a proposed project for reasons other than its environmental impacts.Carol Galante, a professor of Affordable Housing and Urban Policy at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, who served in the Obama Administration as the Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), stated that "It (CEQA) has been abused in this state for 30 years by people who use it when it has nothing to do with an environmental reason, ... NIMBY-ism is connected to the fact that for everyone who owns their little piece of the dream, there's no reason to want development next door to them, CEQA gives them a tool to effectuate their interest ... We need to fundamentally rethink how the CEQA process works in this state."
CEQA has been used by residents in San Francisco and Los Angeles to attempt to block homeless shelters and affordable housing projects from being located in their neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, the well intentioned process ended up producing some very bad outcomes that were not anticipated. Not only are some projects blocked for reasons that are not about the environment, those blockages can easily end up hurting the environment; the people don't disappear if you make it harder to do high density, infill development, they'll just go live somewhere else, probably somewhere more sprawly that's worse for environment.
It can be absolutely true that CEQA was passed by sincere environmentalists. But it can also be true that the beneficiaries are wealthy property owners. If this law produced really bad outcomes for those people, it would already be gone/reformed. But it makes most property more valuable, so that doesn't happen.
Anyway, I'm offering this because loads of people think this is some kind of left/right "process" dynamic that they can fix, when in fact if you fix the process dynamic those same people will find another way to fight you. And that's ok! It's possible to win! Just don't confuse yourself that this is some accidental screwup that you can easily fix, like a downed tree blocking the street.
Restrictions on housing expansion are generally very local, with projects being blocked on the municipal level, or on the neighborhood level. But actually, more housing in a neighborhood would tend to benefit homeowners there. As the neighborhood becomes denser, rents might go down, but land values will go up, since a given piece of land can now be used to build a more profitable apartment building.
What is really blocking housing is simply aesthetics, misguided economic and political beliefs, and fear of change.
A popular view in the YIMBY community is that restrictive zoning and other policies that limit housing are pushed by homeowners who are benefitting from a housing shortage, in some kind of long-range Machiavellian conspiracy to alter macroeconomics in their favor. But this doesn't really hold up when you think about it.Restrictions on housing expansion are generally very local, with projects being blocked on the municipal level, or on the neighborhood level. But actually, more housing in a neighborhood would tend to benefit homeowners there.
I think that "restrictive zoning ... [is] pushed by homeowners" and "actually, more housing in a neighborhood would tend to benefit homeowners there" can both be true. Arguing that someone would be acting counter to their interests by supporting a policy doesn't mean that they don't support it!
But it should be noted that while what you say about land is probably true, many landowners are also landlords, and it benefits them for the rent to be higher.
* Yes, this one is real. I've even seen people here fully admit to it, though it makes you look rather classist and unreasonable, so most people aren't gonna say it out loud.
Another big part is people not wanting the poors in their neighborhood. The more exclusive it is, the better.
As the neighborhood becomes denser, rents might go down, but land values will go up, since a given piece of land can now be used to build a more profitable apartment building.
You're taking about the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods, as they are, to be replaced with something else. The land value might go up, but the existing house value goes down, especially halfway through such a project. It's one thing if you're replacing low density multitenant buildings with higher-density ones, but it's a totally different story if you're replacing detached, single family homes. Usually the latter only happens after a decade or 3 of neglected, low value homes.
Higher density brings pluses and minuses.. more businesses, transit and other services, but also more traffic, crime, noise, etc.
For me, there is a deeper problem that this framing can't answer: the pervasive sense among all people that things have gone wrong and a lack of any kind of stable sense of identity.
The maga right has been successful because they speak to that sense of alienation. That their policies are nonsensical and counter to the material interests of their supporters is utterly beside the point. They promise a reassuring sense of order and stability to a desperate populace. This is cross cutting across economic classes. Rich and poor people alike are fearful of their place in a society that threatens to leave them behind. The strongman is comforting.
Even though the maga movement is not particularly popular (they barely beat a deeply unpopular administration and only because they relentlessly misled their voters and relied on their voters irrational projections of the good they would do them), they are far more powerful than the opposition because they have a far stronger base of support.
Better policy ideas, which I do support, is not the way out of this mess.
To me, it is a grave mistake to think irrationality can be defeated with rationality. Sure, the abundance agenda is rationally superior to maga. But it does not in any way address the pervasive feelings of alienation and disconnection in modern life. At best it offers the promise that we can more comfortably feel these feelings.
The only thing that will truly stamp out maga is a counter movement that address the deeper spiritual issues that we face collectively. Personally, I am not optimistic that will happen until we go through a lot of pain and chaos.
I pray I'm wrong.
Indeed, their idea of being coherent is not only maintaining the status quo that enables those two things, but doubling down. When challenged, they nest in the politics that the Republicans once espoused and have left behind, than realizing that there's a reason those messages and values have shifted by the maga right's successes. It should come as no wonder then that they lose ground year after year from desperate people looking for comfort from the political class.
It's hard to be the party that is aligned with opposing large capital in the public consciousness whilst at the same time bending over and pushing these purists out of the way for donations from said wealth. A party with a subset of oppose police or wants to see it's role redefined with a kamala as a frontrunner. A party that on occasion tries to make itself seen as having the stance and solution regarding things like housing but then not adequately doing so where they have an uncontested stronghold.
etc,etc
Personally, I believe that the pervasive sense that things have gone wrong is an effect of feeling economically stunted. I think it feels spiritual, but it's got a specific and direct economic cause: When the next generation is doing worse economically than the previous one, people have all kinds of dark psychological and political responses. Responses that are self-defeating and irrational.
What I'm worried about is that we won't have time (or political will) to fix the economic problem before the resulting irrational reaction blows shit up.
I've lived in SF and have heard a decade of talking heads prattling on about building housing, and then looking at the plans and they all end up being gobbledygook about "well if you do 20% Affordable, you can do 50% more units, but if it's 40% Affordable, you can do three more floors," and I keep staring at it and just think... why not just let people build more without doing anything?!?
After thinking about this for years, I realized the system is designed to keep growing property values while offering token subsidized units for literal lottery winners. When you're subsidized units are available to people making 80% of median income, you're not giving subsidized units for poor people, you're building lottery-based subsidized units for normal working class folks. That's bananas.
Just let people build more, incrementally, so homeowners feel like they aren't going to be overwhelmed, but you can still build up.
A simply, effective policy would be to, say, allow anyone to double the amount of sqft and units of the median property in the neighborhood.
That way single family homes become duplexes overnight, and when demand is high enough, duplexes become fourplexes, then when the median unit is a fourplex, you're already got density and you can build up.
None of this extractionary bullshit. None of this "yea, but developers need to pay for housing too." None of the, "well you can do this but not that." Just have simple rules so a homeowner can put a wall up in his house and make a duplex, or add a granny flat, without a bunch of bullshit.
The summary, the best I can tell, is "big government bad, that's why we need to empower big government even more, so that it has the power to fix the things that big government did"?
We gave control over housing to big government, which did things the author doesn't like, so now the author wants to give them more power to fix the things they did when we gave them more power?
I have no idea what the author is trying to say. It almost gives the AI content feeling, where you read for a while and then realize you just read words that were grammatically correct but held no actual meaning.
It keeps whiplashing back and forth between "big government good" and "big government bad".
With respect, perhaps you are trying to fit the article into a pre-existing worldview that divides political positions into pro-big-government and anti-big-government? At least, I have heard people espouse this perspective before and it always struck me as odd -- do you think there is a correlation between the size of a government and its quality?
There exist well-run countries with higher levels of government spending (e.g. Scandinavian countries) and lower levels of government spending (e.g. Switzerland, Singapore).
And there exist poorly-run countries with higher government spending (Greece, Brazil) and lower government spending (Hati, Somalia).
Similarly, some large companies are run well and others poorly, and some small companies are run well and others poorly. Scale confers advantages and disadvantages but doesn't seem inherently bad.
This whole thing feels more like its about getting a snappy word out there than anything achievable.
You can get state laws that push cities to change, of course, and the feds can incentivize change through requirements for funding/grants, but overall there's just a lot of momentum behind the existing web of regulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan#Vision
It was exactly the kind of "everything bagel liberalism" that abundance/yimby types malign.
Meanwhile, they only support policy that makes the rich richer, an endless supply of weak immigrant labor doing gig work, and that assigns guardianship of the cake to their foundations. But now, they've blamed woke, which was something they 1) forced into government in order to support their family members who work at nonprofits and foundations, and 2) used to terrify their base into loyalty, a base whom they've encouraged to think of themselves as a Rainbow Coalition-style coalition of minority groups (while getting whiter and wealthier.)
The prescription is to drop the pretense of 2), I think they're saying. It's a distraction from the abundance of allowing large landowners to subdivide lots infinitely, without adding parking. Abundance is when you can sleep in an affordable above-ground coffin in SF; and the person who owns the land that it is on becomes 100x richer, forces small landowners out of the city, and coordinates with the rest to raise the rent again. Abundance: more opportunity to live more compactly than the law currently allows!
Abundance is the new buzzword after the campaign of “brat” and “joy”.
I hope people will see through this crap and demand better. This website isn’t leaving a good impression with the credulity displayed in the comments. Luckily it’s far from the mainstream.
We have to overturn Citizens United and get unlimited corporate money out of politics. This is far and away the most important barrier to having a government that works for people.
Its why neither the Democrats nor Republicans really ever make any significant, meaningful changes that would materially improve the lives of working class people in big ways.
Neither party really represents the working class, and they'll never do anything to restrict the power or reduce the wealth of the rich folks they actually work for, so until corporate (Wealthy elite) money is purged from politics, it's just going to be more of the same for the foreseeable future.
The young and the working class increasingly don't have the capital to buy even with an increased supply of housing.
Absent that, the new housing units will be bought by entities who have most of the capital: very wealthy people and real-estate investment funds.
Housing supply is a major part of it, but the reason it is so resistant to a solution is because it is multifactorial with the factors all influencing each other.
It's a wealth inequality problem created by the economic system favoring capital over labor, unreasonable local zoning restrictions, and also historical housing discrimination (redlining) which then feeds back into wealth inequality.
The DOGE point of view says if the government can’t do anything, we should just get rid of the government
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this statement. If a department in a company does not work, we don't get rid of the department? If a company does not work, this company does not go out of business? If a church does not help its community, people will still go there on Sundays? If a school does not teach effectively, will parents still send their kids there if they have a choice? Then why is it suddenly different when it comes to government.
Now before some of you scream far-right, I do want to note that classical liberalism does advocate for constraints on government authority, and are open to replacement and reform if an institution demonstrably fails.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this statement ... Then why is it suddenly different when it comes to government.
Indeed. I think the media and Democrats are slowly figuring out that screaming about layoffs of federal employees as incipient fascism, tyranny, authoritarianism, etc. just doesn't outrage non-government workers who are quite familiar with the concept of you and everyone else in your office/department/division/company abruptly losing your job.
Meanwhile, on the subject of "state capacity" the author immediately cites "the Niskanen Center". What the heck is the Niskanen Center? Evidently, it's "the most interesting think tank in American politics" according to Time magazine's Molly Ball (Yale, 2025 tuition ~$65k/year), with "roots on the libertarian right". The Niskanen Center says of itself that it "promotes policies that advance prosperity, opportunity, and human flourishing, guided by the belief that a free market and an effective government are mutually dependent." So, what does the most interesting think tank in American politics say about state capacity? Surprise surprise, it says both the traditional Right and the traditional Left are to blame for the decline in state capacity, the latter owing to what else but stifling and "sclerotic" over-regulation. Who exactly at the Center says that? That "research" comes from Brick Lindsey (Yale, Harvard), former senior vice president at the Cato institute where he focused on free trade. Who else is on the masthead for the Niskanen Center? It seems like it's mostly right-leaning Republicans, ex-military, and ex-Cato people.
Is all of this as clear to you as it is to me? To me, this is just the usual prep-school to Ivy League Acela Corridor and Silicon Valley wealthy neoliberal elite making yet another bipartisan "blame both sides" bid to roll back regulations that stand in the way of them making even more money. If that's what you want to read, go for it. It's a free country. Just please don't have any illusions that there's anything new here.
With the ways our societies are currently structured, any additional productivity / surpluses / GDP that's created via automation, AI, or whatever the "Next big thing" is, will just be gobbled up by the rich to pay for vacation mansions and mega yachts.
Across pretty much every industrializing / industrialized / post-industrialized country on earth income inequality is rising, and at an accelerating pace.
Technology is not going to save the common person, it's only going to be used a a tool to further control and exploit us, and a disproportionate share of whatever value it creates is going to go to the wealthy elites as it already does.
The "Abundance" that gets talked about in techno-utopian contexts will be an "Abundance" reserved only for the rich, and unless we the people can somehow find a way to break the iron-grip of power the wealthy elites have over our societies, we won't get to share in the windfall, we'll just get to watch from the sidelines in our broken down, bankrupt communities as the rich broadcast their "Amazing" consumerist lives 24/7 via social media or whatever.
That said, I agree that shifting politicians against the status quo is part of the solution. I do get a sense that things are moving in that direction. At least now it's becoming politically difficult in CA to not at least make some gestures towards supporting housing affordability. And every failure to back those gestures up with action leads to increasing pressure. The balance hasn't shifted yet but it's teetering more than it has for a while.
Another issue is the trend of return to office. There were people who moved to less expensive locations. They are now being required to come into the office. One guy with whom I work is spending about $1k a month on gas to do this. So now he is effectively losing $12k per year to keep his job. If he moves, he loses his lifestyle and his 3% mortgage. This puts him in a tight spot.
We all know adding money to a system without adding more stuff creates inflation. Abundance is an interesting evolution that in my view is a step forward to what has been remanded as "tax and spend" politics of both US political parties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOFcn03k22o
(Sam Seder, host of the Majority Report, went mildly viral for his recent Jubilee appearance)
Getting voting constituencies to do so is a big lift.
And that might be easier than getting people to look at places where ideological assumptions about production dynamics need examination (including the obvious shortcomings of the hope that a laissez faire market will naturally solve housing supply problems).
1. People who have money, who already have anything they want, so they won't buy more.
2. People who don't have money, so they can't buy anything.
And it's specifically the debt based part of capitalism that prevents this from fixing itself. Giving more loans won't fix it, it only shuffles it arpund a bit at best
What needs to be done, if there is the will, is:
1. Ban all further loans.
2. Print enough money to pay all the due debts and distribute it in some way with no strings attached.
There is so much going on with why we can't govern, it isn't as easy to distill into a single comment as many HN commentators would have you believe.
Maybe just cutting red tape isn't enough push. What if we need structural leverage? Think broader checks & balances, and empowering citizens and maybe even corps to pressure each other and politicians directly. Make everyone with skin in the game actually fear the status quo because other players have real teeth, not just politicians worried about votes.
It seems to me that if governments deliver too well for their citizens, if the citizens because too wealthy, if they are too well off, then they will begin to demand even more. This would cause problems for governments, problems that also include the citizens having power and sight to realize the abundant shortcomings of their governments, and the means to do away with them for something that works "better".
So my theory is that the stable system of "liberal democracies" seeks an equilibrium position of "not too much abundance" in order to preserve itself.
Just a theory, I'm not a historian and don't know any historical smoking-guns for this - besides the experience that governments seem to not deliver excellence, even when they could, and instead focus on policies that are often surprisingly ineffective.
I don't discount incompetence, but I like to have at least one alternate theory. Moreover, incompetence is not "constructive" in that it doesn't let you actually design a solution or understand the problem. It provides no real insight. It is, therefore, the kind of explanation that governments intent of continuing to deliver under-adundance would probably want you to believe in place of what my theory proposes is the truth.
I'm sure some political-economists could comment on this - as long as they are sufficiently lacking in woke to retain their critical skills.
My pet theory on this revolves around the G. Michael Hopf quote: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times". When society is too comfortable and the average person experiences too few challenges, they become weak. Physically but particularly mentally. They lose touch with those truly in need. They even begin to secretly despise them. They adopt bourgeoise values and policies which are quite detrimental to society but feel good to declare. Toxic empathy is associated with this. People end up voting for bad policies which lead to worse times. Human societies appear to like to repeat this cycle.
I have a theory that echoes the surprising premise of the well known HN-famous article "The optimum amount of fraud is not zero" that states "The optimum amount of poverty, to governments, is not zero."It seems to me that if governments deliver too well for their citizens, if the citizens because too wealthy, if they are too well off, then they will begin to demand even more.
The more fundamental question is: what is poverty? 100 years ago the answer would be very different to today. The definition of poverty itself is what keeps poverty alive, as it continues to increase to keep up with new products and services that are available.