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Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

inpractice.yimbyaction.org

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Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#141

Post by PaulHoule »

tormeh wrote: post #115
Avicebron wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the political group that can guarantee a quality National Health Service in the US will win

Let's be real. The Republicans would absolutely ruin any such institution the moment they'd get the chance. Better to keep health care private and instead socialize insurance. A hollowing-out of insurance is far easier to reverse than a hollowing-out of hospitals and clinics. An NHS led by an openly antagonistic government is not long for this world. Look at what the Trump admin is doing to other government services.…

They’ve been saying they want to repeal Obamacare since Obamacare and they haven’t been able to do it.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#142

Post by rayiner »

ReptileMan wrote: post #93
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumptions are wrong. Kamala lost because of inflation during the Biden admin and some related missteps. Also her gender and skin color likely worked against her. 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.

[flagged]

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#143

Post by pessimizer »

So libs are going to follow Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias again; they're really making a serious marketing play for "abundance." Why can't we have our cake and eat it too? Why not make the poor richer and the rich richer? Why can't we have a billion immigrants and raise wages?

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!

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#144

Post by mullingitover »

MattGaiser wrote: post #119
aSanchezStern wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Didn't even win the democratic primary" might be a bit of a misnomer if it's implying that winning the democratic primary should be much easier than winning the general. Bernie has positions that are popular outside of democrats, many people think that if he had won the primary, he would have had a much better chance of winning than Hilary or Biden, since he had less baggage and his policies were broadly popular.

Has this idea of Bernie positions being popular outside the Democratic Party gone anywhere? Has it survived an election? 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 cl…

There is a huge market for populism in the US electorate.

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.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#145

Post by stefan_ »

legitster wrote: post #46

I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism. 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…

People don't put 10k of their money towards the bakery opening up next block either. They put it in the bank, which will loan it out. No one needs a million negligent single-rental landlords to create housing. But it does mean you are not entitled to having the same style McMansion built on the close empty lot in eternity, it might just be something with some more space efficiency. It means you can't continue paying a tax rate set 30 years ago for land that has appreciated many magnitudes in value.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#146

Post by TulliusCicero »

legitster wrote: post #107
TulliusCicero wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

Yeah, I think form factors like this should be part of the answer. But part of it has to be getting costs down for regular apartments too. It's not uncommon to see that even non-profit orgs take 400k or 500k per 1br apartment in a building in major cities, which is just crazy.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#147

Post by bryanlarsen »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #84
wwweston wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much where liberal politicians end up targeting most of their policymaking and even a sizable portion of their campaign platform (as demonstrated in the Harris platform). 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.

I dare you to find a Democratic candidate saying "defund the police" any time in 2024. Bet you can't find any.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#148

Post by [deleted] »

legitster wrote: post #46

I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism. 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…

[deleted]

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#149

Post by scoofy »

The problem here is talk is cheap.

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.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#150

Post by huijzer »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #65
huijzer wrote: post #25

Noah Smith also wrote a IMO nice review of the Abundance book [1]. I'm very happy that problems like this are discussed: > 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 resul…

Unfortunately, we have one party that wants the government to get some stuff done but doesn't really care about how much it costs, and another party that cares about costs but doesn't really want the government to get stuff done. So we end up either getting things done for an exorbitant price, or not getting anything done.

> 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).

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