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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

#161

Post by korse »

ragingroosevelt wrote: post #87
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…

I live in Portland and own my house. I'd love to put in an ADU and rent to some of my friends but it's pretty expensive and I can't afford it.

That sounds nice, but don't rent to your friends. I've been there and it sucks. Everything works great until someone hits the hard times and the resource imbalance between parties gets amplified. You're either going to end up trashing friendships and dealing with the emotional baggage, making a really poor business decision or both.

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.

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

#162

Post by rdm_blackhole »

hkt wrote: post #100
MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the Democrats had a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate when Obama was elected, they couldn't even get a public option included in the Affordable Care Act, and the right so successfully demagogued "Obamacare" (their name for it) that the Democrats lost an incredible number of seats in the 2010 midterms. Bernie Sanders campaigned on Medicare for All (essentially what you're suggesting) in 2016…

In fairness, and NHS didn't get tested at the ballot in 2016. There's a structural problem with parties of the "left", namely that they're hostages of their predominantly centre-right memberships. Labour in the UK has the same problem, as do the Socialist party in France. Pretty much all social democratic parties have been hollowed out by a managerial class (alongside career lawyers and the like) that their tradition…

> 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.

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

#163

Post by TulliusCicero »

huijzer wrote: post #150
TulliusCicero wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fals…

The problem is that voters don't seem to actually reward parties for getting stuff done, or for basic good governance in general. Trump accomplished relatively little of his agenda in his first term, and tried to overthrow the government at the end, and people decided to reelect him four years later anyway.

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

#164

Post by wormlord »

Herring wrote: post #158
TulliusCicero wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, this is definitely still solvable. Specifically looking at housing for example, I believe Austin and Minneapolis have seen some good progress. 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 neve…

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Americans (esp white Americans) have a lot of individualist, anti-collectivist, anti-government cultural attitudes. The last time a situation like this happened, it took a Great Depression and intense widespread economic pain for them to snap out of it. So what is it gonna take for Americans to demand universal healthcare? Idk, but 1 pandemic didn't…

Yep basically sums it up. Enough "middle-class" people are insulated from collapse that they still defend the system even though it has already been torn up. Collapse is happening and has already killed people, it just hasn't been equally distributed yet. Once a "critical mass" of people feel collapse and it becomes "real" to them, they will be able to internalize the reality of the class conflict that caused it. Until then people will just keep thinking that "ah well this is just a temporary stumbling block on the path of liberal incrementalism".

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

#165

Post by bryanlarsen »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #151
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…

It's amusing to me that anyone would think a random smattering of ADUs would do anything at all to push the needle when it comes to housing. This is like fixing linter warnings (but not even doing that!) instead of building an entirely new section of an app. We need the latter.

Fixing housing isn't one thing, it's many dozens. ADU's are just one of many. If your list isn't at least 50 items long it's going to be ineffectual. Here's one example of a reasonable list, it's 55 items long: https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force... And there are still many other things I would add.

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

#166

Post by PaulHoule »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #136
PaulHoule wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The odd trouble was that ordinary people saw the Harris campaign as being preoccupied with the issues of a lunatic fringe online plus what conservatives said Harris was preoccupied with. Harris would have had to kick the lunatic fringe to the curb but didn’t have the will to do so.

The lunatic fringe is generally randos on social media, not people of authority in the Democratic party. Kamala wasn't in a position to kick them to the curb.

No excuse. It’s results that matter, not process. Defining who she was would have meant being proactive and saying something like “trans folks should be able to use the bathroom but sports leagues can decide who plays”

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

#167

Post by vondur »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #134
lotsofpulp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The courts should be speedy at forcing landlords to rectify problems just as the courts should be speedy at forcing out squatters. 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…

I’m all for higher property taxes to increase courtroom bandwidth, but I doubt most landlords are.

Those higher property taxes will be passed on directly to the renters.

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

#168

Post by bryanlarsen »

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…

100 years ago rooming houses housed a large fraction of the population. They've been zoned out of existence. Let them come back.

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

#169

Post by hollerith »

MattGaiser wrote: post #153
hollerith wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home owners are the minority in San Francisco, so why in your opinion are prices so high there?

What does the voting population look like? 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.

I was told by a lawyer who does eviction cases that most jury members in SF are renters. My guess is that most who show up for jury duty also vote. There are consequences in theory for shirking jury duty, but my experience (from the early 1990s) was that the risk of actually incurring any consequences is very low.

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

#170

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

PaulHoule wrote: post #88
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…

As someone who owns a second house on a farm that has two rental units in it, I’m skeptical of attempts to expand ‘tenant rights’ in New York. 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…

I’ve also seen this happen in NYS. Tenants do the craziest shit (selling showers to crackheads and discovering a near thousand dollar water bill was one of the tamer tales), fight tooth and nail to stay, and leave the place uninhabitable when they finally are forced to go.

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.

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