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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

#231

Post by s1artibartfast »

baggy_trough wrote: post #83
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…

> 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…

I rent an ADU in California, and many of the Tennant rights are waived for it if the primary property is owner occupied, aside from some cities like oakland.

I would not want to rent a separate property in CA as an individual, especially as counties start banning criminal background checks.

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

#232

Post by PaulHoule »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #227
bryanlarsen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't seem to be the attitude when the lunatic fringe on the Republican side occupy social media. I understand why politicians (both democrats and republicans) don't want to denounce any such fringe groups that are cheering for them. Seems to work better for republicans than democrats though

It does. Why that is is a story that has many different parts.

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".

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

#233

Post by norir »

For me, the abundance/yimby movement is an ok answer to the tantalizing but wrong question: what can do to make people's lives better through technology or public policy?

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.

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

#234

Post by s1artibartfast »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #104
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.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. 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.

People don't believe it was anything but a huge load of pork to corporate interest with nothing to show.

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

#235

Post by treis »

avidiax wrote: post #9

I think the author has it quite backwards, at least as it comes to housing. 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 pe…

I think there's approximately 0 voters that are NIMBY because they want to prop up their housing values by restricting supply. They are NIMBY because they like the way things are where they live and want them to stay the same.

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

#236

Post by iteratethis »

wwweston wrote: post #188
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Here's some quotes from the 2024 D platform: "[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 t…

Stated positions do not erase decade-old associations, which are fully exploited by Republicans in a media system that is largely theirs.

I'd say stated policy positions don't matter period. Nobody reads policy documents, it's all vibes.

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

#237

Post by bradlys »

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…

Third:

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.

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

#238

Post by rayiner »

notahacker wrote: post #180
rayiner wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably wasn’t either inflation or Harris’s race, because the rightward swing was heavily skewed by race. Compared to 2016, all of Trump’s gain came from non-whites : https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/18/opinion/18eks-sho... . 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 w…

Doesn't seem so hard to believe that Latino moderates were worried about Trump in 2016 and somewhat less worried about him and more worried about inflation in 2024...

That doesn’t explain the lack of movement among whites though. Moderate whites were 52% Clinton, 55% Biden, and 52% Harris. 2016 was a good economy and Obama was relatively popular. So among moderate whites, Harris didn’t do any worse than Clinton did despite the inflation under Biden. The 3 point swing from Biden could easily be explained by the fact that Biden had a long track record as being moderate, while Harris always has been liberal.

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.

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

#239

Post by casey2 »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #91
nimish wrote: post #7

Old people are 'aging in place' instead of cultivating the new generation and it really, really shows

I'm not sure if democracy has the tools to adequately deal with this tbh, at-least in the short-to-medium term. 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…

US democracy is just better at managing perception and allowing controlled opposition. Dissent exists, but it’s channeled into ineffective political battles that don’t threaten the ruling structure. People think they have a say because they can vote, use twitter, get their guy in/out the whitehouse, but real systemic change is nearly impossible. Even now "doge is destroying everything the sky is failing" as they go back to scrolling.

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.

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

#240

Post by evilsetg »

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…

Maybe landlord coops could be a solution. Band together to co-own with multiple small landlords and share the risk.
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