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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

#251

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #147
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.

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

Silly straw man, but still, here are 61 Dems doing the next best thing:

https://www.businessinsider.com/which-democrats-voted-agains...

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

#252

Post by danans »

I am a YIMBY (in the form of an incremental upzoning advocate), but the problem with the Abundance campaign is that it will do little to affect housing affordability if wealth inequality is not addressed at the same time.

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.

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

#253

Post by jjani »

steveBK123 wrote: post #215
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It's a law of large numbers thing. Americans romanticized mom&pop landlords vs big greedy landlords, but.. it's a bad business to be a smalltime landlord. It's like putting all your money in one stock. 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, b…

Sounds like it's time for a co-op.

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

#254

Post by legitster »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #226
TulliusCicero wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oakland was looking at 800k for half size shipping containers retrofitted into single room studios with windows.

Shipping containers are a huge red flag that a project is a gimmick.

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.

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

#255

Post by seryoiupfurds »

steveBK123 wrote: post #221
seryoiupfurds wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thei…

It's an interesting problem I'm not sure what the solution is. 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, et…

Oh yeah, I definitely agree that it's an undesirable housing option, and that it shouldn't be a priority to grow it into the future.

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.

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

#256

Post by rayiner »

consteval wrote: post #241
rayiner wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?…

I hardly think most (any?) democrats or their constituents are talking about affirmative action in this day and age. 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…

> 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.

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

#257

Post by smadge »

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…

This is because ADU laws don’t go far enough. If you can sell your property to a developer for 3x the times the price you paid for it because all of a sudden it’s legal and financially viable to build a sixplex, many people will take that offer.

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

#258

Post by jakelazaroff »

rayiner wrote: post #228
jakelazaroff wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read your own link? It says that affirmative action enjoys at least plurality if not majority support: > 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 h…

Keep reading! > 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…

Yes, if you cherry pick data you get different results. Prop 16 was rejected by around 57% of the voters — hardly overwhelming, but there’s a reason that you’re citing a 74% figure when it supports your argument, vaguely gesturing at an election result when it’s more even and outright ignoring the poll where a majority of people explicitly say they support affirmative action for racial minorities.

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

#259

Post by steveBK123 »

jjani wrote: post #253
steveBK123 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a law of large numbers thing. Americans romanticized mom&pop landlords vs big greedy landlords, but.. it's a bad business to be a smalltime landlord. It's like putting all your money in one stock. 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, b…

Sounds like it's time for a co-op.

Anyone who has lived in a co-op might disagree lol

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

#260

Post by wwweston »

rayiner wrote: post #152
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? 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?…

Composition fallacy much?

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...

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