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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

#321

Post by Der_Einzige »

mrguyorama wrote: post #276
ReptileMan wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works wonders for utilities and telcos. You stop paying your bills - your phone is dead, you have no internet and electricity in X days after skipping an invoice. Why should be leasing real estate any different?

This is laughably wrong. 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 ho…

[flagged]

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

#322

Post by veltas »

You don't want more immigrants, you want more skilled and young immigrants. This is an important calculation that's missing from public discourse, instead most people will say "yes immigrants" or "no immigrants" but the right policy is more nuanced than that. If you want to solve aging population and add to the economy then you can't just have unrestricted immigration.

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

#323

Post by FalseNutrition »

The problem isn't abundance, or the lack of thereof. The problem is capitalism. Capitalism creates an excess, but it gets stuck with:

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.

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

#324

Post by bobthepanda »

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 think people would like money but being a landlord in addition to probably being a multi-income household is a lot. A lot can go wrong being a landlord even in a place with permissive laws.

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.

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

#325

Post by defrost »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #321
mrguyorama wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is laughably wrong. 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 ho…

[flagged]

Given there are more renters than landlords it's a literal Laffer Curve of popularity.

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

#326

Post by wwweston »

rayiner wrote: post #287
wwweston wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Voters don’t take campaign platforms at face value, they view them through their experience. People in California aren’t experiencing Democrats actually fixing housing. But they are seeing large employers like Google post stuff like: “Google is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer .” (Google deleted that language from its website recently enough that it still shows up in the Google search…

> 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.

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

#327

Post by TulliusCicero »

huijzer wrote: post #275
TulliusCicero wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 res…

Democracy is better than the alternatives, but that doesn't mean people aren't collectively pretty stupid. Your average American probably couldn't even find North Korea or Iran on a map, but that won't stop them from having opinions on those countries.

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

#328

Post by Der_Einzige »

PaulHoule wrote: post #232
eddythompson80 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Baudillard and all related thinkers are fashionable nonsense and intellectually bankrupt.

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

#329

Post by Der_Einzige »

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...

The shift is because of rapid evangeliszation and abandonment of catholocism in American Latino communities in the past 10 years. It’s a sociological phenomenon.

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

#330

Post by BrenBarn »

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…

The path forward from this is to stop trying to write laws that are wealth-neutral on these kinds of matters. Small mom-and-pop should be allowed to do many things that extremely wealthy landlords and/or corporations are not allowed to do. The penalties for violations should be ruinous for the wealthy and small for the non-wealthy.
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