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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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing that this gets upvoted while it is completely uninformed about what liberal politicians actually run on. This is what the Kamala campaign ran on, it didn’t work. People love getting tangled on social issues as it’s the most provocative. This conception that most people actually care about rational policies is false and has been false for at least the past decade.

Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus…

>People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else.

Republicans haven't?

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is it's not enough to give. You have to show that you're taking from the people who caused the problem.

Covid?

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

#373
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The balance simple - renters have total rights as long as they pay on time and there is no damage on the property except normal wear and tear and 0 when when not paying. You as landlord can't say anything as long as the property is not damaged for the duration of the contract. You always renegotiate at market rates. There is no concept of squatting and evictions are fast. That's it. Works like a charm. No bullshits l…

"renegotiate at market rates" is extremely tenant-punishing, because the cost of moving for the tenant is much higher than the cost of finding a new tenant for a landlord. It becomes better if you remove the "renegotiate" part and couple the allowed rent increase to some index.

Why should an individual landlord have to subsidize an individual tenant? Its a scale of social interaction that doesnt make any sense.

This can have lots of issues. Imagine something like a good school zone changing, an event that may not be accounted for by the index. Insurance and taxes are determined by current value, that is partially determined by market rent, but the landlord cant adjust.

This also hurts a specific landlord when it comes time to sell, making a tenanted property potentially less valuable (and reducing the incentive to take on a tenant at all). This does not impact the general property value mind, as the tenant only benefits and creates this problem if the index is below the market.

If you want a fair balance, "its mine as long as I pay market rent" is pretty good. "its mine as long as I pay indexed rent" is not great, as it removes the financial benefit of capital investment from the landlord.

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

#374

Instead of getting tangled up in social issues, liberal politicians should be prioritizing housing, infrastructure and government services supporting people's economic activity of all kinds. Delivering better lives for people, and having the courage to stand up to vested interests, from house owners to corporations, would create a huge and lasting political win across a broad section of the electorate.

Democrats are largely controlled opposition. If you ask where democratic power comes from, it comes from campaign donations by America's richest and most powerful people. Bloomberg ran for president under their banner, think about that. At minimum it communicates that the democratic platform is compatible with oligarchs. How are they supposed to wrangle corporate power, when that is exactly where their power comes fr…

>without challenging corporate power.

Why would expect this in a capitalist country?

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

#375

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…

How were they supportive? Specifically

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Is this just "People are stupid and easily manipulated by the media. That's just how it is"?

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not talk about one of the civil rights that they openly oppose? They openly oppose black civil rights; that's what the war on “Woke"/”DEI” is about, its what the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act protections (also through the courts, but gets less attention than dismantling of abortion rights) is about, and there are many other aspects of it.

Being anti woke/DEI does not mean you oppose civil rights. Plenty of African Americans and other minorities dislike woke/DEI. They don’t want to be thought of as a diversity hire but still enjoy their rights to vote and use the same bathrooms as their white peers.

Just to be clear, what's the definition of "woke"?

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel for the lady, but the problem is that she didn’t get it in writing. Renter protections are almost orthogonal.

> Renter protections are almost orthogonal. You think something other than renter protections was stopping her from kicking her squatter out?

It's not squatting if the tenant is paying rent.

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

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disapp…

Are you sure that's not just "voting for the the outsider"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/17/trump-aoc-vo...

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thought about renting out property for passive income, but after speaking with a friend locally about issues hes had, changed my mind. Not worth the hassle. In the one case, the tenant stopped paying their power bill and the power company cut them off. The tenant proceeded to tear down the inside of the house and burn it for heat. The kitchen island and kitchen cabinet fronts were burned, for instance. In another i…

Those are pretty extreme horror stories, but in general everything I've heard from small time landlords makes it sound like a terrible value proposition even under normal circumstances. The ones it works out well for are the exception.

The dwelling rental niche is far beyond over-farmed and is definitely overhyped. As with so many other things in our economy, the big players are usually the only ones with decent margins, and even they have to cut corners and be somewhat lucky on dice rolls to get them.

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