The whole system has been optimized to milk as much money as possible from newcomers. The people in power in California even scapegoated the newcomers for a long time, and pretended that they were unwanted. Now that the system has finally become unsustainable, we get these ridiculous takes about how somebody "extracted wealth" from California.
The words "luxury housing" are designed to make you think that it is taking up space that could be used by non luxury housing. Like the only reason a new apartment is so expensive is because it has a gold-plated toilet or something, and if only the developer had built an apartment without a gold plated toilet you could afford it. But in Minneapolis, for example, a 2 bedroom apartment in the nicest building in the city, with a built in pool, car wash, and cigar lounge, is $2000 per month. That barely gets you a spot in someone's living room in SF.
This proves that it is not luxuries that make "luxury apartments" expensive in SF. The only luxury is having a roof over your head.
In practice, "pushes down the prices" is an overstatement, and what actually happens is that once demand pressure reaches a certain point new luxury supply only opens up higher pricing tiers. It potentially stabilizes older construction, which is not bad, but doesn't seem to provide downward pressure. The only thing that seems to do that is non-marginal demand dropping out of the market.
And if you follow it through that's how the incentives seem to be aligned. Capital examining opportunity in construction will want to chase the highest return it can and if you have capital the marginal cost on luxury construction over non-luxury at the same unit scale is usually less than the return. On top of that, at certain scales of operation vacancy is apparently less of a drag on nominal property values involved in the accounting and financing, which means prices tend to float down when the fall rather than plummet. Though of course, any potential developer doing the math is going to look at vacancy rate and will make their decision about whether/what to build targeting points short of outright surplus.
There are some types markets where I think you can drive down pricing market-wide by coming in from the top (consumer tech sure seems to work that way) and that's my guess why so many seem think the same must apply to housing. Perhaps housing could indeed work the same way if the actual manufacturing techniques and costs were being iterated with the same speed and scale.
But that's why there are specific drives for affordable housing: building at the top slows/stops price increases but only lets people on the verge of being priced out tread water.
Personally I think there needs to be vacancy taxes proportional to the market segment being operated (probably also correlated to tightness of supply) so that prices clear on the falling side more easily, but who knows how that would change people's construction calculations.
I liken it to the California of the Midwest. Its nots the cheapest, its more middle of the road (though, I think in absolute terms there are places around Chicago that outpace the cost of the highest cost parts of Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro last time I looked, granted that was a few years ago).
Its culturally though, very liberal (from my own experience, tends to also be very much a democrat state). One thing I will say is Minnesota's public school system is great, and the collegiate system is both affordable and high quality, on average.
It's still cheaper than California, New York, Seattle, Portland etc. paying 2000 a month for a place to live in Minnesota is still very much not the norm, even in nice parts of the Twin Cities.
If you're willing to live up North a bit, Duluth is amazing, its mostly a college town now, and you can surf in the summers!
The downside is always the snow, though if you live in the Twin Cities there are upscale parts of downtown that have miles of indoor walkable paths that take you all over the city.
I really love the state. I've contemplated moving back several times. I just don't think my tech industry connections would carry over as well, so it would limit some of my job opportunities, even with this big push to work from home by a lot of companies. That will have to shake out for me personally first before I would consider moving back.
Though, they've done a decent job netting progressive employers and have in large part been able to avoid the economic collapse that hit much of the Midwest (the rust belt, in places like Ohio). I know a lot of people out there employed in highly trained manufacturing jobs (highly skilled CNC work, maintain automated manufacturing facilities etc.) and those jobs are the only ones in that sector that aren't leaving the USA in droves yet, plus there are a lot of medical technology companies there. Also, a lot of enterprise software companies have HQ or large presence in the cities as well.
It's not a startup scene like SF, but its changing. When I was a kid the state had these huge policy pushes to try and get people entering college to focus on technical degrees (be it 2-year technical school at a community college doing CNC machining and the like or 4-year degrees in engineering/cs). It's also one of the most educated populations in the country [0][1]
Now I just feel like I'm selling it. Though I want to mention one quirk about the population that stands up to everyone I know who has visited. Minnesota Nice [2] is alive and well still. People tend to just be more friendly there than anywhere else I've lived or travelled, and I've been through more than a dozen states from coast to coast. It's just a general demeanor thing. Thats not to say that everyone is nice all the time though, of course. I'd say on average you're less likely to have small confrontations though, than anywhere else I've been.
[0]: https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/outreach/back-to-s...
[1]: http://www.ohe.state.mn.us/fc/2108/pg.cfm
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_nice#:~:text=Minneso....
If a community says 'we'd rather be homes and don't want to turn everything in to high-rises' then that's entirely their discretion.
It's definitely not any individual townships moral or civic responsibility to change their community to accommodate either state/national strategic planning, especially for the benefit of people who do not even live there.
There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between. If the FAANGs having trouble with salaries and bringing in people want, they can be part of this strategy.
I bet there are thousands of G staffers who'd live to live somewhere south of Morgan Hill, away from the city.
Suppose a person buys a house to retire in, on a peaceful quiet little street with plenty of room to park. The neighbors then build: an 80-story apartment tower, a supervised injection place for IV drug users, an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant.
Maybe we overdo it, but yes, we're going to curtail private property rights.
If this is financially viable, that land must be worth a ton. Retiree should sell the property and stop monopolizing such valuable land. They'll have plenty of funds to use to move elsewhere
> a supervised injection place for IV drug users
Very few people want one of these built near them, which itself causes huge societal problems. We'd be better off in aggregate if more services for the poor could be built.
>an organometalic peroxide production plant, a hog farm, and a tire recycling plant
Unlikely to be built on expensive residential land, but if they were it would help fight climate change by reducing commute times, since employees can now live nearby. The existence of actual property rights allows ample housing to be built in this high-demand area
The real prospects of the lack of zoning is something that nobody wants, which is why literally every civil place in the world has zoning.
The failure in the 'property rights' argument is that what's built on one property affects the other - there are externalizations.
What is built on one plot, affects the materiality (and value) of the others.
These arguments exist only on HN and other boards, thankfully.
Calling Houston uncivil is a subjective judgement I can’t objectively falsify, and so is calling its residents “nobody”, but the latter act strikes me as ironically uncivil, and IMO not in line with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments.
But there are good reasons we ought to have governments, and fewer reasons we ought to have a State. I would sum those up as keeping the four horsemen at bay, adjudicating disputes and delivering justice. A few decent reasons too, such as accelerating R&D with their justifiable actions, but pretty much everything else is an abuse of power and tax authority.
Also your examples are ridiculous. There are few places in the world where you can just throw up an 80 story apartment building, and even fewer people who can afford to to spite their neighbors. A world where police powers are not abused to the extreme that they are is also not one without a quiet place to retire without an organometallic peroxide plant nearby, nor one without remedies if a neighbor chooses to break ground on such a project.
Zoning is an important and foundational aspect of civil governance, and works well for the most part.
If SF residents in any clear majority wanted to have zoning laws changed, they probably could, there's a fair component of democratic impetus here.
Most importantly - it's essential to recognize that points of property are not fundamentally discrete from one another.
The value of one piece of property depends a lot on what's around it. Large buildings vs small ones, noise vs quiet, density vs. green, sun vs shade, - there are major externalizations to every property, and zoning helps establish parameters for those things.
Go ahead and put a 50 ft flag pole on our front lawn with a flag on it and see how your neighbours react.
There are innumerable situations wherein tall towers would go up beside homes - they exist in droves in literally every city. Go to any North American city, go to where there are tall buildings - and find homes nearby. Those homes are likely there due to zoning.
There are even more instances wherein homes would be knocked down to put up all sorts of other things - office buildings, industrial facilities, retail outlets, clinics - whatever.
There is in general, no interest in that. Not even the folks wanting to build 80-story towers want it really, lets the autoplant be built across the street and destroy their own property value.
Where we disagree is whether it is an abuse, not the mechanism by which it is justified by the State.
We don’t disagree that what is around is a factor in our purchase and selling decisions, but to be frank, when the developer of your hypothetical skyscraper bought the land to build the skyscraper, he didn’t buy the lot across the street with it that would one day become this hypothetical autoplant, nor the use rights for the lot across the street. In fact, the developer probably didn’t buy across an empty lot because someone that is building an 80 story apartment building wants to attract tenants, and tenants want neighborhood amenities if they’re living in an apartment building.
You could still build across from an empty lot that might be an auto plant in the future, but you don’t build that big without a business case. Property doesn’t exist in a vacuum, we’re agreed on that, and I’m not even 100% against zoning, just maybe 99% of how it is used.
When you buy property, you buy property, not the rights to limit the development and use of all the other properties around you. That “right” comes from a simple tyranny of the majority using the State as their vehicle of power.
It has nothing to do with police powers, it's called zoning and it's absolutely a legitimate part of our governing structure.
If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have.
Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concepts going.
There's plenty of space, go elsewhere.
Also, I'll be even a hyper fast public transport system that connected the Bay Area with surrounding regions: imagine the Bart/Caltrain being 'one thing' running in a really fast loop around the bay, with quick buses LTRs as spokes - and then fast communter trains connecting them out to Sac, Modesta, Santa Rosa, that might work.
Especially if they build smartly around slight more dense centres instead of just pure suburban homes.
Zoning is a mechanism of economic suppression to appease the haves and separate them from the have-nots. They de-diversify and oppress.
> If the residents of SF wanted to go Hong Kong style full on skyscrapers everywhere, they would have.
Yes my point is that they didn’t, and now they’re paying the ridiculous cost: $3000 for a bachelor. Do anything other than work for FAANG? Sorry, you don’t get to live here. Please bus an hour so you can serve me coffee.
> Bulldozing communities to create utopian/dystopian hyper density is one of the most short-sighted urban concepts going.
Bulldozing exclusive communities and replacing them with inclusive ones, which create more local business opportunities and reduce dependence on transportation. Calling high density planning short sighted in favour of single family dwellings is absurd.
> There's plenty of space, go elsewhere.
This mindset is what causes suburbia, which has an absolutely disastrous impact on the environment and local economies. And leads to class segregation (which is a proxy for racial segregation in the US.)
The above sentence could be said about building codes.
I sort of jest but also shudder to think: How soon will progressive SFBA thought leaders call out building and health and safety codes as pushing up costs and excluding homeowners (and potential homeowners) that cannot comply with them ?
Because they absolutely do that. God help us if we act on that knowledge ...
Dezoning is not an argument for deregulation, it’s about creating new economic opportunity in a very direct way. You don’t have to sacrifice building safety as a next step. Sure, you could. And you might be right that it is economically positive to do so. But that’s a sort of deregulation extremism.
This is a ridiculously false statement.
Everyone wants zoning laws, you can't put up a gas station or an industrial facility right in the middle of xyz residential neighbourhood, nobody wants that.
"Yes my point is that they didn’t, and now they’re paying the ridiculous cost"
So you're saying that people are making a choice, but because you're not happy with the choice, they should change?
Are you arguing for rights or not? Which is it?
SF residents wanting to keep zoning laws intact are making their own choices, and that's fine.
"Calling high density planning short sighted in favour of single family dwellings is absurd."
Just the opposite when in fact the citizens are adamant that their city not turn into Hong Kong.
"This mindset is what causes suburbia, which has an absolutely disastrous impact on the environment and local economies"
Total rubbish. Suburbs are some of the most peaceful, plentiful, conscientious, and safe places in civilization ... which is exactly why those types of people move there. They are downright boring in their concientiousness.
That they lack trendy cafes, and hipster fentanyl needle clinics is not a problem for some.
That’s not reality. It doesn’t make economic sense for a an industrial business to set up shop in a supposedly “residential area” - there will still be commercial clusters because that makes sense economically. And you can still define environmental regulations and build infrastructure where you want industrial commerce to happen. Zoning laws are mostly abused.
> So you're saying that people are making a choice, but because you're not happy with the choice, they should change?
The people who are making the choice are the ones who can afford to make the choice. Everyone else is forced out. So what you end up with is a bunch of entitled rich people who forced everyone else out of the market, bleeding the city of its charm and diversity.
> Just the opposite when in fact the citizens are adamant that their city not turn into Hong Kong.
You don’t reach the density of Hong Kong without need. For HK that need is to be included in the region of (former) autonomy. Naturally things aren’t going to get that dense. You can double the density of SF and it still won’t look anything near like HK. And once again, the people who are adamantly against densifying the city are not the ones who have to commute an hour by transit to work in it. They are the stakeholders because they forced their way in. What about people who used to work in SF but got forced out by rising rent, but who still work in the city. They don’t deserve a say?
> Suburbs are some of the most peaceful, plentiful, conscientious, and safe places in civilization
This is so painfully ignorant it’s hard to unpack. Do you understand the toll it takes on small business owners to not be able to buy commercial land where people live? Do you recognize the damage that daily mass commuting into and out of the city has on both the global and local environment? Do you understand that the “peace” is actually just economic segregation? Take a drive outside the gated communities and go on down to the economically segregated “suburbs” of the less fortunate. I believe they call those “ghettos” in the US. Not sure you’ll find much peace or safety there.
> That they lack trendy cafes, and hipster fentanyl needle clinics is not a problem for some.
Man you are a piece of work.
Nobody is arguing it’s not their discretion. I’m just saying it makes you a bad actor in the larger community of people who would like to benefit from the opportunity of living in a city that they otherwise might not get if they weren’t living in the city.
> especially for the benefit of people who do not even live there.
They don’t live there because they’re being systematically and economically excluded from living there by people of means who are unaffected by the damage they’re doing to their own local economy.
> There's plenty of physical space in Cali, if anything, the opportunity might be in Sacramento and in-between.
So... not in your back yard?
It’s the places that everyone want to live in that are crowded, and there are good reasons apartment blocks aren’t going up in farmland (this isn’t China where people are told to live outside the fifth or sixth ring road just because).
So if SF goes 'Hong Kong' style i.e. tears down all those homes and puts full on sky-scrapers everywhere, will the 'current' residents be happy, and will future residents want to be there as much?
'Everyone wants to live there' - which is why it's so expensive - this is an inevitability of a good culture whereupon the physicality is usually critical.
If SF went Hong Kong it simply wouldn't be SF.
Pay the price or live elsewhere - California is vast and beautiful.
Also - if some areas on the peninsula put their minds to it, they could be as cool and fun as SF.
People who want change are free to leave. Only when there are no other places to leave to will there be change.
I feel like the average HN poster sits in a pretty air-tight STEM bubble and doesn't realise how bad life for most people in the Bay Area who are not in STEM. To them, tech workers can leave and the industry can tank and it would be a welcome change. The tax revenue the cities have made during this "boom" have not affected them at all. Building more houses just means more traffic, more crowded hiking trails and beaches, more crowded and trashed natural parks, and for what?
They think it has not affected them, but if they stop, the house of cards that is underfunded ultra-generous defined benefit state/municipal pensions tumbles like a house of cards. When the munis start going bankrupt, only then will people notice...
Who benefits from these exactly?
Tax revenue is up ten fold from where it was at in 2008 and yet the quality of life for most of my connections not working in tech in the bay area is much worse. Everything is more expensive, taxes are much higher, traffic is 10x as bad, homelessness is more severe... Who's this "house of cards" supporting?
The minimum wage is up, that's the only thing, but it doesn't matter. Since a couple making minimum wage could actually have an apartment in 2008, which is not the case now.
CA is as expensive as it is in large part because of NIMBYs and tax schemes that were absolutely the product of right-wing ballot initiatives for the most part. OTOH, a large part of the appeal of TX is that it doesn't have a state income tax, but the state is absolutely on the dole. IIRC TX takes in ~$150b from the Federal government, but only pays ~$100b into the system. CA (like NY) pays more into the system then it takes out, so about ~$50b of the annual budget of TX is literally bumming money from other states, albeit indirectly.
Which is a roundabout way of saying, the narrative about people moving from CA to TX often makes it sound like a narrative about left-wing economic policies vs. right-wing economic policies, but the reality is that CA is expensive in large part because of right-wing economic policies and TX is cheap in large part because it's basically on welfare from the Federal government. Which is fine, the system should allow economically healthier states to help the less successful states get by (looking at you KY), but it's so counter to the narrative that usually surrounds these stories that people tend to sweep it under the rug. And also TX is hardly an economically unhealthy, depressed state in need of assistance from the rest of the country. It should step up and stop being being a bum, because AFAICT it's not a bum but rather a state with well above-average prospects.
This isn't true. According to the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government report dated Jan 8, 2019 (which used the data from the Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2019) the fifty states all had differing Federal expenditures vs Federal receipts but Texas and California were close. See page 15 at [1].
On a per capita basis, here are the federal expenditures per dollar of receipts for a few states:
Connecticut 0.74 50th
New Jersey 0.82 49th
Massachusetts 0.83 48th
New York 0.86 47th
North Dakota 0.94 46th
Illinois 0.97 45th
New Hampshire 0.98 44th
Washington 0.98 43rd
Nebraska 0.98 42nd
Colorado 0.99 41st
California 1.00 40th <=== CA
Texas 1.03 39th <=== TX
Utah 1.04 38th
Wisconsin 1.06 37th
Wyoming 1.06 36th
Minnesota 1.09 35th
Iowa 1.13 34th
Nevada 1.14 33rd
South Dakota 1.15 32nd
Kansas 1.23 31st
Florida 1.24 30th
...
Virginia 1.97 6th
Alabama 1.99 5th
West Virginia 2.17 4th
Mississippi 2.19 3rd
New Mexico 2.34 2nd
Kentucky 2.35 1st
Or is VA's proximity to DC and ownership of a lot of the Federal apparatus helping them to get a disproportionate cut?
The former -- lack of growth in the rest of the state -- may also be driving the state Blue.
"Other states are high or low for various reasons: the outliers Maryland and Virginia, for example, both have dramatically higher Federal spending per capita than the average state, as they are near the physical headquarters for most of the Federal government and have significantly disproportionate Federal spending for procurement and Federal wages."
So, while Virginia is a relatively high-income state and contributes a lot of Federal income tax, they also have a lot of Federal employees, grants, contracts, etc.
(I was surprised at first too)
This is patently false. Property taxes can and do raise 2%/year.
California does need to build new housing.
This had been especially obvious because historically low interest rates have enabled a lot of asset appreciation, with real estate being one example. High real estate prices lead to high property taxes, which makes the difference in taxes paid much more obvious.
NIMBYism also plays a part, but I think people routinely overlook that developers often don't improve local facilities in line with local housing projects, which can lead to all kinds of awfulness. That new 1000 unit apartment complex also needs 1000+ parking spaces, along with other improvements in local infrastructure in proportion to the increase in population, but a developer won't care about that unless someone forces them to care.
2. Why should it be the developers jobs to build out new infrastructure that isn't directly needed by their building. It's their job to build housing which brings people, those people bring taxes and those taxes pay for upgrades to infrastructure.
In terms of who should improve infrastructure, it doesn't really matter who does it, but I think either local government or the developer should be required to do it and not be allowed to let things slide. I focus on the developer because they're the first in the process, but it doesn't matter if instead the city requires the developer to build in the infrastructure improvement costs and does it themselves. The only position I have is that it should get done.
Btw what infrastructure are you talking about? Water, electrics, roads or sewage I'm guessing.
I guess they could be $15k/year, but I've never seen an example that high. My mom lives in Yucca Valley and has two or three Mello Roos items (water district, local community college, and something else), and I think maybe pays about $600 total for them.
https://playavistaexperts.com/buying-selling-resources/mello...
It's a ton off money either way, although I guess not surprising in Playa del Rey.
This tweet highlights some of the insaneness: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1265719788875272192
Someone pays $806 per year, living next to someone who pays $27,732 per year.
https://twitter.com/alfred_twu/status/1327821019931787264?s=...
Translation: The people who live there won't vote for a thing they don't want.
Because of it's size and market influence, California laws can effect the rest of the country, should the rest of the country vote in California elections?
The people who _choose_ to sit in the traffic are getting what they signed up for. I could be that person and I choose not to be in no small part to that situation.
You can see a detailed study of it here: https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/cities-expansion-slowing
Palo Alto. Someone pays $1081 per year living adjacent to someone who pays $24K per year.
Compared to 2020 Anywhere, 2000 Anywhere was a very bigoted place.
This really is not true, in many big cities it was another common facet of life that people were by and large apathetic about at that point.
Even Tyler has changed. (old article, but still)
https://www.advocate.com/society/activism/2009/09/29/gays-ta...
If Texas voters will finally vote in someone who is more like Ann Richards than Greg Abbott, I will believe the mindset is changing. Statewide votes for Governor, Lite Gov, Comptroller, and so on are not gerrymandered so a vote in San Antonio counts just as much as a vote in Midland.
(To your first question, I have not lived in Texas for over a decade, but I am the only member of my family who does not so I have pretty close connections to this day.)
I'm a white man and I suppose I would be a bit wary if I had a huge Bernie sticker on my car, I otherwise don't feel unsafe in the middle of nowhere TX. I just don't like that they're all rah rah GOP.
My own (black) experience in West Texas (Ft. Bliss), "Careful" meant driving across state to see family in Houston and absolutely not stopping in certain counties, not even to piss or stretch my legs.
After getting stopped, pulled over and ordered out of my vehicle while an officer stood back at his car several times and interrogated about "where are you going" "where are you supposed to be" "who do you know in this town" and "where did you steal the car from" (all separate experiences) while doing nothing but trying to take holiday leave.
So... that kind of careful for some of us.
edit, before anyone even makes the attempt:
- I was not driving erratically
- I had no bumper stickers on my car signaling political viewpoints
- I was not wearing any 'curious' clothing other than a shirt and jeans
- I had functioning turn signals and brake lights
- I was driving a legally purchased, registered and insured vehicle at the speed limit (or +5mph) consistent with how I drive literally every day
I remember my truck breaking down in Menard, TX and my black friend and I walked into a restaurant in the morning... everyone stopped and turned around and stared at us for a moment and went back to their business.
I've had ... interesting interactions with police and even some ornery locals as far south as Austin (yes, that "blue dot surrounded by red" as people like to call it) and as far north as Milwaukee, which isn't that far from where I live now, comparatively.
Kinda stopped believing in that whole "social avarice is relegated to certain parts of the country" stuff before I even hit 23.
(but don't get me started about certain parts of Missouri)
Sometimes I don't think humanity deserves to continue existing. It was a wacky experiment, but it is not working out.
That's astounding. Do you have a source for this?
I think we need to admit that we are all racist. Every ethnic majority thinks they are the greatest, it seems. If we can't even admit it, I don't see how it will change.
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, Pensacola, or anywhere in "the sticks" of Texas or Oklahoma or Utah or Alabama before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
Newsflash, you're not going to like upstate New York, either.
All it takes is realizing changing X rule like a deadline will help or hurt your party and then voting based on that rule. Eventually this can fail, which oddly enough tends to flip states so they can quickly go from solidly party A to solidly party B.
And that’s exactly what you would expect from the data. Georgia is one of the few states in the country where Black voter registration rates are equal to registration rates for whites: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/voting-and-voter-r.... (California, by contrast, has a 12 point difference in Black-white registration rates.) In 2018, the Black voter turnout rate was actually 2 points higher than the white voter turnout rate in Georgia. It makes total sense that as you increase turnout, you’re going to see roughly the same demographics.
Same thing in Texas. 87% of votes were cast by mail in ballot. Turn out was up almost 7 points compared to 2016. But Trump earned basically the same percentage of the vote as in 2016, with Biden gaining a few points from winning people who voted third party last time: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/04/texas-voter-turnout-...
Democrats have this idea that voter suppression is preventing more minorities from coming out (and voting Democrat). But what the data seems to suggest in Georgia and Texas is that people who want to vote are already voting. Making it easier to vote or having a high states election will increase turnout, but by dipping into a pool of lower propensity voters who don’t look all that different demographically than the people who were already voting.
As to the extra voting in Texas. 2020 had an additional + 1205300 Republican votes and + 1381258 Democratic votes in a solid red state which just hit 1/2 of voting age population. That’s 46.6% Republican and 53.4% Democrat and means those extra votes very much favored Democrats. Project a 20% increase in turnout with that kind of margin and Texas is in dead even recount territory.
Of course any election where Texas is that close Democrats have already won by such a margin as to make possibility flipping Texas largely irrelevant. Further, looking at these numbers it’s clear why targeted voter suppression becomes so significant.
You can’t conclude that because it overlooks third parties (who performed very well in 2016) and people who changed their votes from 2016 to 2020. That happened in suburbs all over the country. My traditionally red county (where voting was always super easy) went for Clinton by less than a point, but for Biden by 14 points. Voter turnout was up only 4 points, so Biden’s gain came mainly from flipping votes.
In Texas, Trump won basically the same share of the much larger turnout compared to 2016 (dropping just 0.1 points). Biden’s gain came almost entirely at the expense of third party candidates.
Indeed, nationwide, turnout went up 11 points. But Trump’s vote share also went up, from 46.1% to 46.8%. Again, Biden’s increased margin came entirely at the expense of third parties.
Donations to the Green Party for example are a clever and accepted means of reducing Democrats’s turnout. Libertarians draw surprisingly evenly from both sides, but Republicans have had their own spoilers.
Biden increasing his vote share at the expense of third parties doesn’t indicate any structural benefit to Democrats from higher turnout. It seems quite specific to Trump/Biden as candidates versus Trump/Clinton. Clinton and Trump had very high disapproval ratings, which pushed people to a surprisingly strong third party vote. Biden had much lower disapproval ratings than Clinton, which led those third party voters to vote for him in 2020. That doesn’t show a structure benefit to Democrats from higher turnout.
I’ve done a little numeric modeling, and it produces some surprising implications about who new 2020 voters selected. Pre-election polling showed that 9% of Trump 2016 voters planned to vote for Biden, while only half as many Clinton 2016 voters planned to vote for Trump. Moreover, they showed people who voted third party in 2016 strongly favoring Biden.
Trump won about 11 million more votes than in 2016, and Biden won about 15 million more votes than Clinton. But there was an over 3 million vote drop in the third party vote. If you assume that Biden pulled in a significant number of Trump 2016 votes, say 6-8%, while losing only 3-4% of Clinton 2016 voters, and won the majority of people who voted third party in 2016 but not in 2020, then its quite likely Trump actually won a majority of the 22 million new votes in 2020.
Your nationwide numbers are also off for several reasons. For example many people voting in 2016 skipped the 2020 elections for various reasons like death. Further pooling including exit polls doesn’t match up with actual voting very well suggesting a significant portion of Trump voters are unwilling to say they voted or plan to vote for Trump. That or a truly massive pro Republican voter fraud which seems unlikely.
Anyway looking at hard data. In 2016 Clinton got 65,853,514 votes Trump got 62,984,828 votes. A Democratic margin of 2,868,686 million votes. In 2020 Biden got 81,282,896 votes vs Trumps 74,222,484 a Democratic margin of 7,060,412.
Using the middle of your range 62,984,828 * 0.075 - 65,853,514 * 0.035 that’s a net gain of 2,418,989 votes which far less than the actual net gain of (7,060,412 - 2,868,686) = 4,191,726 votes that Biden over Trump.
To gain the (4,191,726 - 2,418,989) = 1,772,737 votes from a 3 million 3rd party voter drop would have taken a truly extreme margin of ~80% even assuming your other assumptions where correct. That might be reasonable if they where mostly green voters, but it’s largely from the Libertarian party.
Having satisfactorily worked hard to make voting as difficult as possible in Texas, he wants to use the state's limited funds to sue other states that dared to improve their democracy. This is the government of Texas.
Are you stating that as long as public officials are "daring to improve their democracy" that they are free to ignore Constitutional requirements that the legislature has plenary authority to proscribe the manor of selecting electors?
Note: Setting aside the likelihood that any of the alleged unconstitutional actions resulted in a different electoral outcome, isn't it important that election law is established through the Constitutionally proscribed legislative process and not via executive and/or bureaucratic actions independent of the legislature?
Let's not pretend that this absurd lawsuit has any merit -- it's one in a long line of losing lawsuits (what are they up to, 50 out of 51 lost now?) by the current president to overturn an election result he didn't like.
I'm interested in poking holes in that argument not avoiding it.
It is.
> but you’ve neatly avoided addressing the underlying argument that they are making that the election rules were not changed by the legislature in these states and those actions are unconstitutional.
The reason why that is false is well-argued in some of the briefs for the defendant states in Texas just-failed lawsuit, but, in summary: State legislatures are constitutionally free to, as part of the rules they set for elections of Presidential electors, submit those same rules to the same judicial and executive constraints otherwise applicable to state law including those applicable to state elections, the defendant states (and most other states, including those suing) routinely do so and specifically have done so for the rules applicable in this case, and the rules for the elections were all handled according to state law (including the role that state law affords judicial and executive officers in its application).
No, it would actually be terribly disruptive if the legislature could not subject its regulation of federal elections to the judicial and executive power in the same way as other state laws (and, particularly, laws governing the administration of simultaneously and on-the-same-ballot state elections) are.
The concern here was entirely feigned, hypocritical by the states involved in complaints, and substanceless and purely based on partisan advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_v._Virginia_State_Board...
So, it’s a much more specific question you’re asking. It also had zero impact on this election, but that’s largely irrelevant to the question.
The question in the Texas lawsuit doesn't challenge the actions of the legislature, it challenges the actions of the other officials.
It’s often argued by public officials that exceptions are allowed in extreme situations, though what those are is of course up to the courts. Perhaps best summed up as "The Constitution is not a suicide pact". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic... Which of course isn’t a blank check to do anything for any reason, but it is considered by the court system in various cases. There are many examples of this argument being considered acceptable, and perhaps more frequent examples of it being rejected.
As such simply saying the legislature was bypassed on it’s own is not considered a sufficient legal argument.
Well, the interesting point of law here is that the Constitution specifically delegates the authority to the legislature. So in this particular case it may indeed be as straightforward as saying that the legislature was bypassed and didn't authorize the changes. At least that is my understanding of the case so far.
It all rolls back to article III section 2 The Judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution
The legislature is often assumed to have a great deal of power, but it was intended to be relatively weak just like the other two branches of government.
It's a relatively clean slate in state vs state case precedent. Clean enough that a majority will easily find a way to justify a desired ruling one way or the other.
In any case you can't dismiss a lawsuit "because no one has presented any evidence". That is part of a lawsuit itself. Perhaps the evidence will be determined to be insufficient but that will be determined within the proceeding itself.
Now if you want to say that the claims presented in this particular motion is unconvincing, that would make logical sense. But any rationale for dismissing the motion has to be based on what is in the motion, not on what is floating around in social media.
No, six attempted to do so (since the suit was never permitted to be filed, no one actually joined it.)
18 states (including the six that shortly after that filed to join the suit as party intervenors) filed a request to file a pro-plaintiff amicus brief, which is different than joining the suit.
It’s not that people are choosing to insulate - the metros are where the jobs are. Those metros have been changed by the influx of people, and if there were jobs the suburbs you would see the electorate change there as well.
I think the problem with this is that it rests on a fundamental assumption that someone's primary motivation for voting Republican is bigotry. Polls by the Pew Foundation do not bear this out. Non-college educated Democrats and Republicans have equally wrong knowledge about what people on the other side of the spectrum believe. College educated Republicans match their numbers. The outliers are college educated Democrats. They, by far, have the most distorted view of what right wing people ACTUALLY believe. It goes both ways of course, with conservatives dramatically underestimating the patriotism of liberals, etc.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/democr...
When I lived in Arkansas, the voters simultaneously voted for a Republican governor and state house, AND a ballot initiative to significantly raise the state minimum wage, as well as a ballot initiative for medical marijuana.
The GOP politicians were all against these measures, but the voters approved them by large majorities.
The point I'm making is that the politicians on both sides aren't in step with the electorate, even if they are chosen by the electorate. People are voting for the lesser of two evils a lot more than we give them credit for.
California may seem like it's 100% different, but that's mostly because people only know San Francisco, LA, and the other coastal cities. CA has its other parts, too.
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
The "dysfunction" is more likely a function of population density as it is a unique California thing. Watching local Austin news - definitely some familiar problems - gentrification, what to do about the homeless/crime, pollution, desires to raise taxes, traffic.
It's not as though California was always unicorns and rainbows, either.
Compare that to the dirty looks I got walking around SF in a Buck-ees hat that happened to be red. It bordered upon comedy.
Man sent to jail for attack on man wearing MAGA hat: https://www.fox5dc.com/news/man-who-attacked-maga-hat-wearin...
And an article about other incidents around the country: https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/attacks-trump-supporters...
49ers hats are not bright red, and tend to be fairly distinctive.
Anecdote time - my buddy sometimes wears a red hat with the California bear on it, and he regularly (as in without fail) gets dirty looks because of it. I personally stopped wearing my red Nike running hat in public last year because of the reactions I'd get. For context, we live in a relatively conservative East Bay suburb of Northern California.
2) Politically motivated violence is rare in the US and right-wing violence obviously exists as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Portland_train_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2018_United_States_mai...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_killings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
Implying that people who enjoy wearing red hats should avoid SF is like telling liberals to not open their mail. It's absurd.
3) They definitely make 49er hats in bright red:
https://www.rallyhouse.com/assets/images/products/59001909-1...
https://m.hatland.com/prodimg/m1/49ers-super-bowl-xxiii-gold...
https://www.neweracap.com/medias/sys_master/root/h75/h28/891...
https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/1f6093f0-cbdc-42ac-a096-c65...
For those who doubt you, I ask them to ponder the following:
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
There are plenty of conservative places that would be upset to see Harris / Biden attire. Look no further than the classic Top Gear episode with the Gay Pride car and the Clinton car driving through the south.
I think a difference might be that these are super rural and uneducated communities as opposed to global capitals of business and technology
Are Fort Worth and Pensacola also filled with "overly polite Mormons"? Are they also "cartoonish examples of polite conservative locales"? (Congratulations, by the way, on making polite Mormons and conservatives sound like bad things.)
Conversely, are San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Cambridge "cartoonish examples of crazy extreme leftists", or are they (unfortunately) typical of places where such congregate?
Mormons are excellent people. I sincerely appreciate how absurdly polite they are. They are cartoonishly polite. It’s just true. My newly married 20 year old next door neighbors moved in and immediately brought me, a plate of fresh baked cookies on day 1.
Fort Worth is a place with plenty of parts of town where I can pretty well guarantee that you’d catch some flack. That said, most big Texas cities are as liberal as they are conservative, if not more, so it’s a bad example of an absurdly conservative place. It’s nowhere near as conservative as SF and Cambridge are liberal. No major city in Texas is. Texas is more diverse than anyone gives it credit for.
I don’t know anything about Pensacola, so I can’t comment on that.
That doesn't sound very specific of Texas, that's the case pretty much everywhere
A couple years ago I was at a bar in Marfa, Texas - a small art-centric town that gets a lot of tourism for things like it's fake Prada store (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prada_Marfa) - and overheard a few guys celebrating a birthday. They were all clearly gay, which isn't unusual in Marfa. I started talking with them and it turned out that one of them, who was black, had just bought a ranch a half hour north of Marfa outside the town of Fort Davis. Fort Davis also has a bit of a touristy feel with its exaggerated "old western town" look and because it's right outside Fort Davis State Park, but culturally it's no Marfa.
The fact that an openly gay black man felt comfortable buying farmland in a small Texas town was pretty awesome. I have a hard time believing that would've happened even 10 years ago. In fact, he might be the first.
I hope he still likes it there.
I've never heard anyone in Tyler scream at random strangers calling them "f*t". But that does seem to be a pretty much daily occurrence from the illustrious cast of characters that hang out around the Powell Street BART station.
You might not have heard it because they've already hammered down all the nails around you that stick out.
Notice he's "fleeing" after he made his billions.
The Texas you grew up in is not the same as Texas today. Places change. People change. Look at a county-by-county map of the election results.
What did he extract from California? Was he on welfare?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
Houston is literally the most diverse city in America, statistically speaking.
And you have to look hard to find religiously conservative people in any Texas metro that are also exclusionary. I say that as someone neither white nor Christian.
If anything, the only place you may find a lack of diversity is Austin, which is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly intolerant of non-leftist opinions.
I hear this claim from time to time but I’d like to know what it means concretely. Do you mean things like churches being closed due to COVID, or some sort of anti-white racism existing in Austin on the one hand while on the other hand racism isn’t prevalent outside of Austin?
Austin is trying to turn in a smaller scale version of San Francisco, complete with needles and shit on the streets.
Nothing about that is "great". I'll take Fort Worth over that any day.
Well, live and let live sounds pretty ideal, given that in several places across California conservative opinions are not tolerated.
Maybe we agree that a college town in Texas it's a place where opposing viewpoints can still coexist?
I think that people underestimate just how common this very same thing is here in California.
> but lots of people live in the 'burbs and around the smaller areas and do not get the benefit of this peaceful coexistence
Again, very similar to California.
I grew up in California and moved to Texas for 13 years, and have recently (begrudgingly too) moved back to California. Things have not changed a whole lot here. Once you get out of the cities and into more rural areas, it's about the same as you'd experience anywhere else.
> If someone moved to Texas, they made a choice to accept it and I will not knock people for their individual choices.
Sucks if you're gay and are born near Tyler. In case others will knock you for something that wasn't even a choice to begin with.
It's odd because I grew up in a major metro, and going to college I found people in college to be very strict and severe about enforcing their morals on people. You had to use specific language, be nice and more forgiving and understanding to the right groups of people, and you were not supposed to disagree on specific subjects of discussion or you'd be a pariah.
The idea that this is "live and let live" is silly. It seems that way to you because your morals align very closely with the morals of people in a college setting. If they didn't, you'd notice the similarities to an orthodox religious community immediately.
Any society will try to grind your unique edges off to more smoothly fit into their culture. Perhaps you were more inclined to explore liberalism or intellectualism (more prone to be the culture around colleges) or had had enough of conservative religiousness. I had that same kind of inclination from ~18-30 years old.
I have seen plenty of discrimination and judgment coming from 'the right' in my upbringing (usually directed toward others). But now that I'm much more center road and no longer extremist leftist, I am experiencing increasing hostility from my still left leaning friends/groups.
I hope that the internet can somehow transform into a vehicle of understanding rather than a vehicle of argument. Maybe video comments would be more helpful in this regard.
I disagree with your assessment that Texas has wide acceptance for opposing viewpoints, at least out in the suburbs where I grew up. If you were not religious and conservative (I have my own anecdotes), you did not fit in. Only when I went to college in a college town did people largely seem to want to live and let live. Sure, inside the larger cities it is more cosmopolitan, for lack of a better word, but lots of people live in the 'burbs and around the smaller areas and do not get the benefit of this peaceful coexistence. For example, to this day I do not recommend being openly gay and living near Tyler.
If someone moved to Texas, they made a choice to accept it and I will not knock people for their individual choices. But my experience is not that the prevailing view is open acceptance of people of all stripes like found in other parts of the country.