It's really hard, as one of those activists, to not burn out and get cynical. Those who have theirs, are quite comfortable with the way things are, and do not want the smallest amount of change are often also retired and have infinite time on their hands - which they can use to great effect to lobby local governments and organize with their friends.
It's really hard to effectively organize against that among people who are trying to get themselves established in their careers, or who are starting/raising young families, or who are on the career grind. None of us have the time or energy to stay on a council meeting until 3 am every week.
But we've finally gotten fed up to the point where we're starting to put together an organization that looks like a political party with in a political party (our city is a one party town so we have to operate with in that party). It will canvas and organize volunteers and build a database we can use to simply overwhelm that loud minority. It's going to be a fuck ton of work, and it may fall apart before it gets going, but this seems like the only way forward.
It works exactly like this all the way up from local through to federal politics. We Can't Have Nice Things in democracies, because of a small number of people willing to commit their entire souls, lives and money to some niche cause that's a net-bad, and they won't quit, even after losing 50 times. All it takes is that 51st time, and they'll definitely be at the fight.
> We Can't Have Nice Things in democracies, because of a small number of people
I wonder if this is more a problem with representational government. In a democracy there would be no council to influence, instead everyone would have an equal vote on the issue.
The thing with direct democracy is that we'd really need to implement like a 20 hour work week to make it work. Everyone would need to find the time to get up to date on all of the issues. Or you'd end up with a minority of people who happen to know and care about each issue controlling that issue... which maybe that's okay, actually.
It would be really interesting to see how a true direct democracy behaved at the government level. I've seen it work at the level of a workplace or a housing cooperative. And it does work, it's effortful, but it works. But I dunno if it's ever really been tried at the level of a government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Selection...
It is quite possible that it would not scale to larger population and general voting rights.
I don't really care for it, although I will have to say it would probably work better in the case of opaque public bodies very few people vote for elections in (e.g. a local American school board)
Switzerland has a lot more democracy than any other western government that I know of. Switzerland is a federation of cantons, each averaging 300k people, each with it's own constitution and parliament, collecting its own taxes, administering its own health care, even entering into certain treaties with other countries, etc. Each canton is subdivided into municipalities, some as small as a few thousand people, that decide more local issues including police, schools, etc. Divide and conquer, so that people can decide things for themselves. The magic seems to be that the people, via referendum, can add and/or delete laws they don't like [0]. So they have representatives but the people have ultimate direct power over them. Higher levels of government are involved only where necessary, for issues involving multiple lower levels of government. Seems to work well for them.
Many people seem to believe that government needs to be big to be effective. The opposite may be the case, as Leopold Khor convincingly argues [1], that "bigness" is the cause of many problems.
[0] https://wolf-linder.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Swiss-poli...
This is also true of California; that's not the magic. I'd say identifying bigness as the problem is much more on target.
I would think that this would tend to force issues that are not agreed upon down to a more local level, which doesn't sound like a bad thing.
However I do not disagree with you that the scale California often operates at may be too large.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. This is also true of California. (Well, not the part about representatives worrying about it, but all that that demonstrates is that the claim you repeat is not true. The ability of the people to remove laws isn't forcing representatives to do anything.)
> The magic seems to be that the people, via referendum, can add and/or delete laws they don't like.
I'm saying that this cannot be the magic, because this state of affairs obtains in California, and it does not have the results which are, in Switzerland, ascribed to it. Those results do not come from this; they come from something else.
- .6% signatures required for a local referendum, 2% at federal level (somewhere else I saw 50k or 100k signatures required federally, some with 100 day time limits)
- referendums can occur between parliamentary elections (I read somewhere else that it might be typical that a citizen could vote 3 or 4 times per year)
- as per the constitution every tax is subject to a referendum, taxes are (mostly?) collected at the canton/municipality level, given the smaller size of these units people are engaged when their vote is more closely tied to their taxes and services.
- 295 referendums launched at the federal level since 1980, 124 gathered enough signatures, 14 passed, many more were withdrawn before a vote, the gathering of enough signatures having had the desired effect on parliament
- about 50% of the 124 referendums that got enough signatures had a direct or an indirect effect on parliament, many without ever needing to come to a vote
- 9% of laws decided by parliament end up subject to referendum
- parliament tends to form majorities on a per issue basis, and tends to design laws to avoid provoking a referendum
- there is no federal court to adjudicate the constitutionality of referendums, some referendums pass that cannot be implemented due to this, this was identified as a shortcoming (other shortcomings were the influence of money in politics and keeping the public informed on issues)
I'm not sure of the details and effects of California referendums, in comparison. The information above are my notes from the linked youtube unless otherwise indicated.
I personally would tend to agree with you on the specific issue we were talking about. I'm personally a fan of the way Japan does zoning, which allows for growth (more height and more retail) when the population density grows (industrial separate).
The documentation I had showed that the Swiss set the principals for zoning at a federal level, and zoning is actually administered at the most local municipality level.
I'm not sure of the Swiss implementation details. But in my ideal world that would mean a Japanese style zoning principals at the federal level, administered locally. A municipality can decide where they want industrial areas, and how to tax for their infrastructure, but local NIMBYs would have no power over what can be built on a specific plot (the federal principals would control that).
There's a lot of ways to be democratic. For example, perhaps our block elects a representative to attend council meetings, who will inform our group on issues in front of council, maybe someone else contributes with some extra research, etc, then we decide how our block will vote in council. Just one of many possibilities.
The problem is how to get people to think about the issues? Too many fail to realize the unintended consequences of their vote. Too many vote for what they think is popular not what is right.
The only leverage we have is our greater numbers, which doesn’t count for much if we don’t organize.
Tangentially, the NREL recently developed an app that streamlines the rooftop solar permitting process by integrating with the Accela city administration product. Permitting time has gone down from weeks to days (or sometimes minutes). [4] Progress is possible.
[2] https://developer.accela.com/
[3] https://www.gsa.gov/blog/2021/02/18/logingov-to-provide-auth...
[4] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nrel-solar-app-rooftop-resi...
I think that matters less than you might think.
Most decisions of any import are done by city and county staff, a few by appointed organizations like planning commissions (usually filled with yet more activists, each with their own activist kink), and finally an elected official(s) who spends most of their time handing out awards and declaring civic festivals.
The flip side of this is that building middle- to low-income housing shouldn't be much of a thing. If there were enough development, the low-to-middle income housing would be the small units with the bad views and the laminate counters and no dishwasher and creaky floors, which is to say the older stuff that wasn't seriously maintained. Constrain supply and new construction enough, and all that stuff is intensely maintained because building new is not an option.
Anecdotally, from San Francisco, my experience is the opposite. Most units are in terrible conditions, barely painted over. There is no incentive for landlords to put extra money on the place, it will not increase the price at which it will rent.
You end up with high income people moving into shitty housing, middle income moving to the outskirts and low income people moving to the streets. Only the landlords win.
Oh, it definitely will. The well-maintained places rent for astonishingly crazy amounts, which is why most people don’t see them.
Maybe there's some interesting political science research on this.
I'm not claiming that there is a formal legal obstacle here. I'm hypothesizing that a state government would be less interested in banning something which has popular support in a medium-size city in that state.
(Thankfully that was a few years ago, now I have FTTH, yay!)
It's amazing how socialist america is.
They're probably right. Have you ever tried to drop off a package at a UPS store that has no parking anywhere near it?
Local businesses pay taxes and provide jobs. They are there on the street all day every day, while any commuter is there for a fraction of a second. Shafting them should be an obvious political non-starter.
A commuter may only be at one point briefly, but, they pass through many points on their route to work. And they do it daily across the span of years. Multiplied by thousands of commuters.
Get involved in your local politics, people. It matters much, much more than whatever the NY Times and CNN are trying to get you riled up about.
Worked to improve broadband and build a co-working space in small town. Submitted writing for a state grant. Against all odds was selected as one of the winners. They only awarded a few.
At the end of this long process after everything had been agreed to and supported and focus grouped... The group started talking about what to do with grant money.. as in like something other than broadband improvements and a co-working space.
Then I get paired with a working partner to develop the plan further. The partner upon first time meeting refuses the idea and then we have a brainstorming session about some other "neat" ideas people had. I was furious but held my tongue. Resigned next day. Life is too short to spend time with politics. I hate it.
I asked her how long she's been on the community council (a long time) and suggested it might be someone else's turn, to which she replied that there isn't anybody else (there are other members, but they are few and old).
So if this is typical, then if you are in the UK and care about / have strong opinions about what's right or wrong or needed in your local community: join you local community council.
Things should be done at a high enough level so that it's worth having experts do them. They should be done locally enough so that people can get involved and be heard, but not to the point where personal vendettas against volunteers matter.
Utilities should provide infrastructure, and should be for anything worth doing (correctly) once. Paths, roads, pipes of all sorts, including data pipes; even basic postal and transit options.
Competition should happen over those utilities, where public interests aren't paramount. 911 and similar can just exist on a data-pipe network. Power is often so critical that failures of the market, like Texas recently, show exactly why that has to be highly regulated even if there's competition. Water and sewer can't be divided like that. Though options for transit, and secondary providers for other forms of movement (like long distance data transfer) are logical to have.
Somewhat tangential story, but I thought it was interesting in this context.
A former landlord in NYC told me a story where some local community board was required to approve a new 3-story apartment building with some kind of public/community space on the first floor, which was replacing a couple old 2-family homes.
There were two groups in opposition: the "old white men" who own property in the area, and the young DSA board members who stuck to their hard line of "no new development". Apparently the old white men didn't always get their way in the past, but their new coalition with the hipster socialists was enough to block the development.
Said landlord had lived in the area for ~40 years so he was pretty annoyed at the blockage of what he saw as necessary and beneficial development, that (IMO) was also perfectly in-character with the area. Then again, the same landlord was strongly in favor of the Amazon deal in Long Island City.
Axiom: "all politics are local". Theorem: "local politics are more important than you think". Corollary: "if you care about improving other people's lives, get involved in local politics".
I was shocked. While Trump getting elected certainly impacted that persons life, their actual ability to make change in their community would be far more impactful if they focused on the local level.
But local politics do not provide as much fun political us vs them talk which is what it feel like most people actually enjoy about politics.
As the old saying goes, All politics are local. And the last four years in particular have been a huge wake up call to me that I need to get WAY more interested and involved in local politics.
Utter BS like critical race theory would never get a toe hold in our schools, for example, if people paid attention at all to what was going on in their literal back yard. In one way COVID and kids attending school remotely has been hugely beneficial in that a lot of people have started to pick up on the utter garbage being routinely foisted on our kids.
The toeholds would still be there. This stuff seeps into schools because it is taught in university education departments, which provide required credentials for schoolteachers. If people paid attention to what was happening in their backyard, none of that would change.
But if people paid attention to their local schools, they might do a better job preventing educational fads from growing in them.
Maybe it's an extreme reaction. Critical race theory is certainly an extreme way of looking at the world if you take it literally and not as a thought experiment. But I just see it as a swing of the pendulum. I wish people wouldn't get "canceled" over it, but I don't think it's the slippery slope to Maoism that people seem to think it is.
Dont states give certifications for teachers, not colleges/universities?
> For educators prepared in California, completing a Commission-approved educator preparation program is required to earn a credential or authorization.
There’s a new form of NIMBYism that’s pretty extreme and comes from the left.
The only group interested in building housing seems to be the neoliberals/moderates/center - people that believe in markets/supply and demand?
The politics around this stuff is a mess. I wish there was just a way to incentivize building.
We hear similar arguments in DC, but they tend to come from current residents, who are often Black or other PoC, and not traditional (young, white) liberals.
Related anecdote: After gentrification, DC gets some interesting side-effects... there are several "neighborhood" churches where most of the congregants live 30+ minutes away in the suburbs, due to being priced out of the local rental market. And these church-goers do everything in their power to block bicycle lanes downtown, because they need the street-side parking for the church.
If that fails they fall back on generic environment arguments, “taking down any building is bad for the environment”.
I think it’s all just status quo bias and resistance to change, resistance to building.
All of the arguments that come after that are driven entirely by motivated reasoning. If you lean left it’s the left nimby canon, if you lean right it’s the right version of that.
I just want more housing supply.
Over long enough time-spans and large enough areas of a city, I agree. But, that doesn't change the impact on individuals who get priced out of their specific apartment (where that apartment was rented below market because it was run-down, and was replaced with a market-rate apartment).
Which isn't to say its right/correct that the individual can potentially block development to the detriment of the city as a whole. We would all be much better off with a different approach to zoning/development.
I'm going to be a little pedantic, but I think we're mostly in agreement. A rundown apartment is not priced at 'below market' - it gets the price the market supports which is just lower than a nice place that more people want. That demand still exists, it just prices up other stuff even higher.
In a restricted supply environment that price will still be very high, it just won't be as high as a place that's actually nice (which will be even higher). It's why awful places in Palo Alto are worth $2M (see: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Palo-Alto/3785-Park-Blvd-94306/hom... - in case that link goes away it's a basically condemned house for $1.7M next to train tracks. It's dirty and they didn't even clean up before taking pictures.)
I'll concede that if you replace crappy housing with nicer housing (and don't increase the number of units overall) some of the demand that wouldn't consider it before now will so the market price goes up (and the market price of other fancier housing likely reduces a bit).
> "Which isn't to say its right/correct that the individual can potentially block development to the detriment of the city as a whole. We would all be much better off with a different approach to zoning/development."
In total agreement here - I wish there was a way to align incentives such that we built a lot more housing. It'd be cool if there was a way to have people have vested interest in a city's success rather than their own home asset price via scarcity. Maybe a way for people to recognize increased city GDP directly or something? I'm just making stuff up, but clearly the current set up causes a lot of problems.
I'll concede that if you replace crappy housing with nicer housing (and don't increase the number of units overall) some of the demand that wouldn't consider it before now will so the market price goes up (and the market price of other fancier housing likely reduces a bit).
This is the crux of the problem. There is just so much pent up housing demand that the market is totally out-of-kilter and below-average units get replaced with above-average units. And even if that nudges the average down marginally, the residents of the below-average units are now priced out of town.
That is the argument and the desire. Have any cities ever proven that it's true? My experience has universally been that prices go up indefinitely, until the local economy dies and there is no money left to pay the rent.
If 10,000 yuppies move to town and 1000 apartments' worth of old buildings are torn down to build new apartments for them, then 1000 people are displaced. But consider the alternative: if 10,000 yuppies move in and no new housing is built, they'll bid up the price of run down old buildings until nobody else can afford them, and 10,000 people are displaced.
The US is a mess given the incentives towards home ownership as an investment. The Bay Area and California make this incentive worse with Prop 13.
The only groups interested in building extremely dense housing in medium-density residential neighborhoods are large property investors and people who believe that the price of housing is due to a lack of supply rather than property being used as a place to park money in a low-interest rate environment.
I think their idea is that development inevitably means gentrification, so they are opposed to development in order to stop the advance of gentrification.
The big takeaway here is how municipal politics works. There’s a tiny number of people - largely volunteers - working on the issues that have a huge impact on everyone’s daily life - and how much they deal with a very motivated and angry opposition all day long. The opposition size is never truly known, and the problem is it usually feels enormous and is actually tiny. It is not unusual for big city projects to be shut down literally by the angry screaming of a dozen people.
Lest you think this is just a small town thing, I have first-hand experience working in a local committee when I lived in Houston, and it was basically identical to what this author described.
Care about our national housing shortage? In nearly every city there exists a small angry mob that works to block every development project, and this job tends to be loudest and angriest about middle to low income housing and apartments. If you want that to change, the single best thing you can do is show up to local meetings and say “I support this apartment building.” Even better if you can mobilize a few friends. You would be shocked at how little it takes to have a big influence.