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.
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".