David Watkins

American planning in a nutshell: building apartments in a wealthy neighborhood? You need special permission and must rent 20% of them at a loss to poor people.

Combining 10 apartments into a mansion for one extremely rich family? By-right process, no subsidized housing requirement, and a tax break.

I, a Mariners fan, am not particularly predisposed to have much by way of capacity for sympathy for Angels fans. But almost every time I learn some new peice of information about that organization I feel a bit of it.

"I, a second-wave gentrifier, have looked into the issue carefully and am soberly forced to conclude that it's these third and fourth wave gentrifiers who are causing all the problems"

I see Ross has found an answer to the question: "How can I comment on the housing crisis in a manner that will demonstrate how much cooler I am than these phillistines?"

every faction in politics will invent their own bespoke conspiracy theory to avoid confronting the inescapable truth that we just need to make it easier to build denser housing

What precisely counts as 'equitable' is of course the subject of reasonable disagreement. But "putting a finger on the scale to benefit a (better-off group) at the expense of a (worse-off group)" should probably fall outside of any reasonable definition of the term.

That an openly anti-renter policy -- that was very recently tried, with predictable results! -- is such an easy sell to left-populists is an important data point for the view that left-populism is inherently unstable, and will struggle to resist the gravitational pull of right populism.

But, of course, actual conservatives tend to be the biggest NIMBYs of all, who fight to keep housing that might be affordable to even the slightly less rich out of their neighborhoods. So the phrase, in this context, is meant to confuse and bias the underlying politics, not shed light.

Anti-new housing activists (yes, they exist) like to call allowing new housing to be built and sold "trickle down" because in conversations with liberals because they know the phrase has conservative valence from an entirely different context--they're trying to paint their opponents as Conservatives

There's sense in which the vacancy chains that new housing creates could be described as allowing older, less fancy housing to "trickle down" to those with less income. But that is, in fact, a good thing! The critique of trickle down econ was that it didn't work, not that it would be bad if it did.

Instead of giving rich people more money and crossing our fingers, hoping they'll do something socially beneficial with it, we're allowing them to do something socially beneficial with the money they already have. Those are different in important ways that calling them both "trickle down" elides.

"Trickle down" is a poor analogy. The critique of trickle down economics is that it's naive to give more money to rich people in the hopes that they'll do something socially beneficial with it.

Changing the law to make it easier to build housing in a housing shortage isn't like that at all:

NYC city council effectively banned new hotels last year; undoing that seems like the right place to start here.

A lot of responses boil down to "OK, fine, so maybe that works in practice, but does it work in theory"?

I haven't moved the goalposts at all. You initially made a claim about "Why they existed" and I offered a counterclaim about "why they were written." How was I to know we were actually talking about the best logical justification, regardless of historical motives?
bsky.app/profile/djw1...

The line of reasoning you're using--emphasizing potentially logical but ahistorical benign justifications for comprehensive zoning, was pushed by segregations later in the 20th century. The purpose of this rhetorical shift was to defend segregation in practice without having to do so in theory.

The "preventing noxious uses next to housing" justification for zoning is particularly weak as a historical explanation, since nuisance laws, a much older and narrowly targeted kind of restriction, existed (often uncontroversially) and were widely used long before zoning was invented.

Non-segregationist reasons can provide logical justifications for some zoning policies. I was making a historical claim. The actual people who enacted zoning codes everywhere between 1916 and the 30's were, obviously and openly, motivated overwhelmingly by segregationist goals.

Of course it's not all about SF zoning. That's not the only tool for enforcing race and class segregation in the zoning toolkit. As I said, NYC's first-in-country had no SF zoning and its authors openly admitted it was motivated by a desire for class and race segregation.

Even in NYC, where they didn't initially try SF only zoning because they assumed courts would reject it, they were clear a goal was to keep the tenements, their immigrant residents, and their workplaces away from the fancy high-end shops on 5th Ave, so the shoppers wouldn't have to mingle w them.

They were written with the goal of class and/or racial segregation.

Locations of new homes built in Switzerland in 2018

Country-wide effects of new housing supply: Evidence from moving chains, by Lukas Hauck and Frederic Kluser

Another new paper on housebuilding and vacancy chains, this time with data on every Swiss resident & housing unit! An interesting context given Switzerland's high immigration, very large rented sector and strong tenancy rent controls... frederickluser.github.io/files/Moving...

This is her MO; when the dumber people on her coalition say particularly awful and revealing things, she tries bail them out, by subtly shifting their bailey to a motte. Here, she knows better than to try to defend his position, so she tries to recast is as "based in reasonable concerns."

I'm often taken aback by how often I encounter people who have a proper liberal understanding of race in America, to such a degree that they can tell you all about the evils of redlining, who nonetheless go straight for this kind of naive church history of zoning.

It's genuinely impressive the degree to which you are illustrating the phenomenon Will identified while ostensibly attempting to refute it.

I think you may misunderstand the concept of "median." If you took all the billionaires or even the entire top 1% (or 2% or 5%) and changed their household income to, say, 250k a year, the median would be exactly the same as it is now.

This clearly implies people are aware of the nature of their objective material conditions, presumably by virtue of living them, which is how they come to know the posted chart is not accurate.

bsky.app/profile/96ak...

I encourage you to reflect on how the thing you just said is in clear conflict with the thing you said three minutes earlier.

A) I'm aware of no evidence whatsoever she was "pushed out" back in October when she made this decision
B) I have no idea what "seems to" indicate that establishment Democrats prefer Platner to Mills; all available evidence I'm aware of points in the opposite direction.

Proponents of the "we don't need new housing, we just need policies that shrink the STR market and push existing homes back into the LTR pool" approach to solving the housing crisis should be paying close attention to Spain, where this approach is being tested. Early results are not promising.