Ned Resnikoff

At some point the “one size fits all” cliché becomes an argument against policymaking, period. If every single instance of a social problem is irreducibly unique and special, what’s the point of trying to address it in aggregate?

NIMBYs love to say that state-level zoning is too “one-size-fits-all,” meanwhile every jurisdiction has roughly the same >80% single-family zoning map.

Or San Diego www.sfchronicle.com/politics/art...

The Great Retcon The invention of "heritage Americans"

For my newsletter, I wrote about "heritage Americans" and the real meaning of nationhood. publiccomment.blog/p/the-great-...

This is an excellent, clear discussion of what progressive "abundance" looks like, which is really just YIMBYism. If you can get past kneejerk reactions to such terms, it's well worth reading.

Pritzker to propose statewide zoning laws to spur homebuilding, limit local control The ‘BUILD’ plan would allow more multi-unit housing and legalize granny flats.

😍 www.wqad.com/article/news...

i might dispute the branding of these ideas as YIMBY or “abundance”, but there’s a lot of policy wisdom in this by @resnikoff.bsky.social. 1/

Because this podcast was a safe space I also got to be extremely pedantic about the difference between democratic socialists and social democrats. (It doesn't matter off of Bluesky. Just call us all liberals, it's fine.)

Lessons from YIMBYism: Taking “Abundance” Back to Its Fundamentals Lessons from YIMBYism examines how supply-side reforms, public investment, and state capacity can make progressive social policy work as intended.

Here's the paper in question: rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

595 | Ned Resnikoff: One Year In - Taking Abundance Back to Its Fundamentals | The Realignment Ned Resnikoff, Roosevelt Institute and author of Lessons from YIMBYism: Taking “Abundance” Back to Its Fundamentals, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Ned discuss the history of how YIMBY housing ac...

Thanks to Marshall Kosloff of the Realignment podcast for having me on to discuss my "Lessons From YIMBYism" paper and the future of abundance. the-realignment.simplecast.com/episodes/595...

It's all well and good to have a conventional campaign platform; obviously I care quite a lot about the candidates' housing and climate plans. But if you're planning to run a state that is under constant attack from a fascist regime, you should have some ideas about how to thwart those attacks!

IMO every gubernatorial candidate in California should have an answer to the question "what's your strategy if Trump tries to turn San Francisco into another Minneapolis next year," and if I were a state politics reporter I'd be calling them up to ask that very question.

Deeply bizarre to be Scots Irish on both sides and have never, ever heard this “Heritage American” shit before this admin. Not even from my conservative relatives. I was more likely to hear a valorization of outlaw hillbillies than this “Noble inheritors of the fatherland” nonsense.

RETVRN (to Sicilians speaking a dialect of Ancient Greek)

Do I have any mutuals who are professional graphic designers and who I could trouble offline for five minutes of free feedback on something.

"Lincoln, in other words, rejects the notion that American nationhood is rooted in genetic ancestry. It is instead rooted in a shared creed based on a particular conception of liberty and political equality."

Good stuff as always from @resnikoff.bsky.social

The Great Retcon The invention of "heritage Americans"

“National identities such as ‘French’ and ‘Italian’ were things that had to be invented, and they were often imposed through military or state power.” @resnikoff.bsky.social publiccomment.blog/p/the-great-...

This very smart post leaders to a much broader point: if the identitarian right is going to invent an exclusionary racist American heritage and history, then its opponents will need to their own positive, full throated statement of American heritage and history.

One of the ways you can tell this is all code is by the combination of prolixity and imprecision that tends to accompany these paeans to the American race. Listening to them, you might sometimes find yourself paraphrasing Liz Lemon and blurting out, “J.D., just say Aryan, this is taking forever.” And indeed, when less adroit Nazis like Elon Musk try to circle around a clearer articulation of what they mean by American heritage, they end up making hilariously ahistorical claims about, for example, the “English-Scotts-Irish origin” of American culture. (“Scotch-Irish” is, in the words of one historian, “an Americanism, generally unknown in Scotland and Ireland and rarely used by British historians.”) The fact is, there’s very little basis for any of this stuff, at least if you’re looking for historical roots deeper than the middle of the nineteenth century. “Scotch-Irish” as a self-descriptor appears to have only entered common usage after large-scale Irish immigration to the United States began in the 1840s; incumbent Presbyterian communities sought a way to distinguish themselves from the largely poor, Catholic newcomers. (Ironically, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Eric Schmitt are all Catholic; Elon Musk is “culturally Christian,” whatever that means.) The “Western Civilization” that, according to Rubio, binds America to Europe, is of a similarly recent vintage. As Yuri Slezkine observed in a recent essay for The New York Review of Books, there were no self-identified “Westerners” until the nineteenth century—and most of the early theorists of Western Civilization made a point of excluding Russia from their definition, which would no doubt upset many of Vladimir Putin’s fans on the American far right. Even the concept of a single, coherent nation that commands one’s personal allegiance is an invention of the 1800s; one that was more commonly associated with liberalism than aristocratic conservatism in its early iterations. [truncated due to character limit]

publiccomment.blog/p/the-great-...

The Great Retcon The invention of "heritage Americans"

Decided to blog about this: publiccomment.blog/p/the-great-...

The Great Retcon The invention of "heritage Americans"

For my newsletter, I wrote about "heritage Americans" and the real meaning of nationhood. publiccomment.blog/p/the-great-...

It’s basically legal for drivers to kill pedestrians in America, especially if you do it while driving a Mercedes

I've been rewatching Twin Peaks and it is difficult to get my head around the fact that this was on the air in 1990 and 1991. It's so far advanced beyond anything on television *right now,* let alone 35 years ago.

If these Nazis weren't so historically illiterate they might know that, for example, the country of Italy wasn't a unified linguistic community until circa the 19th century. Their "common cultures" are very much modern inventions.

The kind of utter confusion Brooks is going to inflict on Yale undergrads.

Poor management is costing Los Angeles millions of dollars earned for street upgrades. It's infuriating. The city needs change at the top.

Chart showing consistent rent declines in Los Angeles since mid-2022.

Rents are falling in Los Angeles.

People who don't follow these arguments *will never believe* how controversial the idea that this is how it works is

A chart showing that the nationwide rental vacancy rate has been rising since late 2021.

A chart showing that median rent spiked precipitously around the pandemic but has since begun a modest decline.

Rents are declining nationwide because the United States is building more housing. www.apartmentlist.com/research/nat...

I'm going to start drastically limiting my time on here and pour more energy into my newsletter (publiccomment.blog) in part because I don't think it's healthy to be regularly exposed to takes this radioactive.