I appreciate the review. What I appreciate even more is that you confirmed you got the popcorn bucket shaped like Barbie’s corvette, complete with Margot Robbie Perfect Day Barbie because as soon as I got to the part of the article where you mentioned arriving too early and not getting it I thought to myself "but she got it eventually, right?!"
At least Judge Cannon didn't schedule it after the general. Evidently she might have noticed that clowning around on this one could get her up shit creek. Probably that severed horsehead the appeals court left on her bed about the "special master" affair got her attention.
For sure and I support such amelioration schemes because I think that their actual cost would be pretty small. But I also, cynically, think that NIMBY opposition can't be bought off with such offers because it's fundamentally non-financial and irrational. The most passionate NIMBY's simply don't want their neighborhoods to change, don't want more people around them and don't want to say either of those things and thus cloak their venal desires in camouflaged language.
For sure I'd support that, especially since the actual numerical value of dollar losses you could expect individuals to face from developments would be quite low.
But, similarly, I fear you'd find that NIMBY objections would likely not be mollified by such a program since the root of their animus against development lies in less tangible complaints like "Parking", "traffic" and the evergreen "neighborhood character".
I do think accepting that pro-development policies are zero sum, with NIMBY's on one, potentially losing, side is very much accepting NIMBY framing and helping NIMBY's keep their coalition together.
Well yeah, plus Cali has horrific distortions from the way voter initiatives have borked up their taxation regime- Proposition 13 chief and worst of all of them.
I agree you maybe can't build a national constituency around YIMBY but I am dubious that a solution to housing lies at the national/federal level. Housing regulations are set at the municipal/city level and those entities derive their authority from their state constitutions (via their state government) so it seems to me that housing policy can most plausibly be tackled at a state level. That gets it up away from the parochial interests of the nakedly unpersuadable NIMBY's and lets the politicians talk in sweeping positive terms that can disarm the lower temperature/irrational NIMBY's (who are, let's be clear, the majority of NIMBY's).
Not intending to pick on you specifically but using this framing is, in of itself, a capitulation to NIMBY framing. The reality is that the majority of NIMBY home owners would be financially helped, not harmed, if they lost their policy battle against development.
Let’s start off by carving off the genuinely wealthy NIMBY’s who own assets well beyond just their home. They’re NIMBY’s because they’ve got theirs and they want their neighborhoods to remain as is. Everything else they say is just camouflage for that sentiment and the only rational response to that truth is to just shrug. They’re the literal bootleggers of the Baptist/bootlegger NIMBY coalition. They’re unpersuadable and they’re a significant minority. Fish em.
If you take the NIMBY’s that you have left, the ones for whom their home is their only major asset, from that the number who would be genuinely financially damaged by development in their neighborhood is vanishingly small. Yes, NIMBY’s have their favorite horror stories they like to highlight but the reality is that making neighborhoods denser generally makes the land more valuable, not less. They are understandably averse to change because they’re often older and, frankly, old people don’t like change, but the reality is densifying their neighborhoods would be good for the vast majority of them; not bad.
And, of course, there’s no small contingent of NIMBY’s who would be flat out, unambiguously, helped by widespread development. All the “anti-gentrifiers” and any of them who rent, for instance. They are being fooled by ideology of by the wealthy “bootlegger” NIMBY’s into voting directly contrary to their interests.
I put up a Josh Barro link below and he touches on all this a bit. YIMBY movements are making some decent inroads in places and they have the significant advantage of being right on the substantive merits. A talented politician can square this circle by focusing their messaging on positive, but anti-NIMBY themes and actually do very well. NIMBY’s greatest power is simply their disparity of passion in local, low involvement, elections where the zoning decisions get made. I do agree with Saul, moving zoning decisions up a few rungs may be a good idea.
Barro has a pretty decent answer to Freddie
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/yimbys-are-doing-better-than-they?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=573691&post_id=135331590&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
Here here. Every possible solution has to pass through the gate of zoning/permitting reform. It may or may not be sufficient by itself but without it nothing will work.
On the one hand, this seems dumb. On the other hand I'm not in the jury.
On the policy hand- I argue with libertarians in meatspace and virtual space a bit. Some of them are emphatically against regulations saying "if there's any harm, they should sue" but then at later times always go off about tort reform. I get the biggest shit eating grins from them when I point out the dichotomy there- and then they wonder why it is that the ignorant masses never seriously give libertarianism a chance.
DEI has been getting the chop chop across the corporate world for quite some time now. Contrary to the rights fulminations it's not some ascendant successor ideology to liberalism- it's just a fad. What is worthy in it will become part of liberalism and the larger part that's dross will be discarded. Corporate wise there just isn't enough market boost to be worth paying for those largely performative positions any more if there ever was.
I partially disagree with Freddie here. NIMBY is a choice and also structure. Freddie has a lot of denunciations for online YIMBY movements but, of course, online YIMBY's, just like online anything, are not representative of the masses.
While I am trying to remain open to Freddie’s point I think he lets his social media focus color his scorn along with his very obvious discomfort with the fact that the more libertarian themes are probably more right than wrong and housing shortages are overwhelmingly due to problematic state controls on construction in local markets. We’ve seen this again and again. Even when attempts are made towards left wing housing solutions such as public construction of housing, that money runs afoul of the same NIMBY barriers to development and end up producing a laughably small number of housing units at insane per unit costs.
A personal anecdote: I recently had the “fortune” to put my YIMBY principles to the test. My husband and I had the fortune to purchase a single family home in Minneapolis within the city itself. The neighborhood is about 75% multifamily dwellings but there’re pockets of older single-family houses scattered throughout it. This year I was notified that the owners of a small single family bungalow that neighbors our home to the south were planning on redeveloping the lot into a 3 story tall apartment building with ten one bedroom apartment units. I have always been ra-ra development and I remain so but I absolutely could feel the NIMBY horror crawling down my spine. Less light from the south*, more street parking, what would it do to the value of our house etc etc etc. I was tested and I passed. I attended the community input stage of the planning and voiced support for the development and now there’s a pit to the south of my house (the builders are nice- they even paid us 200 bucks to use our hose, wtf?). Now Minneapolis (thankfully) has instituted a housing plan that encourages a lot more development so I suspect that a “South” version of me going full raging NIMBY wouldn’t have been able to stop it but I’m sure he could have gummed things up.
The point is, NIMBY is absolutely a choice. I know objectively, first hand, that it’s a choice. Now perhaps Freddie means something along the lines of “housing as private property is a structural choice not an individual choice” and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear such lunacy from him- he’s always been a dear genuine commie (said with utmost affection).
And, slightly off topic, it gratifies me enormously that Freddie has done so well by Substack. His writing has always been fire. And I had been fishin worried as hell about him for quite a while there.
*In Minnesota obstructions to the south of you are a big deal because the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest in winter.
Well the policy asks from the T part of LGBT are pretty vague in general beyond a perfectly reasonable request to be treated humanely. It's a curious intellectual exercise to ponder if that's because of something inherent to the T movement or if it's simply because of the state of both social media as it is now and right wing weakness. The battles with the LGB portion of the alliance happened in an environment with less and different social media and a much stronger social right wing.
I'm unaware of any declarations of "commitment to revolution" that predate* the foofaraw that followed when right wing media glommed onto the campaign and it went viral. If you have any references I'd be interested because I haven't seen any but I confess not to having dug into it deeply.
*Declarations after it blew up are meaningless since, at that point, they'd be skittering for any ideological shelter or retort they could find.
No, Jay, I think that to the degree the execs thought about it at all it they thought about it like a variation of the apocryphal Pauline Kael quote that Nixon couldn’t have won because everyone she knew voted against him.
But I think the social media brain rot in this case was that the people behind this Bud Lite decision probably weren’t even thinking about how the masses would respond to it at all, but rather were thinking about the plaudits and praise they’d get from their social media environs for putting Mulvaney in their branding message first and foremost. Then only absently going Kael like as a second order thought about how it’d be received.
So I don't think it was cynical manipulation or even, screw those hicks defiance- I think it was pure social media thoughtlessness.
Sure, if that was their plan. But I think that the better take away from this saga is simply that social media is c-suite and decision maker brain rot. It gives them a distorted understanding of what "everyone" wants and it skews decision makers incentive away from messages and decisions that will be broadly successful and towards messages and decisions that will earn said decision maker plaudits from their social media environ. In a lot of cases it’s an open question as to if the decision maker is even thinking about broad success at all.
The media have always been prone to throwing their collective underwear at prosecutors. Remember how they lost their fishing minds over Mueller? Or the credence they gave that laughable clown Durham?
On “It’s Barbie’s World!”
Hmmm.... no, not at all actually. Like, not even in the same neighborhood.
"
I appreciate the review. What I appreciate even more is that you confirmed you got the popcorn bucket shaped like Barbie’s corvette, complete with Margot Robbie Perfect Day Barbie because as soon as I got to the part of the article where you mentioned arriving too early and not getting it I thought to myself "but she got it eventually, right?!"
On “Ten Things I Think After Watching Oppenheimer”
Thank you, this makes me want to see it even more.
On “YIMBYs, NIMBYs, and Freddies”
For sure, I'm all for it. Thankfully the internet YIMBY's are not representative of the politician YIMBY"s
On “Trump’s Classified Document Trial Scheduled”
At least Judge Cannon didn't schedule it after the general. Evidently she might have noticed that clowning around on this one could get her up shit creek. Probably that severed horsehead the appeals court left on her bed about the "special master" affair got her attention.
On “YIMBYs, NIMBYs, and Freddies”
Yes, agreed. I think the baptists can be bought off of ameliorated from that coalition but I suspect the bootleggers cannot.
"
Absolutely, and perhaps that's what enough NIMBY's want but I suspect/fear it isn't.
"
For sure and I support such amelioration schemes because I think that their actual cost would be pretty small. But I also, cynically, think that NIMBY opposition can't be bought off with such offers because it's fundamentally non-financial and irrational. The most passionate NIMBY's simply don't want their neighborhoods to change, don't want more people around them and don't want to say either of those things and thus cloak their venal desires in camouflaged language.
"
To be fair, YIMBY is only a dewy eyed baby in terms of ages of political movements.
"
For sure I'd support that, especially since the actual numerical value of dollar losses you could expect individuals to face from developments would be quite low.
But, similarly, I fear you'd find that NIMBY objections would likely not be mollified by such a program since the root of their animus against development lies in less tangible complaints like "Parking", "traffic" and the evergreen "neighborhood character".
"
I do think accepting that pro-development policies are zero sum, with NIMBY's on one, potentially losing, side is very much accepting NIMBY framing and helping NIMBY's keep their coalition together.
Well yeah, plus Cali has horrific distortions from the way voter initiatives have borked up their taxation regime- Proposition 13 chief and worst of all of them.
I agree you maybe can't build a national constituency around YIMBY but I am dubious that a solution to housing lies at the national/federal level. Housing regulations are set at the municipal/city level and those entities derive their authority from their state constitutions (via their state government) so it seems to me that housing policy can most plausibly be tackled at a state level. That gets it up away from the parochial interests of the nakedly unpersuadable NIMBY's and lets the politicians talk in sweeping positive terms that can disarm the lower temperature/irrational NIMBY's (who are, let's be clear, the majority of NIMBY's).
"
I laughed, hard.
"
Not intending to pick on you specifically but using this framing is, in of itself, a capitulation to NIMBY framing. The reality is that the majority of NIMBY home owners would be financially helped, not harmed, if they lost their policy battle against development.
Let’s start off by carving off the genuinely wealthy NIMBY’s who own assets well beyond just their home. They’re NIMBY’s because they’ve got theirs and they want their neighborhoods to remain as is. Everything else they say is just camouflage for that sentiment and the only rational response to that truth is to just shrug. They’re the literal bootleggers of the Baptist/bootlegger NIMBY coalition. They’re unpersuadable and they’re a significant minority. Fish em.
If you take the NIMBY’s that you have left, the ones for whom their home is their only major asset, from that the number who would be genuinely financially damaged by development in their neighborhood is vanishingly small. Yes, NIMBY’s have their favorite horror stories they like to highlight but the reality is that making neighborhoods denser generally makes the land more valuable, not less. They are understandably averse to change because they’re often older and, frankly, old people don’t like change, but the reality is densifying their neighborhoods would be good for the vast majority of them; not bad.
And, of course, there’s no small contingent of NIMBY’s who would be flat out, unambiguously, helped by widespread development. All the “anti-gentrifiers” and any of them who rent, for instance. They are being fooled by ideology of by the wealthy “bootlegger” NIMBY’s into voting directly contrary to their interests.
I put up a Josh Barro link below and he touches on all this a bit. YIMBY movements are making some decent inroads in places and they have the significant advantage of being right on the substantive merits. A talented politician can square this circle by focusing their messaging on positive, but anti-NIMBY themes and actually do very well. NIMBY’s greatest power is simply their disparity of passion in local, low involvement, elections where the zoning decisions get made. I do agree with Saul, moving zoning decisions up a few rungs may be a good idea.
"
Barro has a pretty decent answer to Freddie
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/yimbys-are-doing-better-than-they?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=573691&post_id=135331590&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
"
Heheh perhaps that is true, oh Saulza the Amazing, tell me, what card am I thinking of right now?
"
Here here. Every possible solution has to pass through the gate of zoning/permitting reform. It may or may not be sufficient by itself but without it nothing will work.
On “The $800K McNugget: A Legal Discussion”
On the one hand, this seems dumb. On the other hand I'm not in the jury.
On the policy hand- I argue with libertarians in meatspace and virtual space a bit. Some of them are emphatically against regulations saying "if there's any harm, they should sue" but then at later times always go off about tort reform. I get the biggest shit eating grins from them when I point out the dichotomy there- and then they wonder why it is that the ignorant masses never seriously give libertarianism a chance.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/17/2023”
DEI has been getting the chop chop across the corporate world for quite some time now. Contrary to the rights fulminations it's not some ascendant successor ideology to liberalism- it's just a fad. What is worthy in it will become part of liberalism and the larger part that's dross will be discarded. Corporate wise there just isn't enough market boost to be worth paying for those largely performative positions any more if there ever was.
On “YIMBYs, NIMBYs, and Freddies”
I partially disagree with Freddie here. NIMBY is a choice and also structure. Freddie has a lot of denunciations for online YIMBY movements but, of course, online YIMBY's, just like online anything, are not representative of the masses.
While I am trying to remain open to Freddie’s point I think he lets his social media focus color his scorn along with his very obvious discomfort with the fact that the more libertarian themes are probably more right than wrong and housing shortages are overwhelmingly due to problematic state controls on construction in local markets. We’ve seen this again and again. Even when attempts are made towards left wing housing solutions such as public construction of housing, that money runs afoul of the same NIMBY barriers to development and end up producing a laughably small number of housing units at insane per unit costs.
A personal anecdote: I recently had the “fortune” to put my YIMBY principles to the test. My husband and I had the fortune to purchase a single family home in Minneapolis within the city itself. The neighborhood is about 75% multifamily dwellings but there’re pockets of older single-family houses scattered throughout it. This year I was notified that the owners of a small single family bungalow that neighbors our home to the south were planning on redeveloping the lot into a 3 story tall apartment building with ten one bedroom apartment units. I have always been ra-ra development and I remain so but I absolutely could feel the NIMBY horror crawling down my spine. Less light from the south*, more street parking, what would it do to the value of our house etc etc etc. I was tested and I passed. I attended the community input stage of the planning and voiced support for the development and now there’s a pit to the south of my house (the builders are nice- they even paid us 200 bucks to use our hose, wtf?). Now Minneapolis (thankfully) has instituted a housing plan that encourages a lot more development so I suspect that a “South” version of me going full raging NIMBY wouldn’t have been able to stop it but I’m sure he could have gummed things up.
The point is, NIMBY is absolutely a choice. I know objectively, first hand, that it’s a choice. Now perhaps Freddie means something along the lines of “housing as private property is a structural choice not an individual choice” and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear such lunacy from him- he’s always been a dear genuine commie (said with utmost affection).
And, slightly off topic, it gratifies me enormously that Freddie has done so well by Substack. His writing has always been fire. And I had been fishin worried as hell about him for quite a while there.
*In Minnesota obstructions to the south of you are a big deal because the sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest in winter.
On “That’s Not How That Works: “The New Right’s Theory of Power””
Well the policy asks from the T part of LGBT are pretty vague in general beyond a perfectly reasonable request to be treated humanely. It's a curious intellectual exercise to ponder if that's because of something inherent to the T movement or if it's simply because of the state of both social media as it is now and right wing weakness. The battles with the LGB portion of the alliance happened in an environment with less and different social media and a much stronger social right wing.
"
I'm unaware of any declarations of "commitment to revolution" that predate* the foofaraw that followed when right wing media glommed onto the campaign and it went viral. If you have any references I'd be interested because I haven't seen any but I confess not to having dug into it deeply.
*Declarations after it blew up are meaningless since, at that point, they'd be skittering for any ideological shelter or retort they could find.
"
No, Jay, I think that to the degree the execs thought about it at all it they thought about it like a variation of the apocryphal Pauline Kael quote that Nixon couldn’t have won because everyone she knew voted against him.
But I think the social media brain rot in this case was that the people behind this Bud Lite decision probably weren’t even thinking about how the masses would respond to it at all, but rather were thinking about the plaudits and praise they’d get from their social media environs for putting Mulvaney in their branding message first and foremost. Then only absently going Kael like as a second order thought about how it’d be received.
So I don't think it was cynical manipulation or even, screw those hicks defiance- I think it was pure social media thoughtlessness.
"
Sure, if that was their plan. But I think that the better take away from this saga is simply that social media is c-suite and decision maker brain rot. It gives them a distorted understanding of what "everyone" wants and it skews decision makers incentive away from messages and decisions that will be broadly successful and towards messages and decisions that will earn said decision maker plaudits from their social media environ. In a lot of cases it’s an open question as to if the decision maker is even thinking about broad success at all.
"
I don't think it'd be going out on a limb to say that Bud lite's primary marketing target wasn't and isn't trans people and their allies.
On “Rule of Tod Video Playback: Campaign Silly Season Edition”
The media have always been prone to throwing their collective underwear at prosecutors. Remember how they lost their fishing minds over Mueller? Or the credence they gave that laughable clown Durham?