NY Times Opinion Column: "America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals"

[cawacko]

Provocative title, especially for something in the New York Times, but the author is pretty spot on in what he writes. Folks are talking about Bernie's new Bill of Rights which says housing is a right but as stated here people may support that in theory but they don't want that housing built near them. Having lived in urban areas for the past 35+ years I can agree with the author of all the good that are in our cities. But he nails the issues.




America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.

The demise of a California housing measure shows how progressives abandon progressive values in their own backyards.

By Farhad Manjoo


To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.

The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

Just look at San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s city. One of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000. Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute.

And there is no end in sight to such crushing success. At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing.

It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.

There are many threads in the story of America’s increasingly unlivable cities. One continuing tragedy is the decimation of local media and the rise of nationalized politics in its place. In America the “local” problems plaguing cities are systematically sidelined by the structure of the national media and government, in which the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court are all constitutionally tilted in favor of places where no one lives. (There are more than twice as many people in my midsize suburban county, Santa Clara, as there are in the entire state of North Dakota, with its two United States senators.)

That’s why, aside from Elizabeth Warren — who has a plan for housing, as she has a plan for everything — Democrats on the 2020 presidential trail rarely mention their ideas for housing affordability, an issue eating American cities alive. I watched Joe Biden’s campaign kick off the other day; the only house he mentioned was the White House.

Then there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support at the national level. Creating dense, economically and socially diverse urban environments ought to be a paramount goal of progressivism. Cities are the standard geographical unit of the global economy. Dense urban areas are quite literally the “real America” — the cities are where two-thirds of Americans live, and they account for almost all national economic output. Urban areas are the most environmentally friendly way we know of housing lots of people. We can’t solve the climate crisis without vastly improving public transportation and increasing urban density. More than that, metropolises are good for the psyche and the soul; density fosters tolerance, diversity, creativity and progress.


Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing. The bill would have erased single-family zoning in populous areas near transit locations. Areas zoned for homes housing a handful of people could have been redeveloped to include duplexes and apartment buildings that housed hundreds.


The bill had garnered support from a diverse coalition of business and advocacy groups, and its sponsor, State Senator Scott Wiener, had negotiated a series of compromises with some of its fiercest opponents. Polls showed the measure to be widely popular. For the first time, something extraordinary looked possible: California’s wealthy homeowners would abandon their restrictionist attitudes and let us build some new housing.

Nope. Instead, Anthony Portantino, a Democratic state senator whose district includes the posh city of La Cañada Flintridge and who heads the appropriations committee, announced that he’d be shelving the bill until next year. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he worried that the law would spur lots of people to move near residential bus routes, which he suggested would alter the character of enclaves like his.

And? Why is that so bad?

Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.

“We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/o...ing-nimby.html

[Grokmaster]

Almost belaboring the OBVIOUS, isn't it?

[/MSG/]

metropolises are good for the psyche and the soul; density fosters tolerance, diversity, creativity and progress.

That's some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Guess the author has never heard of Dunbars Number.

[Centerleftfl]

I live in 'one of those' communities. The workers 'come in' work and go home--the nannies, the house-cleaners, yard workers, repairmen. The teachers come here and teach our kids and go home. The police and firefighter come here put out our fires and save us when we have heart attacks or 'fall and we can't get up'. The waiters and waitresses and grocery clerks all come here to work and go home. THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE HERE. This is not just a CITY problem.

The upside HERE is they can cross the county line by 4 or 5 miles or cross the intercoastal waterway by 5 or 6 miles and there is comfortable liveable and affordable HOUSING--houses, apartments, condos, the rest. They can go another 10 miles and find even more affordable, still nice comfortable and liveable housing.

Of course everyone here MUST have a car.

[anonymoose]

I live in 'one of those' communities. They can go another 10 miles and find even more affordable and still nice comfortable housing.

Of course everyone here MUST have a car.

Ever been to the Bay Area? Impossible.
Of course in my city the muni workers belong to public unions so they can afford to live in mansions and retire at about 50.

[Truth Detector]

Provocative title, especially for something in the New York Times, but the author is pretty spot on in what he writes. Folks are talking about Bernie's new Bill of Rights which says housing is a right but as stated here people may support that in theory but they don't want that housing built near them. Having lived in urban areas for the past 35+ years I can agree with the author of all the good that are in our cities. But he nails the issues.




America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.

The demise of a California housing measure shows how progressives abandon progressive values in their own backyards.

By Farhad Manjoo


To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.

The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

Just look at San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s city. One of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000. Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute.

And there is no end in sight to such crushing success. At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing.

It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.

There are many threads in the story of America’s increasingly unlivable cities. One continuing tragedy is the decimation of local media and the rise of nationalized politics in its place. In America the “local” problems plaguing cities are systematically sidelined by the structure of the national media and government, in which the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court are all constitutionally tilted in favor of places where no one lives. (There are more than twice as many people in my midsize suburban county, Santa Clara, as there are in the entire state of North Dakota, with its two United States senators.)

That’s why, aside from Elizabeth Warren — who has a plan for housing, as she has a plan for everything — Democrats on the 2020 presidential trail rarely mention their ideas for housing affordability, an issue eating American cities alive. I watched Joe Biden’s campaign kick off the other day; the only house he mentioned was the White House.

Then there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support at the national level. Creating dense, economically and socially diverse urban environments ought to be a paramount goal of progressivism. Cities are the standard geographical unit of the global economy. Dense urban areas are quite literally the “real America” — the cities are where two-thirds of Americans live, and they account for almost all national economic output. Urban areas are the most environmentally friendly way we know of housing lots of people. We can’t solve the climate crisis without vastly improving public transportation and increasing urban density. More than that, metropolises are good for the psyche and the soul; density fosters tolerance, diversity, creativity and progress.


Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing. The bill would have erased single-family zoning in populous areas near transit locations. Areas zoned for homes housing a handful of people could have been redeveloped to include duplexes and apartment buildings that housed hundreds.


The bill had garnered support from a diverse coalition of business and advocacy groups, and its sponsor, State Senator Scott Wiener, had negotiated a series of compromises with some of its fiercest opponents. Polls showed the measure to be widely popular. For the first time, something extraordinary looked possible: California’s wealthy homeowners would abandon their restrictionist attitudes and let us build some new housing.

Nope. Instead, Anthony Portantino, a Democratic state senator whose district includes the posh city of La Cañada Flintridge and who heads the appropriations committee, announced that he’d be shelving the bill until next year. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he worried that the law would spur lots of people to move near residential bus routes, which he suggested would alter the character of enclaves like his.

And? Why is that so bad?

Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.

“We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/o...ing-nimby.html

I am always surprised when a young liberal gets it. The irony is that he will still support the Democratic Demagogues over Conservatives with real solutions.

[leaningright]

... metropolises are good for the psyche and the soul; density fosters tolerance, diversity, creativity and progress.

Such an interesting read. I was, like grind? ... struck by the above quoted statement. While metropolises might be good to foster “tolerance” and “diversity” they are most definitely not good for my “psyche” or “soul.”

The writer of the article makes sense though. I know he blames the democrats (and maybe rightly so) but I think there are probably a lot of people on both sides who have the NIMBY attitude when it comes to low cost housing. I assume that they look at what are now slum areas (once the low cost living solution of days gone by) of other major cities as justification.

But you’re right, something’s gotta give. We can’t continue to have tent cities and sidewalk dwelling be the solution. It’s a sad deal.

[Getin the ring]

I live in 'one of those' communities. The workers 'come in' work and go home, the house-cleaners, yard workers, repairmen. The teachers come here and teach our kids and go home. The police and firefighter come here put out our fires and save us when we have heart attacks or 'fall and we can't get up'. The waiters and waitresses and grocery clerks all come here to work and go home. THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE HERE. This is not just a CITY problem.

The upside HERE is they can cross the county line by 4 or 5 miles or cross the intercoastal waterway by 5 or 6 miles and there is comfortable liveable and affordable HOUSING--houses, apartments, condos, the rest. They can go another 10 miles and find even more affordable, still nice comfortable and liveable housing.

Of course everyone here MUST have a car.

there must be some point to this drivvle ^^^

I'm still searching

[anonymoose]

While metropolises might be good to foster “tolerance” and “diversity” they are most definitely [i]not[/n] good for my “psyche” or “soul.”
.

Henry David Thoreau would agree with you.

[anonymoose]

there must be some point to this drivvle ^^^

I'm still searching

I was hoping for a rational response from someone on the left. Still waiting.

[archives]

Provocative title, especially for something in the New York Times, but the author is pretty spot on in what he writes. Folks are talking about Bernie's new Bill of Rights which says housing is a right but as stated here people may support that in theory but they don't want that housing built near them. Having lived in urban areas for the past 35+ years I can agree with the author of all the good that are in our cities. But he nails the issues.




America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.

The demise of a California housing measure shows how progressives abandon progressive values in their own backyards.

By Farhad Manjoo


To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.

The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

Just look at San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s city. One of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000. Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute.

And there is no end in sight to such crushing success. At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing.

It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.

There are many threads in the story of America’s increasingly unlivable cities. One continuing tragedy is the decimation of local media and the rise of nationalized politics in its place. In America the “local” problems plaguing cities are systematically sidelined by the structure of the national media and government, in which the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court are all constitutionally tilted in favor of places where no one lives. (There are more than twice as many people in my midsize suburban county, Santa Clara, as there are in the entire state of North Dakota, with its two United States senators.)

That’s why, aside from Elizabeth Warren — who has a plan for housing, as she has a plan for everything — Democrats on the 2020 presidential trail rarely mention their ideas for housing affordability, an issue eating American cities alive. I watched Joe Biden’s campaign kick off the other day; the only house he mentioned was the White House.

Then there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support at the national level. Creating dense, economically and socially diverse urban environments ought to be a paramount goal of progressivism. Cities are the standard geographical unit of the global economy. Dense urban areas are quite literally the “real America” — the cities are where two-thirds of Americans live, and they account for almost all national economic output. Urban areas are the most environmentally friendly way we know of housing lots of people. We can’t solve the climate crisis without vastly improving public transportation and increasing urban density. More than that, metropolises are good for the psyche and the soul; density fosters tolerance, diversity, creativity and progress.


Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing. The bill would have erased single-family zoning in populous areas near transit locations. Areas zoned for homes housing a handful of people could have been redeveloped to include duplexes and apartment buildings that housed hundreds.


The bill had garnered support from a diverse coalition of business and advocacy groups, and its sponsor, State Senator Scott Wiener, had negotiated a series of compromises with some of its fiercest opponents. Polls showed the measure to be widely popular. For the first time, something extraordinary looked possible: California’s wealthy homeowners would abandon their restrictionist attitudes and let us build some new housing.

Nope. Instead, Anthony Portantino, a Democratic state senator whose district includes the posh city of La Cañada Flintridge and who heads the appropriations committee, announced that he’d be shelving the bill until next year. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he worried that the law would spur lots of people to move near residential bus routes, which he suggested would alter the character of enclaves like his.

And? Why is that so bad?

Reading opposition to SB 50 and other efforts at increasing density, I’m struck by an unsettling thought: What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.

“We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/o...ing-nimby.html

For starters, the NYT has an array of conservative contributors, some quite renowned as Willis, Brooks, and until his death, Krauthammer

A large part of the issue the author doesn't stress is just the pure success of capitalism, the problems that burden the cities are partially the product of income inequality, the sucess of a few among the stagnation of many. It is not a new problem, but rather more exaggerated now with the further division between peoples' resources.

And historically, those people elected those Democrat Administrations because they saw their solutions and achievements as better than anything the opposition was offering

The author is correct, America 's cities define the US, and the majority of Americans live in cities, but the political system is based upon geography and not people

[archives]

That's some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Guess the author has never heard of Dunbars Number.

Hardly, those people living among other people who aren't the same as them leads to an understand, whole lot different than those growing up in Kansas who have lived the majority of their life among others who look, act and think exactly as they do

[archives]

I live in 'one of those' communities. The workers 'come in' work and go home, the house-cleaners, yard workers, repairmen. The teachers come here and teach our kids and go home. The police and firefighter come here put out our fires and save us when we have heart attacks or 'fall and we can't get up'. The waiters and waitresses and grocery clerks all come here to work and go home. THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE HERE. This is not just a CITY problem.

The upside HERE is they can cross the county line by 4 or 5 miles or cross the intercoastal waterway by 5 or 6 miles and there is comfortable liveable and affordable HOUSING--houses, apartments, condos, the rest. They can go another 10 miles and find even more affordable, still nice comfortable and liveable housing.

Of course everyone here MUST have a car.

Better yet, access to quality mass transit

[/MSG/]

Hardly, those people living among other people who aren't the same as them leads to an understand, whole lot different than those growing up in Kansas who have lived the majority of their life among others who look, act and think exactly as they do

Yeah, in small numbers. Humans can only hold around 150 distinct social relationships.

[archives]

Ever been to the Bay Area? Impossible.
Of course in my city the muni workers belong to public unions so they can afford to live in mansions and retire at about 50.

Are those the same "muni workers" who have most likely worked their whole life with minimalist salary, subject to the whims and tendencies of the local politicians, and probably have been picking up your garbage and making sure your sewer worked for decades? Or the ones who don't know when they report to work in the morning if they will be alive when their shifts end?