Ned Resnikoff

@resnikoff.bsky.social

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Newsletter: http://publiccomment.blog/ Hire me to write/research/do policy analysis: http://resnikoffconsulting.com/ Pre-order my book! https://bookshop.org/p/books/build-or-die-how-america-is-suffocating-its-cities-and-what-to-do-about-it-ned-resnikoff/

This makes the false assumptions that Stancil is asking questions in good faith and genuinely open to understanding more. "Why won't yo just debate me, bro?" trolls exist in every political alignment, not just the right.
“Ned Resnikoff is one of the heroes of the YIMBY movement. While there have been a number of foundational works on our housing crisis written in the past few years, Resnikoff brings something different to the genre—real work in the trenches of the struggle combined with deep theoretical sophistication and a powerful point of view. Build or Die is a destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center
“The East Bay district I represent has been rocked by the intertwining crises addressed in Build or Die: soaring housing costs, a strained public transit system, and cities that bear the scars of historic redlining and exclusionary zoning. Our urban centers are in crisis, and our community members suffer the consequences. To understand where we go from here, research like Ned Resnikoff’s is invaluable. With a journalist’s relentless curiosity and a policy analyst’s deep subject matter expertise, Resnikoff has dedicated himself to the betterment of our cities—a defining fight of our times.”—Buffy Wicks, California State assemblymember
“Rarely do you find a prescient journalist, a captivating writer, and a committed activist in the same person, but Ned Resnikoff is all three. In Build or Die, Resnikoff explains how a century of political choices produced today’s housing crisis and how Democratic cities, by failing to make good on the promise of competent government, risk becoming complicit in the far right’s campaign to discredit liberalism itself. This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument “In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.”—Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor, The Atlantic “Build or Die is a deeply informed account of why the housing, transportation, and governance challenges facing American cities are not inevitable but the result of policy decisions that we can change. Ned Resnikoff is a trusted expert and wise voice in the burgeoning pro-housing movement and speaks from a place of hard-fought experience, rigorous research, and fundamental care. Build or Die is for anyone who cares about the future of American cities—and the hope and promise of American multiracial democracy itself.”—Annemarie Gray, executive director of Open New York
Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”
Screenshot of Mark from Peep Show with a speech bubble
The 39-ish Most Stylish People of 2026, So Far On red carpets, on set, onstage and even up in space, they captured our attention with their looks.
Like many other Americans, I went to public schools and worked shitty jobs. I spent a year attending community college philosophy classes, and some of the best nights of my life have been spent standing outside a strip-mall GameStop. In those days—closing up pizza restaurants, drinking beers in garages, debating the Iraq War—I came across a lot of guys like Platner. This country is tiled with adrift twentysomething males, beset with incoherent politics, whose opinion about any issue is generated in the 10 seconds after they’ve been asked the question. We’ve shunned those former doofuses and nihilists for so long, even as it becomes clear that the future of the nation hinges on bringing them along. They are not perfect, but you know what? I’ll take as many of them as I can get.
Post from Mehdi Hasan on threads, with a screencap of the following excerpt: "Does anyone really believe that the usually cautious New York Times would have run a piece making similarly incendiary claims against an establishment politician, based almost wholly on the uncorroborated allegations of a single source who just happens to be a long-standing activist from the opposing party? Is it any wonder that so many people online see this article as a hit job against an anti-oligarchy, anti-Israel populist?"
Headline from Ken Klippenstein's Substack: Graham Platner Loses Washington's Vote And yet the era of smoothgroin politicians is coming to an end
A map of the United States from the National Weather Service, showing the current status of the heat wave.
That 2020s political compass test going around except somehow the result is Alexandre Kojève
Ladies stipulated that the solution of the problem of squaring the circle
“I saw so many connections between what was happening to Palestinians there in Palestine and what was happening to so many communities across the U.S., particularly Black and Latino communities, who have been priced out and pushed out of our homes,” said Avila Chevalier, who — like most candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America — draws her strongest support from predominantly white and highly educated residents of the district. “When we talk about displacement in the West Bank and Gaza, it is a very similar, visually similar situation, where people who have been in a place for generations, are being displaced because of corporate interests, because of folks who are coming in, claiming the land over, and buying it up and kicking the people who live there out.”
Visualization showing that the Slate Auto is significantly smaller and less likely to kill kids than the Chevy Silverado
Scene from the Simpsons: Leonard Nimoy says "my work here is done," to which Barney replies, "What do you mean? You didn't do anything?" Leonard Nimoy chuckles smugly and says "didn't I?" before beaming back up to the USS Enterprise.
My claim is not that the framers were 21st-century progressives. But there is little doubt that they understood themselves to be universalists and opposed to all distinctions conferred by birth, even as their own position within a patriarchal slave society blinded them to the full implications of this universalism. The fact that they failed to recognize these implications does not mean they didn’t exist; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Harvey Milk were among those who saw the Declaration of Independence’s full meaning even more clearly than Thomas Jefferson did. Each of them enlisted the Declaration in the liberation struggles of their own time. Closer to the present, even the late philosopher Charles Mills—one of contemporary academia’s sharpest and most eloquent critics of the latent racism in Enlightenment liberal thought—called for the left to embrace political liberalism. If we accept the premise that the meaning of America’s creed goes further than its original authors grasped, that leads us to a couple of other conclusions. First, it suggests that the American Revolution is, in fact, unfinished; that the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal era, and the Civil Rights movement, among others, can be understood as efforts to bring this revolution to completion. Second, we can conclude that the cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideals of the founding, once unleashed on the world, are too powerful to stuff back in the box for very long.
Norman Rockwell freedom of speech meme
Abstract What makes dense urban form desirable, and for whom? Structured as a critical dialogue, this intervention puts psychoanalysis and affect theory into conversation with Marxian political economy to generate new insights about urban planning and contemporary cultural interpretations of ‘the good life.’ Urban density is conceived here as standing in for a range of sometimes-conflicting individual, professional, and societal desires. In this way, urban planning that takes high-density development as an axiomatic ideal fetishizes densification, obscuring the social relations of the production of space with the simplified idea that ‘if only’ cities and suburbs were as dense as they ‘ought’ to be, then a broad range of desires could be fulfilled. The gap between desire and its fulfillment, however, persists; cities and suburbs can always be denser, taller, better-serviced and higher-yielding. This examination of the ‘desire for density’ exposes the deeper, complex, libidinal impulse for (private-market driven) urban densification while also noting slippages within the field of urban planning that crack open dominant narratives and produce space for alternative fantasies of what the good urban life could be.
@philwongNYC on X saying: "I will also be reaching out to CUNY to ask why studies like this are being published without students even talking to the community and while including institutions that are totally opposed and were never consulted."
A series of posts from my timeline about the Iran/US negotiations, but in the middle there's a post that says "i'll be honest with you, id din't know the minions had different names"
Joe Rogan wearing a short lil tie
BALLROOM DANCE — While some potential 2028 contenders for president like Sens. Ruben Gallego and Chris Murphy say they want to tear down Trump’s ballroom, Newsom told NOTUS that he doesn’t see a purpose in destroying something that will have already been built. “But destruction is not strength,” Newsom added. “We have to be builders. What’s destroyed, history can’t be replaced, so even if you tore it down again, what do you rebuild in its place?”
Bumper sticker meant to say "We Are Charlie" but with an infelicitously placed cross
When Bass was first elected in 2022, I held onto some dim hope that she would be different from her predecessors. ED 1 in its original form seemed promising. But everything since—including the confounding decision to defang ED 1 just when it was starting to work—has demonstrated Bass’s firm commitment to the untenable status quo in Los Angeles. A couple of weeks ago, I took a work trip to downtown Los Angeles for the first time in a little while. Every time I visit that neighborhood, it feels a little more broken. The unsheltered homelessness, poverty, and human suffering is a little bit more in your face on each visit; Skid Row always seems a little bit larger than the last time I was there. And while individual LA neighborhoods are eminently walkable, I’m always struck by how hazardous getting between neighborhoods can be. One late afternoon, I decided to take a walk to Echo Park to meet up with a friend, and quickly found myself marooned on a dead-end sidewalk with no crosswalk to the other side, cars whizzing by at high speeds. Bass is the candidate of letting conditions continue to deteriorate. Spencer Pratt was the candidate of reactionary LA’s shrieking id, a creature of the same malarial swamp that gave us Howard Jarvis. Only Raman has real ideas about how to bring down housing costs, house the city’s enormous homeless population, and open up the city to people who don’t own cars.
I see people are talking about speed limiters as a viable tech in America and everything else aside: I need you all to realize that we destroyed civil society because Applebee's was closed for a few weeks in some states during a deadly pandemic. I don't think we're getting speed limiters
Ms. Fifield called that a lie. Mr. Platner, she said, knew when they were dating years ago that the tattoo was a Nazi symbol, and that he called it “my Totenkopf.” “I would never have known what that was,” she said. “He would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo.” Ms. Fifield said he told her that he and other members of his unit selected the tattoo because “they were like a death unit, they were killers,” and saw a parallel between their unit and the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or S.S., unit, that used the skull-and-crossbones image. “They literally, deliberately, selected it because it was relevant to their military unit,” she said.
EV TREPIDATION: Xavier Becerra has serious doubts about California’s lofty electric vehicle ambitions. The former Health and Human Services secretary, who’s leading in the polls ahead of the Tuesday primary, wouldn’t commit to the state’s goal of banning purchases of new gas and hybrid vehicles starting in 2035 in a recent POLITICO survey. “California should transition from gas-powered vehicles when it makes sense — when infrastructure and affordability are there for California families,” he wrote in response to a question about whether California should maintain the strategy.
I would like to suggest that Trumpism is best understood as a species of what I’m going to call hyperfascism. By “hyperfascism,” I don’t mean “superfascism” or anything like that. Instead, I’m using the hyper- prefix in a way similar to how Baudrillard deploys it in his definition of hyperreality as a sort of representation that is more “real” than whatever it was originally meant to represent. (He uses Disneyland as an example of the paradigmatic hyperreal space.) I’m also influenced by Anton Jäger’s suggestion that “hyperpolitics”—or constant and frenetic political activity in the absence of any structures that might convert this activity into real institutional change—is the dominant political register in 21st-century Western democracies. So what is hyperfascism? It is hyperreal, hyperpolitical fascism. It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found. It’s the signs and symbols of fascism detached from the machinery of the Nazi war economy or the large-scale, organized street violence of the Italian blackshirts. Make no mistake: hyperfascism is still fascism. But it is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else. It is as if the architects of the Trump regime had cribbed their entire governing agenda from cheap cyberpunk thrillers about fascist dystopias. They certainly haven’t given much thought to how authoritarian regimes consolidate popular consent; in fact, they’re acting like the 2024 election represented the end of politics, and therefore the end of any need on their part to modulate their behavior in order to ensure regime stability.
Home ownership is 65%. That's not most.
I’ve been thinking about what goes into artistic creation ever since I learned of the recent death of jazz giant Sonny Rollins at the age of 95. Rollins was one of the greatest saxophone players of all time; some of this greatness might have come from his native genius, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that he drilled himself on the saxophone relentlessly. Famously, between 1959 and 1961, Rollins spent up to 16 hours a day practicing his instrument alone on the Williamsburg Bridge. He also developed a disciplined spiritual practice built around yoga. I think you can hear the fruits of both these disciplines in his music, and not just because he was extremely technically proficient. This is a man who really knew his saxophone and was dedicated to exploring the full range of its rhythmic and melodic possibilities. Like any good jazz practitioner, he was also clearly interested in timbre, and subtle variations in sound and color that are untranscribable in Western musical notation. In other words, Rollins was a consummate artist. His life is, in fact, an object lesson in what it means to be a true artist. Compare his obsessive self-discipline with the sort of just-one-click artistic output promised by generative AI’s boosters. If you ever pop over to X (which, to be clear, I don’t recommend), you’re likely to encounter some venture capital guy talking about how generative AI democratizes art by allowing people to “draw” without learning how to draw, or “compose music” without knowing a single thing about the art of composition. But that’s not really artistic creation, no matter how convincing the results may be. Because the point of creation is never just the end product; it’s the practice. Rollins didn’t spend 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge trying to achieve a particular outcome. He was exploring musical possibilities and changing himself in ways that even he may not have understood. That process of exploration and self-definition is itself the...
The analysis in this report draws on a variety of datasets to estimate the number of housing units that could be built on USPS-owned property. First, we pulled property data for the approximately 8,500 parcels that USPS owns from the USPS website. Next, we merged that with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Center for Geospatial Solutions’ data to get more accurate information on the size of every USPS-owned parcel. Similar to the Terner Center report, we limited our inquiry to parcels over 20,000 square feet. We also assumed that the density of the resulting buildings would equal the highest density of any of the surrounding census block groups (as measured by dwelling units per acre), although we limited eligible parcels to those with at least four dwelling units per acre.
If Becerra suffered any damage, it was likely on health care … answering Porter’s direct question about his opinion on a single-payer, state-run insurance system with: “Californians don’t care what you call it, so long as they have affordable health care.” The position he was gesturing at is broadly the same one Newsom holds. They both like the concept of a single-payer federal system, but won’t commit to it on a state level. Both would much prefer to talk about how they have expanded access to private and public health insurance and tackled affordability in their respective offices. A recent report from KQED, which Becerra disputes, also compared the former health secretary to Newsom when Becerra was reported telling the doctors’ lobby that it isn’t possible at the state level when Trump is in office. Becerra had previously said in his campaign that he would deliver a state-level program. In the post-debate commentary on CNN, Van Jones described Becerra as “squirrely.” Porter elided her own two-step on single-payer; a mid-debate X post from her campaign said she had “supported single-payer since day one,” though she said as recently as January that she did not think a state-level program was realistic.
Another area where I would say the delegation could work effectively is around housing finance, so when we have more expensive housing the amount you need to get to 20% just is a bigger number. So if your housing costs $1 million, 20% is $200,000. If your housing costs $500,000, it’s $100,000. That’s just the math. After the subprime crisis, we were sort of bounced all the way back to that traditional 20% down payment, which was incurred in the 1930s. There’s actually not a lot of research — I’ve written about this in my day job as a professor — there’s not a lot of research behind why you have to have a 20% down payment. It’s very true that 0% down payments, send in whatever you feel like, pick a payment loans — I was on the ground, I was ground zero on that disaster, both in terms of my research but also my public service running the state-wide mortgage foreclosure settlement program. But 3%, 5% down payment, that’s what our FHA program has at the federal level, that’s what our VA program has, and they have some of the lowest default rates. So I think pushing our federal housing, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, all of those entities to think about moving from a 20% to a 10% down payment, for example, would make a huge difference here in California.
Hello Ned Resnikoff, I’m writing again regarding my earlier message. I don’t usually reach out to authors without a clear reason. When I do, it’s because a book has genuinely stayed with me and feels worth a thoughtful exchange. I’m intentional about where I place my time and attention, especially within the writing community. It would be disappointing if my previous note was simply lost or set aside without acknowledgment. When one writer takes the time to engage another’s work seriously, even a brief reply feels like a basic professional courtesy. I hope to hear from you soon. Warm Regards, Thomas Harris, Author.
Absolutely unhinged antisemitic screed from a third party candidate. I won’t even try typing out the whole thing here, but for example this guy uses the term “ZOG.” You get the idea.
Hasan Piker modeling some of his official merch
Dementia-addled Junior Soprano saying "Well, that's nice" after Tony tells him that he used to be a big deal in the Jersey mob.
Post from me re Platner: "Still hasn't sat down with any Jewish leaders in Maine, acknowledged lying about his tattoo, or explained any of his suggestive allusions to cosmopolitan elites conspiring to take him down"
So Newsom is a sort of transitional figure, poised between the end of the Pat/Jerry Brown dynasty and whatever comes next. But he has shown little interest in succession planning, much less California politics in general. Kamala Harris would have been the obvious choice for a successor, but she opted not to run, probably because she wants to take a third crack at running for president in 2028. Attorney General Rob Bonta, another strong contender, also opted out of running; after it became clear that he was staying out of the race, some California Democrats made a hail mary attempt to draft Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, but she also demurred. In an organized party system, Democratic elites might have been able to coordinate internally and put forth a consensus pick to replace Newsom; at the very least, each distinct party faction could have put forth their own candidate. (To my great frustration, the demurral of both Bonta and Wicks means there is no clear YIMBY favorite in the race, even though most of the candidates are making pro-housing noises.) But American political parties are anemic, and they’re especially anemic in California, thanks in part to institutions like the jungle primary. To borrow a term from the political scientist Julia Azari, the Golden State is a land of strong partisanship and weak parties; most voters and elected officials are Democrats, but the California Democrats have few mechanisms for enforcing anything resembling party discipline. No one is in charge.
He started on finasteride and was seeing results — but the reports on Reddit unnerved him and he went off the drug for several years, until he felt his hair loss was intolerable enough that it was worth taking whatever small risk was involved. “My relationship got better because I felt so much more confident,” he told me. “I volunteer for things I never would have done. I’m competing in a CrossFit competition. I’m doing more public speaking at work.” He was convinced that men with more hair who look younger are treated differently. “People make quick judgment calls,” he said. “They might see someone whose hair is thinning and think they’re a stressed-out person who doesn’t look after themselves.”
Garth Marenghi from Darkplace saying, "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards."
“Build to rent is essentially home builders switching their construction from building homes for people to building homes for large institutional investors,” said Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog organization focused on the impact of institutional investors. “It puts homeownership further out of reach for individuals,” denying them an opportunity “for building wealth for themselves, their families and their children.”
Cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are in crisis. Chronic housing shortages are driving countless middle-class and working-class households out of high-opportunity areas. Homelessness is skyrocketing. Cars continue to rule city streets, poisoning the climate and putting everyone’s health and safety at risk. And city governments, instead of rising to meet the challenge, are increasingly dysfunctional and unaccountable. Build or Die traces the history of a disaster a century in the making, detailing how shortsighted and reactionary policy decisions led to the interlocking crisis that threatens America’s great cities. Veteran urban policy analyst and journalist Ned Resnikoff cuts through the noise surrounding these issues, revealing exactly how we got here, and describes the work that a generation of urban reformers and activists have already been doing to make their communities more sustainable, egalitarian, and democratic. The crisis facing our cities isn’t due to rising crime or urban decay. It’s because of their inability to manage unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. Drawing on his experience at the forefront of the modern urbanist movement, Resnikoff makes the case for how cities can make that growth work for everyone by building more homes, investing in transit and walkable communities, and restoring democratic accountability to local government. The health of a nation depends in no small part on the health of its cities. Build or Die charts a path to healthier, more vibrant cities and reveals why saving them must go hand in hand with the revitalization of democracy itself.
Kent’s comments, predictably, revealingly, are not so much to blame Israel as to exonerate Trump. And that’s precisely how antisemitism works. It’s not Trump’s fault. He was taken in by “pressure” from the Israelis. The U.S. has its own vast intelligence resources. It has its own region experts. Israel couldn’t pressure or convince Trump that Iran posed some imminent threat to the U.S. Indeed, no one in the Trump White House thought anything like that. The U.S. and Israel went to war not because Iran was strong or about to do anything to the U.S. or really anyone else but because the country is currently so weak. Iran was on its back and it seemed like you could go to war with them and they wouldn’t be able to strike back. (Mostly true — except for the thing they can do easily, harry the Strait of Hormuz.) Trump thought this would be easy. He made this decision on his own, because he thought it would be fun and that it would be simple, as a vast, kinetic kind of self-soothing because of the skids his presidency is on at home.
The age of diversity, equity and inclusion transformed affirmative action into something that felt more sharply discriminatory. And now there’s a big debate among conservatives: Should they counter progressive identity politics with a colorblind nationalism? Or treat white culture as something real and embattled and worth organizing around? My guest this week ended up at the center of that debate when the Trump administration nominated him for a State Department post. Jeremy Carl is the author of “The Unprotected Class,” a book that argues that white Americans are in danger of becoming second-class citizens. We talked about what constitutes antiwhite discrimination and whether focusing on it leads inexorably toward white nationalism. After we taped this interview, Carl withdrew his nomination, acknowledging that he lacked enough support to be confirmed.
Kagi translation from English to nonprofit speak: "I don't want affordable housing in my community." = "We have concerns regarding the potential impact of high-density residential developments on the existing character and infrastructure of our neighborhood."
In The Darkened Light of Faith, his recent survey of some of the Black anti-slavery and anti–Jim Crow figures operating in that tradition, Rogers highlights the writings of David Walker, the abolitionist author of An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. In Rogers’s reading, the very title of this tract is performative: By making an appeal to citizens, he was performing a particular type of democratic engagement. “To petition is to see oneself as an agent, a person for whom something is at stake and in need of attention,” Rogers writes. Similarly, by referring to “colored citizens,” Walker was “criticizing the American polity for its horrific treatment of blacks while endowing those same individuals with a political status otherwise denied.” Rogers is describing a performative utterance in the Austinian sense. If anything, the performative dimension of democratic politics is even more front and center when it comes to the work of some of the other figures that Rogers considers. Frederick Douglass had himself photographed more frequently than any other 19th-century American man, precisely because he understood the influence that depictions of his dignified countenance could have if widely distributed. These portraits were, like Walker’s tract, a performance of citizenship that, by their very existence, helped to call the reality of that citizenship into being. Later in The Darkened Light of Faith, Rogers highlights the power of Billie Holiday’s live renditions of the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit”—both a literal series of musical performances in the colloquial sense and a performative act in the Austinian sense that, according to Rogers, “is not exclusively concerned with helping us understand lynching…but to help us feel what should be felt and to display the appropriate emotions to it through a mimetic display of the horrific.” By dramatizing the horror of lynching, Holiday compelled otherwise dispassionate white listeners to feel...(truncated)
Principal Skinner meme: "Is the modern GOP obsessed with imperial conquest? "No, it's the Jews who are wrong."
We can begin to answer that question by considering the conceptual slippage between the technical definition of a performative utterance, “performative” as an insult, and accusations of virtue signaling. The blurriness between these different meanings implies that a performance should be considered less authentic and worthy of greater suspicion if the thing being performed is a type of virtue or selflessness. Tate’s performance is “authentic” because his vision of masculinity is all about terrorizing and exploiting others. In contrast, a “performative male” who reads Sally Rooney and behaves in a generally nonthreatening manner has to be concealing his real agenda, which is no less sociopathic than Tate’s. No one really has the capacity for virtue or altruism, so the only honest (non-“performative”) performances are those that make a spectacle out of selfishness and cruelty. Similarly, only the rituals of democratic political engagement—the displays of respect for your fellow countrymen, the invocation of values like liberty and equality, and the public demonstrations on behalf of one cause or another—can be considered performative under this rubric. The rituals of autocratic rule—cabinet meetings that consist of televised self-abasement sessions, demonstrations of the state’s immense capacity for violence, and flagrant lying—aren’t performative in the derogatory sense, because the thing being performed is an insatiable desire for power. That’s authentic. Only attempts to communicate that you hold certain principles higher than your own base hungers and your own self-exaltation must be somehow misleading.
In addition to Senators Van Hollen, Kelly, Gillibrand, Booker, and Kim, this legislation is cosponsored in the Senate by Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Angus King (I-Maine), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.). This legislation has been endorsed by a broad range of organizations: AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Americans for Tax Fairness, Community Change Action, Demos, Get Out the Vote PAC, Indivisible, Institute for Policy Studies, MoveOn, National Education Association (NEA), NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Oxfam US, Patriotic Millionaires, People’s Action, Public Citizen, Social Security Works, Strong Economy for All Coalition, SURJ, Take on Wall Street, and United for a Fair Economy.
Tweet from Katie Porter: 0% state income tax for California families making under $100,000. That’s thousands of dollars back in your pocket where it belongs. As Governor, I’ll work the issue at both ends—lowering taxes for those who are struggling and raising them on the biggest corporations that can afford to pay.
A chart showing housing production pluging by nearly 50% in the two years after 1973 and 1979, respectively.
At first glance, the LSE paper is more sophisticated, and, therefore, more convincing. By modeling hypothetical housing production scenarios in six high-cost cities, the authors claim to show that “supply restriction is not principally responsible for declining affordability,” and in fact that it could take decades or even more than a century for housing production to make cities like San Francisco and New York become affordable. “The problem lies not in a constrained market but in rising inequality,” the authors conclude. Given the wealth of empirical data on housing production and costs, the authors’ choice to develop an ideal model instead of observing real-world conditions is a strange one. It starts to look even stranger when one considers the assumptions that go into that model. Consider the authors’ “affordability” threshold: They think that a city should only be considered affordable if the median non-college-educated worker can afford the median rent on a one-bedroom apartment. That’s an extraordinarily high standard for affordability. It is one thing to say that an Angeleno who earns $31,000 a year has a right to decent housing and quite another to say that a city where such workers tend to live with roommates in cheaper-than-the-median apartments should be considered prohibitively expensive. In short, the best available evidence still supports a YIMBY approach to housing policy. While both of the above papers attempt to challenge that evidence, neither is able to muster a strong case against YIMBYism. The fact remains that boosting supply is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for making sure everyone in the United States has decent, stable housing. We cannot end the crisis unless we undo the system that produced the housing shortage in the first place.
The problems with the Georgetown paper are more obvious, so let’s start there. The authors note that low-income households in cities with relatively high rates of housing construction (for example, Houston) still saw their rents go up. But, as researcher Ed Mendoza observes, the report offers no counterfactual: It fails to consider what would have happened to low-income Houstonians if the city built new homes at the rate of a low-growth jurisdiction like, say, San Francisco. It is likely that rents in relatively high-growth cities would have risen by significantly more if they had not added new housing at an above-average clip. Second, the paper’s authors simply wave away the mechanism by which new market-rate housing production helps low-income households. Of course a new apartment is going to have higher rent, for the same reason that a 2026 Toyota Corolla costs more than a used 2006 Corolla. But adding new housing allows higher-income renters to “trade up,” which in turn makes their former domiciles available for occupancy. This creates what researchers call a “chain of moves,” which is a bit like a game of musical chairs in reverse: As more chairs get added to the circle, the competition for a seat becomes less and less intense. The Georgetown paper does not engage with any of the research on chains of moves. The authors do discuss the possibility that older housing can “filter down,” or become more affordable, as it depreciates, but they conclude that “this process has stalled or reversed” without considering why that might be the case. In fact, older housing in many cities has filtered up precisely because it has become more scarce relative to demand. The Georgetown paper declares that market-rate housing construction hasn’t had the desired effect without considering whether that might be because most high-cost cities are still not building at a fast enough clip to end the supply crunch.
Opponents worry about wildfire risks in the wooded area, the strain on local water supplies, which rely on wells, and increased traffic. The owners of a nearby winery are reportedly worried that the camp could threaten its liquor license. While many support the camp’s mission, opponents think the camp should be built elsewhere.
This “war on fraud” has alread been in progress for months, according to Trump. The racist slander against Somali immigrants in Minnesota was just one part of it. In January, Trump attempted to illegally freeze billions of dollars in childcare subsidies to California. Nick Shirley, the regime-affiliated propagandist who helped lay the groundwork for ICE’s invasion of Minnesota, was subsequently spotted skulking around San Diego day cares. And Shirley isn’t the only apparatchik who has gone fishing. Last year, the Trump administration tried, unsuccessfully, to get access to California’s voter registration data. In February, just a week before the State of the Union, Customs and Border Protection asked San Diego County to tell them who owns every parcel of land in the county. It is clear that the Trump administration wants another domestic invasion, and that California is a likely target. Based on Shirley’s whereabouts and that strange CBP request, I would guess that they’re zeroing in on San Diego as a potential site for their next siege. It’s something that the State of California, and in particular the next governor of California, should be prepared for. Given how much we already know about the Trump playbook, there’s no excuse to not be prepared.