11 ms·

America's Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.

127 points by pdog 7y ago

TimJRobinson 7y ago
Is it really wealthy liberals or just Californians? Seattle is building like crazy to keep up with demand, as are many other Democrat run cities.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Seattle is doing a much better job than SF, but they're also still doing a terrible job. Most of the residential land is still zoned for super low density housing, even though it's a major city. It's absurd, but people accept it because it's one of those American absurdities, like people dying because they couldn't afford health coverage. Single family home-only zoning is economically segregationist, and should not exist. It's fine if people want to own a single family home themselves, but wrong to keep the poor and working class out of their neighborhood by making that type of home mandatory.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Texas is growing like crazy, and housing is super affordable.
  - asdff 7y ago
    No zoning and what do you know, supply appeareth.
ucaetano 7y ago
Cities are unlivable due to liberals, suburbs are devoid of life due to conservatives and rural areas are stagnated and dying off due to the economic environment. So, where to?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mishkinf 7y ago
Blame Wealthy Liberals? What does the liberal part have to do with it. Blame wealthy corporations. The formation of ultra large corporations who pay people in highly unequal ways is the root cause of all of the country's problems; offshoring of labor, layoffs, huge executive compensation, real wages being stagnant, corruption that led to the 2008 housing crisis, government corruption, etc..
- yohann305 7y ago
  You got baited and someone downvoted you! I have a feeling I’m next
- gipp 7y ago
  And what causes them? There is no such thing, really, as a "root" cause, just causes we can effectively intervene on.
  - door5 7y ago
    Capitalism.
    - gipp 7y ago
      This is not an insightful answer.
      - door5 7y ago
        Capitalism has certain systemic features, one of them is concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small few. Look at how wealth is concentrated in the U.S., especially over the last 40 years. Unions have eroded, markets have been deregulated, our social safety net has been dismantled, etc. and as a result, the power of capitalists has expanded. Capitalism is by its nature struggle between workers and capital. Capital is winning.
    - StreamBright 7y ago
      I am quite surprised by the amount of anti-capitalist propaganda on HN.
justinph 7y ago
55 years of republicans working to lower taxes and demonize public employees has had an effect, even in cities that don't vote republican. Our cities are starved of money for basic maintenance and to pay the best and the brightest to do public work.
- writepub 7y ago
  Just completely inaccurate. San Francisco - an uber democratic, liberal city, is the polar opposite of everything you blamed Republicans for. It has extremely high taxes, one of the largest budgets and income for any city in US (normalized per capita), and it still flounders on basic promises to it's citizens. Sky High Taxes + Democratic govt. still doesn't deliver good, nay half-decent results.
  - sdinsn 7y ago
    San Fransico's sales tax (8.5%) is lower than the average Californian city (8.56%) and lower than the average city in many states, for example: Alabama (9.14%), Arkansas (9.43%), and Kansas (8.67%). So it's definitely not accurate to say SF has "extremely high taxes".
    - writepub 7y ago
      Please examine the revenue per capita of San Francisco. And they have taxes on a myriad of things, sales tax is ONE of them. [1] has a better summary of reality, than a myopic comparison at sales tax %. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19985340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19985340
      - sdinsn 7y ago
        The reply to that summed up the flaws with the claim well. I encourage you to read it. SF doesn't even have city income tax.
    - Redoubts 7y ago
      SF also has a Payroll Tax, unlike most cities.
gok 7y ago
The headline about all American cities seems like it doesn't match the rest of the article, which is really just about San Francisco.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  NIMBYism is a problem in all American cities.
  - rubicon33 7y ago
    I'm not sure that there will EVER be a solution to this, especially in California. Why? Property is an investment (and that investment creates wealth for CA via Prop 13). It's rational to oppose anything which would decrease the value of your investment. For many home owners, their home is one of their biggest wealth sinks. That said, we should have never treated housing as an investment without some sort of control.
    - falcolas 7y ago
      And when they want to put it in your (literal) back yard, your property is foreclosed by the city, often for a tiny fraction of the actual market value of your property. Once that occurs - you have two choices - you take it or you put up a lot of money and fight it in the court systems. In the grand scheme of things, screwing over one person (or one family) could be considered to be OK, given the benefit to the city as a whole. But, having gone through this with my parents in a stupidly small town (40k), I can understand why anybody doesn't want it in their back yard. And ultimately, they're the tax payers and voters for that city. What they want is valued more than what outsiders want for their city.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        > And ultimately, they're the tax payers and voters for that city. What they want is valued more than what outsiders want for their city. Yup, this is a big part of the problem. Potential residents can't vote, so you end up with a tragedy of the commons kind of situation: everyone agrees that someone ought to make more housing, but they all want someone else to handle it, and leave them alone. It's not entirely unlike homeless shelters. People agree that they should exist, just never in their own neighborhood. Because, y'know, eww. The solution is to have policy dictated at a higher level of authority that can avoid regulatory capture by hyperlocal interests. A zoning board that operated at the regional level would have fewer problems than cities or neighborhoods making these decisions.
zxcvvcxz 7y ago
"Open borders for you, but not for me." - Liberals.
TulliusCicero 7y ago
> 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. 100% spot on. NIMBYism is the left's version of xenophobia. The mantra is very much "Welcome to my country, now get the hell out of my city".
- heurist 7y ago
  Seems to mostly be "get out of my neighborhood" more than city, though the city part comes from not allowing growth in neighborhoods.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    It's both. Neighborhoods do often have input at community meetings, but actual regulations are usually decided at the city level.
    - asdff 7y ago
      The city under siege by these neighborhoods. Renters don't vote, NIMBYs who moan at council meetings do. Therefore, city officials either side with NIMBYs or are replaced with one that will.
- rch 7y ago
  I don't think this comment reflects the heterogeneity of the American urban and semi-urban landscape. There are places actually trying to understand how to progressively and responsibly manage infill development, along with issues like mobility, local organic/regenerative agriculture, modern educational resources, and so on.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    What heterogeneity? Most US cities and suburbs dedicate most of their land exclusively for detached single family homes. This is true even in most major cities. > There are places actually trying to understand how to progressively and responsibly manage infill development You make it sound like they're having to do groundbreaking research or something, but Japan and France and Germany have had responsible infill development for decades now. If we're failing to leapfrog using their lessons, it's because we're stupid and obstinate, not because we're mature and wise.
lemony_fresh 7y ago
All this news looks like a good complex systems / agent based modeling problem. Is anyone aware of such research?
- heurist 7y ago
  Not sure complex systems researchers have gone that far into the practical issues yet, but Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West are the current leaders in urban growth/sustainability as far as I can tell as an interested outsider. Strong Towns [1] takes an antifragility approach in line with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and touches on complex systems thinking (without taking a theory/purely scientific stance). NNT occasionally posts thoughts on localism, though again usually quite abstract relative to the practical modeling question you pose. The most practical related work I've seen has been on growth of major international cities and large villages/slums in third world countries. I can't recall any authors in particular. Some of my commercial work approaches what you're asking about but I build products more than perform research and have never worked with zoning data. If anyone has a better answer I would love to hear it; this is my jam. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/
sonnyblarney 7y ago
If San Franciscans don't want their city to be 'verticalized' that's perfectly fine. There's actually quite a lot of space in Cali, and cost of living is not quite insane in many areas just outside the bay. So if there were some thoughtful progress even on just transportation (i.e. imagine something faster than Bart/Caltrain that looped quickly around) and some quick commuter trains ... combined with less of the various needs to be in the Valley/City ... Then maybe places like Stockton, Merced, Morgan Hill etc. could flourish smartly. Consider if there were a fairly quick way to get from Gilroy to the Valley+City without fuss? Maybe someone would open a big office there? The entire North Bay seems to be 'cut off' (many residents probably like that...), but maybe 'a tunnel' where the Golden Gate is, to connect that 'fast train' to Santa Rosa? (Yes, 'earthquakes' surely) but it's worth considering. The Valley, and even many places in SF are not particularly aspirational places, frankly. My bet is people would be happy to live a ways away if they could get into the office quickly.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  > If San Franciscans don't want their city to be 'verticalized' that's perfectly fine. No it's not. It's ridiculous. Cities are meant to change, to grow, to adapt to conditions over time. By refusing to build enough housing to match its booming economy, the cities in the bay area are seriously hurting people. They're seriously hurting economic opportunity. That is not okay.
  - sonnyblarney 7y ago
    No, the notion that every city should become 'Dubai' is ridiculous. NYC has already 'verticalized' ... and they are one of the example 'problem cities' - and they still have extreme inequality and 'housing problems'. So when SF crams in 5 million more folks, will they have 'solved the problem'? Or will they be just like NYC? Why haven't Chicago, NY or Hong Kong, with all their 'amazing density' solved this ostensible problem? By this 'build out' logic Stockholm, most of London, Zurich should be bulldozed and turned into NY or Hong Kong as well? So first, is the notion, hinted above, that 'more density' in no way implies a solution to the problem - because there's nary any limit to how many people might want to come into the city. Second, which underlies the above, is an issue called 'Supply and Demand'. People moving to the Bay have to make that rational decision as to housing costs vs. pay. Moving to the Bay is usually a choice, not some kind of coercion, so people are for whatever reasons, making that choice. If the Bay wants to expand smartly they should consider wicked fast transportation to places around the bay, and those places could be built with a little more density than now as well. There's quite a lot of space, there's no reason that even working class folk can't live a decent standard of living.
anomie31 7y ago
Isn't the problem not so much liberals but the perverse incentives created by a housing market in a globalized economy?
- epistasis 7y ago
  It's not a globalized economy that's made perverse incentives, it's local control that prevents enough housing to match the number of jobs in the area. Also, it's only sort of "liberals" that are the problem, the real problem is those who claim progressive values, except for when those values may affect themselves.
ptyyy 7y ago
Clickbait title and hyperbole aside, this is the same guy who published a piece declaring that he was unplugging from social media and continued to use Twitter. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php
crispinb 7y ago
Opinion columnists are lazy unoriginal authoritarian dictator manques. Stop writing imperative mood headlines.
SamuelAdams 7y ago
We need to be careful about where this line of comparison will take us. X is a problem, blame group Y. This sounds a lot like something Hitler would say: he used the Jewish community as a scapegoat for many problems the country was facing, so some citizens were all too happy when they were quietly being taken away.
thrower123 7y ago
The best part is when they have so polluted one area that they start to flee to greener pastures, and they turn right around and start instituting the same policies in the new place.
overthemoon 7y ago
*Blame the wealthy. Liberals at the levers of power are certainly part of the problem (or at least their neoliberalism is) the problem is the wealthy of all ideological stripes. Blaming nimbyism is just a roundabout way of blaming government regulation, which I find nonsensical.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Why is it nonsensical? It's absolutely the problem. The bay area in particular isn't even that densely populated. It's just that most of the residential land is reserved for detached single-family homes still. When you constrain supply that much and demand shoots up, the result isn't exactly surprising.
  - overthemoon 7y ago
    It's nonsensical because it's too limited. Housing is like health care in that the market is sorely lacking in its ability to distribute those resources equitably--pinning the problems on nimbyism is admitting that market solutions are the best we've got, which I think is wrong. I'm advocating for socialized housing, not tweaking the knobs of the market until it comes out fair. Moreover, nimbyism is a lot like the solutions for environmental problems that stop at consumer boycotts and individual choices to recycle or reduce water usage. Good things, but predicated on individual virtue over systemic changes. Finally, nimbyism is resentment about gentrification in reverse. I find objections to gentrification pretty convincing--why shouldn't people have a say in what happens to their neighborhood? TLDR a lot of the description of the problem (IE nimbyism) depend on the market continuing to do what it's doing, and I think the market is the problem to begin with.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      > pinning the problems on nimbyism is admitting that market solutions are the best we've got, which I think is wrong. I'm all for public housing too (more competently executed than last time, please), but Tokyo is a good example of prices being fairly reasonable relative to the size/prosperity of a metro area, and that's been done with the market. Besides, you'd need to upzone for public housing complexes anyway. There's no conflict here between the socialized solution and the market one, really. The government can make what public housing it can do, and the market can handle the rest. > why shouldn't people have a say in what happens to their neighborhood? Because it turns them into reactionary assholes? Because land is in fixed quantity and quality, so letting people with a monopoly on it command even their neighbors to not let people in is a terrible idea? Because mandatory single-family home zoning is classist bullshit that is designed to keep out the poor and working class? It's economic segregation, pure and simple, and you can't be economically progressive while supporting it. One of the starkest changes going from the US to live in Munich was that suddenly, I didn't notice neighborhoods being obviously rich or poor or middle-class most of the time. Nearly all of them are sort of middling, and have people with an obvious variety of incomes. Even if I focus on it, it's hard to slot neighborhoods into a particular income bucket. And the most obvious cause of this is that SFH-only zoning does not exist here, not in Munich and not anywhere in Germany. Thus, would-be rich neighborhoods cannot keep out the working class by making sure that nobody can build fourplexes or apartments that might be more affordable. edit: to be clear, I'm not categorically opposed to community input on neighborhood design. But letting specific neighborhoods and cities decide on zoning density has been an unmitigated disaster. So yeah, let's maybe not do that.
docker_up 7y ago
San Francisco's budget for homeless is over $300 million per year. If you add the additional $300 million they got from their tax on companies, that's over $600 million per year. Even at $300 million, we have no idea how that money is being spent. There are 7500 homeless people in San Francisco, and yet Market Street looks like something out of a 3rd world country. San Francisco is mishandling the budget, plain and simple. They have more than enough money, and yet they are completely opaque and they have zero accountability. This is the government that we want to give MORE money to, because somehow more money is the solution to this problem? Hell no. Hold the politicians accountable. Get a proper budget that will focus money on where it will most help and make people accountable. Fire those in charge and put people who are willing to help without wanting to suckle from the teat of public funding and taxation.
- lucaspm98 7y ago
  Do you have any sources about those numbers or other information about where this money is going? That works out to $40,000 per homeless person, or almost double the pre-tax annual income working full time at California's minimum wage.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    It's an extremely dishonest look at the numbers. I'm having trouble finding the article from sfchronicle.com now, but the idea that each person is getting an average of $40,000 is comically wrong. The homeless population is always in flux: new people become homeless, some people get housed, and some people migrate. Treating a year time span as having a static population of X is just an unrealistic way to look at it. There are something like 20,000 different homeless individuals in the city throughout the course of the year. Something like 15,000 end up getting some sort of services. However, that's not really much of the story, because the bulk of that $300M budget from prior years goes directly to the easiest and cheapest intervention to stop homelessness: paying people's rent. For families and individuals living paycheck to paycheck, a single unexpected expense can get them kicked out. Without that $300M, the problem would be immensely worse, on a huge scale.
Dirlewanger 7y ago
Lol, flagged post. Seems like some "wealthy liberals" here on HN don't like being called out.
xrd 7y ago
OK. Correlation does not imply causation, or something... So, San Francisco still votes 8% Republican. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Francisco Is it possible that there are a majority of people in SF that support changing their city and are Democrats? And, that a small minority of people (who could be Rs or Ds) can effectively block legislation to change housing laws? I'm not sure this article proves it is all "liberals" doing it, just that a) lots of liberals live in SF and b) SF has been ineffective at tackling the housing crisis ("...a place where lots of liberals live! QED!!!"). Having said this, my mom considers herself very liberal, and still has signs up on her lawn saying "Preserve Historic Houses" (which means "I don't support tearing down houses in my neighborhoods to build higher density places"). BUT: I do think she would be open to changing her mind. I'm not sure someone that lives in SF and that agrees with Trump's approach to immigration would be open to changing their mind. Is that biased of me?
- bdittmer 7y ago
  Nope. There is no vast right wing conspiracy to prevent affordable housing. I don’t want to jump to conclusions but I’m guessing you don’t live in SF or California?
  - xrd 7y ago
    I never said there was a "vast right wing conspiracy" nor did I imply that. You are the only person saying that and thinking that in this thread. You don't want to jump to conclusions, but you already did, didn't you? I wrote: "... that a small minority of people (who could be Rs or Ds) can effectively block legislation to change housing laws." How did you turn that into a vast right wing conspiracy UNLESS you already felt that "someone out there" already thinks that (well before my post)?
    - xrd 7y ago
      None of my statements ever said that I think Republicans have a right wing conspiracy to prevent affordable housing. I am refuting the assertion made by the article that says Liberals are to blame. I think it is more complicated. I point out that there are voters in SF who vote Republican. DOWNVOTES because I must be saying Republicans are to blame. Hint: I never said that, nor do I believe that. I point out that people that align with Trump's immigration policy that live in SF might not be open minded about changing their mind. DOWNVOTES because I must be saying Republicans are not open minded. Hint: I never said that, nor do I believe that. Hint: downvoters, you aren't reading carefully. And, if there is a hint of people making assumptions about who you are, and you are angry, and it is translating into downvotes, then you have some introspection work to do.
trabant00 7y ago
The part about North Dakota having senators way above population share in the country: why is this bad? Maybe they represent a different kind of life. Maybe the zones that encourage overpopulation shouldn't have monopoly on representation. Because on some issues they clearly did bad. And I think we can stretch this logic to the entire article. The author is as guilty as "not in my back yard" as the rich people. Move you yard! Vote with you wallet. Go live, work and pay taxes where they respect your way of thinking. Now you want to have your cake and eat it too. You talk against corporations and rich people but you consume their products and dream about making it big yourself. What other reason could you have for staying in mega cities?
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  > The part about North Dakota having senators way above population share in the country: why is this bad? Because it's anti-democratic? > Maybe they represent a different kind of life Maybe Hindus have a different way of life than Christians in the US. Should they get bonus representation too, since they're a much smaller population? > And I think we can stretch this logic to the entire article. The author is as guilty as "not in my back yard" as the rich people. Move you yard! Vote with you wallet. Go live, work and pay taxes where they respect your way of thinking. Absurd. Land is fixed, you can't just go generate more of it. And by not allowing more people to live where a booming economy is, they're hurting people, they're hurting economic opportunity, and they're hurting the environment. That is not okay. The winners here are selfish people, largely landowners who benefit from the housing prices being so high. The losers are the rest of us.
  - mfatica 7y ago
    > Because it's anti-democratic? Good thing the US is a federal republic
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      It's also a representative democracy.
elhudy 7y ago
Just curious why has this been flagged for removal?
- umeshunni 7y ago
  There are lots of wealthy Bay Area liberals on HN.
  - WalterGR 7y ago
    I’ve noticed that lots of accounts that post dismissive, low-content comments like yours have an “about“ section in their user profile that matches the exact format of about: [ my public key: https://keybase.io/<Hn https://keybase.io/<Hn profile name>; my proof: https://keybase.io/<Hn https://keybase.io/<Hn profile name>/sigs/n_-<text matching [a-zA-Z0-9]+> ] Complete with the opening and closing brackets. Why is that?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Politics, presumably. From HN guidelines: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
  - elhudy 7y ago
    That's unfortunate. The article offered an interesting new perspective to me and I don't think it's one that would generally be found on tv or elsewhere.
    - mfatica 7y ago
      Because it's a bullshit article claiming all American cities are shit when really it's just San Francisco and the liberal elite that are fucking up their own cities. New York as well. The rest of us are doing just fine actually.
noxToken 7y ago
The headline feels so disingenuous just to garner clicks. First of all, this article is about San Francisco. SF is parodied within many groups for being exactly the way that it is. However, put that aside. Are the problems of SF cause by liberals or are they cause by people who happen to be liberal. This is an important distinction. If it's the latter, then the problems are caused by the inhabitants, and you could substitute any politically identifying individual in to get similar results: >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. That's what I mean. Is that due to liberals only paying lip service, or is that due to wealthy people not wanting to co-mingle with commoners? I agree with some of the base reasoning in the article: NIMBYers make it hard for a major city to be inhabitable by others. However, how much of this politics compared to people?
mfatica 7y ago
Cleveland, Ohio is perfectly fine. We have amazing suburbs, nature, a beach, a beautiful lake, tons of unique places to go and see, and a bunch of jobs (tech especially, many startups as well).
- asdff 7y ago
  That's because greater cleveland has lost population almost every decade since the 1970s, so there is plenty of supply to meet demand and keep housing costs low.
alphabettsy 7y ago
The problem is wealthy people, not just wealthy liberals.
scythe 7y ago
Zoning is half the battle, but municipal boundaries are equally absurd. Many town boundaries are still where they were 50 years ago, but the economic reality has moved past them. For example, a meaningless line between the nonexistent "places" of "San Francisco" and "Brisbane" constrains the development of Hunter's Point. As it is, if one municipality upzones alone, they see an increase in demand and the neighboring municipalities see a decrease in demand. As a result, whoever blinks first loses. So Palo Alto wants San Francisco to upzone and San Francisco wants Palo Alto to upzone. This problem is systemic: it particularly affects suburbs that were originally created by segregation, most famously contributing to Detroit's budget crisis. In ancient times, cities were autonomous units, defended by local armies. The idea of a "suburb" financially independent of the main city was unthinkable; the city was the state. The modern US has created a system of social organization with entities called "cities" and "towns" which are really nothing of the sort; they are more like electoral fiefdoms, chartered by whit of the state government usually back in the time when we were still killing Indians and promoting racial hierarchies. And these "towns" have given rise to their own mythology, with a call to defend "our community" (usually from annexation) which is neither ours nor a community, but a haphazardly sown legal artifice whose primary effect in reality is moving tax money around and putting up signs. This whole charade has got to end sometime. But what would that look like? And how can it be squared with our love of bottom-up governance, which, via English common law, has always been a part of America?
- novok 7y ago
  This is why you need state level bills with teeth to end the stalemate.
deviomi 7y ago
The problem goes deeper than that. I've have discussion with highly educated people in San Fransisco and it becomes obvious they really don't understand this is basic supply and demand problem. The first step in fixing this is somehow teaching econ 101 as a PSA.
- WalterGR 7y ago
  That hasn’t been my experience.
flatfilefan 7y ago
«with a fifth of the population struggling to get by» - isn’t this just per definition of poverty: the lower quintile? That is in any place lower quintile is poor. Regardless of their absolute living standards.
Left8ntright 7y ago
Liberal policies create homelessness period. Show me a city or state rife with poverty and crime and I will show you a city or state run by Democrats for decades. 9 out of the 10 poorest most crime ridden cities in America have been under Democratic control for decades. Chicago, Detroit, Flint, I could go on and on. And then you have the model of conservative values. Texas which has one of the fastest growing economies in the country and was until recently a mostly red state. But with people fleeing California in droves because the liberal policies of over-taxation and over-regulation and other Nanny State policies. Truth is a big government makes the people small. Now the people that have fled California are made up of a lot of people with liberal ideology and they don't have enough sense to see that their belief system is what screwing everything up. So they are now trying to change Texas into the nightmare that California has become. That is the Democratic way Liberals forced to leave areas that are becoming unlivable because they voted for people to enact their liberal ideology when everything goes to hell in a they are too blind to reality to see what caused it so they criss cross the like Locust leaving Devastation in their wake.They are taking a perfectly good state like Texas and screwing it up. California's economy which was built on conservative values was rated the 4th or the 5th in the world has now 7th or 8th and falling fast. This is under liberal policy. Data shows that conservative values conservative fiscal policies conservative ideology leads to high employment and more people enjoying the American dream. Capitalism is not by any means perfect but Has Lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. Not once in the history of the world has socialism helped anybody but the Elite and those high up in the . You can bet your last dollar that when they start running out of everybody's money that the government will get theirs first and all their rich friends, and then if there's anything left the people get theirs last and that's how it's always worked Venezuela is a perfect model for that that's where we'll be if we take on the socialist agenda the Democrats have for us socialism always starts out sounding so good and turns out being so bad. I have yet to hear somebody point out the difference between socialism and Democratic socialism other than you vote for somebody to steal from you and your neighbors. Government has never produced anything. Everything the government has they take from somebody who worked to produce it the government paid for it they paid for it with money they took from somebody who worked for it.

127 points by pdog 7y ago

Is it really wealthy liberals or just Californians? Seattle is building like crazy to keep up with demand, as are many other Democrat run cities.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
Seattle is doing a much better job than SF, but they're also still doing a terrible job. Most of the residential land is still zoned for super low density housing, even though it's a major city. It's absurd, but people accept it because it's one of those American absurdities, like people dying because they couldn't afford health coverage. Single family home-only zoning is economically segregationist, and should not exist. It's fine if people want to own a single family home themselves, but wrong to keep the poor and working class out of their neighborhood by making that type of home mandatory.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
Texas is growing like crazy, and housing is super affordable.
- asdff 7y ago
  No zoning and what do you know, supply appeareth.

ucaetano 7y ago

Cities are unlivable due to liberals, suburbs are devoid of life due to conservatives and rural areas are stagnated and dying off due to the economic environment. So, where to?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mishkinf 7y ago

Blame Wealthy Liberals? What does the liberal part have to do with it. Blame wealthy corporations. The formation of ultra large corporations who pay people in highly unequal ways is the root cause of all of the country's problems; offshoring of labor, layoffs, huge executive compensation, real wages being stagnant, corruption that led to the 2008 housing crisis, government corruption, etc..

yohann305 7y ago
You got baited and someone downvoted you! I have a feeling I’m next
gipp 7y ago
And what causes them? There is no such thing, really, as a "root" cause, just causes we can effectively intervene on.
- door5 7y ago
  Capitalism.
  - gipp 7y ago
    This is not an insightful answer.
    - door5 7y ago
      Capitalism has certain systemic features, one of them is concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small few. Look at how wealth is concentrated in the U.S., especially over the last 40 years. Unions have eroded, markets have been deregulated, our social safety net has been dismantled, etc. and as a result, the power of capitalists has expanded. Capitalism is by its nature struggle between workers and capital. Capital is winning.
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    I am quite surprised by the amount of anti-capitalist propaganda on HN.

justinph 7y ago

55 years of republicans working to lower taxes and demonize public employees has had an effect, even in cities that don't vote republican. Our cities are starved of money for basic maintenance and to pay the best and the brightest to do public work.

writepub 7y ago
Just completely inaccurate. San Francisco - an uber democratic, liberal city, is the polar opposite of everything you blamed Republicans for. It has extremely high taxes, one of the largest budgets and income for any city in US (normalized per capita), and it still flounders on basic promises to it's citizens. Sky High Taxes + Democratic govt. still doesn't deliver good, nay half-decent results.
- sdinsn 7y ago
  San Fransico's sales tax (8.5%) is lower than the average Californian city (8.56%) and lower than the average city in many states, for example: Alabama (9.14%), Arkansas (9.43%), and Kansas (8.67%). So it's definitely not accurate to say SF has "extremely high taxes".
  - writepub 7y ago
    Please examine the revenue per capita of San Francisco. And they have taxes on a myriad of things, sales tax is ONE of them. [1] has a better summary of reality, than a myopic comparison at sales tax %. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19985340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19985340
    - sdinsn 7y ago
      The reply to that summed up the flaws with the claim well. I encourage you to read it. SF doesn't even have city income tax.
  - Redoubts 7y ago
    SF also has a Payroll Tax, unlike most cities.

gok 7y ago

The headline about all American cities seems like it doesn't match the rest of the article, which is really just about San Francisco.

bryanlarsen 7y ago
NIMBYism is a problem in all American cities.
- rubicon33 7y ago
  I'm not sure that there will EVER be a solution to this, especially in California. Why? Property is an investment (and that investment creates wealth for CA via Prop 13). It's rational to oppose anything which would decrease the value of your investment. For many home owners, their home is one of their biggest wealth sinks. That said, we should have never treated housing as an investment without some sort of control.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    And when they want to put it in your (literal) back yard, your property is foreclosed by the city, often for a tiny fraction of the actual market value of your property. Once that occurs - you have two choices - you take it or you put up a lot of money and fight it in the court systems. In the grand scheme of things, screwing over one person (or one family) could be considered to be OK, given the benefit to the city as a whole. But, having gone through this with my parents in a stupidly small town (40k), I can understand why anybody doesn't want it in their back yard. And ultimately, they're the tax payers and voters for that city. What they want is valued more than what outsiders want for their city.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      > And ultimately, they're the tax payers and voters for that city. What they want is valued more than what outsiders want for their city. Yup, this is a big part of the problem. Potential residents can't vote, so you end up with a tragedy of the commons kind of situation: everyone agrees that someone ought to make more housing, but they all want someone else to handle it, and leave them alone. It's not entirely unlike homeless shelters. People agree that they should exist, just never in their own neighborhood. Because, y'know, eww. The solution is to have policy dictated at a higher level of authority that can avoid regulatory capture by hyperlocal interests. A zoning board that operated at the regional level would have fewer problems than cities or neighborhoods making these decisions.

zxcvvcxz 7y ago

"Open borders for you, but not for me." - Liberals.

TulliusCicero 7y ago

> 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. 100% spot on. NIMBYism is the left's version of xenophobia. The mantra is very much "Welcome to my country, now get the hell out of my city".

heurist 7y ago
Seems to mostly be "get out of my neighborhood" more than city, though the city part comes from not allowing growth in neighborhoods.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  It's both. Neighborhoods do often have input at community meetings, but actual regulations are usually decided at the city level.
  - asdff 7y ago
    The city under siege by these neighborhoods. Renters don't vote, NIMBYs who moan at council meetings do. Therefore, city officials either side with NIMBYs or are replaced with one that will.
rch 7y ago
I don't think this comment reflects the heterogeneity of the American urban and semi-urban landscape. There are places actually trying to understand how to progressively and responsibly manage infill development, along with issues like mobility, local organic/regenerative agriculture, modern educational resources, and so on.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  What heterogeneity? Most US cities and suburbs dedicate most of their land exclusively for detached single family homes. This is true even in most major cities. > There are places actually trying to understand how to progressively and responsibly manage infill development You make it sound like they're having to do groundbreaking research or something, but Japan and France and Germany have had responsible infill development for decades now. If we're failing to leapfrog using their lessons, it's because we're stupid and obstinate, not because we're mature and wise.

lemony_fresh 7y ago

All this news looks like a good complex systems / agent based modeling problem. Is anyone aware of such research?

heurist 7y ago
Not sure complex systems researchers have gone that far into the practical issues yet, but Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West are the current leaders in urban growth/sustainability as far as I can tell as an interested outsider. Strong Towns [1] takes an antifragility approach in line with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and touches on complex systems thinking (without taking a theory/purely scientific stance). NNT occasionally posts thoughts on localism, though again usually quite abstract relative to the practical modeling question you pose. The most practical related work I've seen has been on growth of major international cities and large villages/slums in third world countries. I can't recall any authors in particular. Some of my commercial work approaches what you're asking about but I build products more than perform research and have never worked with zoning data. If anyone has a better answer I would love to hear it; this is my jam. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/

sonnyblarney 7y ago

If San Franciscans don't want their city to be 'verticalized' that's perfectly fine. There's actually quite a lot of space in Cali, and cost of living is not quite insane in many areas just outside the bay. So if there were some thoughtful progress even on just transportation (i.e. imagine something faster than Bart/Caltrain that looped quickly around) and some quick commuter trains ... combined with less of the various needs to be in the Valley/City ... Then maybe places like Stockton, Merced, Morgan Hill etc. could flourish smartly. Consider if there were a fairly quick way to get from Gilroy to the Valley+City without fuss? Maybe someone would open a big office there? The entire North Bay seems to be 'cut off' (many residents probably like that...), but maybe 'a tunnel' where the Golden Gate is, to connect that 'fast train' to Santa Rosa? (Yes, 'earthquakes' surely) but it's worth considering. The Valley, and even many places in SF are not particularly aspirational places, frankly. My bet is people would be happy to live a ways away if they could get into the office quickly.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
> If San Franciscans don't want their city to be 'verticalized' that's perfectly fine. No it's not. It's ridiculous. Cities are meant to change, to grow, to adapt to conditions over time. By refusing to build enough housing to match its booming economy, the cities in the bay area are seriously hurting people. They're seriously hurting economic opportunity. That is not okay.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  No, the notion that every city should become 'Dubai' is ridiculous. NYC has already 'verticalized' ... and they are one of the example 'problem cities' - and they still have extreme inequality and 'housing problems'. So when SF crams in 5 million more folks, will they have 'solved the problem'? Or will they be just like NYC? Why haven't Chicago, NY or Hong Kong, with all their 'amazing density' solved this ostensible problem? By this 'build out' logic Stockholm, most of London, Zurich should be bulldozed and turned into NY or Hong Kong as well? So first, is the notion, hinted above, that 'more density' in no way implies a solution to the problem - because there's nary any limit to how many people might want to come into the city. Second, which underlies the above, is an issue called 'Supply and Demand'. People moving to the Bay have to make that rational decision as to housing costs vs. pay. Moving to the Bay is usually a choice, not some kind of coercion, so people are for whatever reasons, making that choice. If the Bay wants to expand smartly they should consider wicked fast transportation to places around the bay, and those places could be built with a little more density than now as well. There's quite a lot of space, there's no reason that even working class folk can't live a decent standard of living.

anomie31 7y ago

Isn't the problem not so much liberals but the perverse incentives created by a housing market in a globalized economy?

epistasis 7y ago
It's not a globalized economy that's made perverse incentives, it's local control that prevents enough housing to match the number of jobs in the area. Also, it's only sort of "liberals" that are the problem, the real problem is those who claim progressive values, except for when those values may affect themselves.

ptyyy 7y ago

Clickbait title and hyperbole aside, this is the same guy who published a piece declaring that he was unplugging from social media and continued to use Twitter. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php

crispinb 7y ago

Opinion columnists are lazy unoriginal authoritarian dictator manques. Stop writing imperative mood headlines.

SamuelAdams 7y ago

We need to be careful about where this line of comparison will take us. X is a problem, blame group Y. This sounds a lot like something Hitler would say: he used the Jewish community as a scapegoat for many problems the country was facing, so some citizens were all too happy when they were quietly being taken away.

thrower123 7y ago

The best part is when they have so polluted one area that they start to flee to greener pastures, and they turn right around and start instituting the same policies in the new place.

overthemoon 7y ago

*Blame the wealthy. Liberals at the levers of power are certainly part of the problem (or at least their neoliberalism is) the problem is the wealthy of all ideological stripes. Blaming nimbyism is just a roundabout way of blaming government regulation, which I find nonsensical.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
Why is it nonsensical? It's absolutely the problem. The bay area in particular isn't even that densely populated. It's just that most of the residential land is reserved for detached single-family homes still. When you constrain supply that much and demand shoots up, the result isn't exactly surprising.
- overthemoon 7y ago
  It's nonsensical because it's too limited. Housing is like health care in that the market is sorely lacking in its ability to distribute those resources equitably--pinning the problems on nimbyism is admitting that market solutions are the best we've got, which I think is wrong. I'm advocating for socialized housing, not tweaking the knobs of the market until it comes out fair. Moreover, nimbyism is a lot like the solutions for environmental problems that stop at consumer boycotts and individual choices to recycle or reduce water usage. Good things, but predicated on individual virtue over systemic changes. Finally, nimbyism is resentment about gentrification in reverse. I find objections to gentrification pretty convincing--why shouldn't people have a say in what happens to their neighborhood? TLDR a lot of the description of the problem (IE nimbyism) depend on the market continuing to do what it's doing, and I think the market is the problem to begin with.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    > pinning the problems on nimbyism is admitting that market solutions are the best we've got, which I think is wrong. I'm all for public housing too (more competently executed than last time, please), but Tokyo is a good example of prices being fairly reasonable relative to the size/prosperity of a metro area, and that's been done with the market. Besides, you'd need to upzone for public housing complexes anyway. There's no conflict here between the socialized solution and the market one, really. The government can make what public housing it can do, and the market can handle the rest. > why shouldn't people have a say in what happens to their neighborhood? Because it turns them into reactionary assholes? Because land is in fixed quantity and quality, so letting people with a monopoly on it command even their neighbors to not let people in is a terrible idea? Because mandatory single-family home zoning is classist bullshit that is designed to keep out the poor and working class? It's economic segregation, pure and simple, and you can't be economically progressive while supporting it. One of the starkest changes going from the US to live in Munich was that suddenly, I didn't notice neighborhoods being obviously rich or poor or middle-class most of the time. Nearly all of them are sort of middling, and have people with an obvious variety of incomes. Even if I focus on it, it's hard to slot neighborhoods into a particular income bucket. And the most obvious cause of this is that SFH-only zoning does not exist here, not in Munich and not anywhere in Germany. Thus, would-be rich neighborhoods cannot keep out the working class by making sure that nobody can build fourplexes or apartments that might be more affordable. edit: to be clear, I'm not categorically opposed to community input on neighborhood design. But letting specific neighborhoods and cities decide on zoning density has been an unmitigated disaster. So yeah, let's maybe not do that.

docker_up 7y ago

San Francisco's budget for homeless is over $300 million per year. If you add the additional $300 million they got from their tax on companies, that's over $600 million per year. Even at $300 million, we have no idea how that money is being spent. There are 7500 homeless people in San Francisco, and yet Market Street looks like something out of a 3rd world country. San Francisco is mishandling the budget, plain and simple. They have more than enough money, and yet they are completely opaque and they have zero accountability. This is the government that we want to give MORE money to, because somehow more money is the solution to this problem? Hell no. Hold the politicians accountable. Get a proper budget that will focus money on where it will most help and make people accountable. Fire those in charge and put people who are willing to help without wanting to suckle from the teat of public funding and taxation.

lucaspm98 7y ago
Do you have any sources about those numbers or other information about where this money is going? That works out to $40,000 per homeless person, or almost double the pre-tax annual income working full time at California's minimum wage.
- epistasis 7y ago
  It's an extremely dishonest look at the numbers. I'm having trouble finding the article from sfchronicle.com now, but the idea that each person is getting an average of $40,000 is comically wrong. The homeless population is always in flux: new people become homeless, some people get housed, and some people migrate. Treating a year time span as having a static population of X is just an unrealistic way to look at it. There are something like 20,000 different homeless individuals in the city throughout the course of the year. Something like 15,000 end up getting some sort of services. However, that's not really much of the story, because the bulk of that $300M budget from prior years goes directly to the easiest and cheapest intervention to stop homelessness: paying people's rent. For families and individuals living paycheck to paycheck, a single unexpected expense can get them kicked out. Without that $300M, the problem would be immensely worse, on a huge scale.

Dirlewanger 7y ago

Lol, flagged post. Seems like some "wealthy liberals" here on HN don't like being called out.

xrd 7y ago

OK. Correlation does not imply causation, or something... So, San Francisco still votes 8% Republican. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Francisco Is it possible that there are a majority of people in SF that support changing their city and are Democrats? And, that a small minority of people (who could be Rs or Ds) can effectively block legislation to change housing laws? I'm not sure this article proves it is all "liberals" doing it, just that a) lots of liberals live in SF and b) SF has been ineffective at tackling the housing crisis ("...a place where lots of liberals live! QED!!!"). Having said this, my mom considers herself very liberal, and still has signs up on her lawn saying "Preserve Historic Houses" (which means "I don't support tearing down houses in my neighborhoods to build higher density places"). BUT: I do think she would be open to changing her mind. I'm not sure someone that lives in SF and that agrees with Trump's approach to immigration would be open to changing their mind. Is that biased of me?

bdittmer 7y ago
Nope. There is no vast right wing conspiracy to prevent affordable housing. I don’t want to jump to conclusions but I’m guessing you don’t live in SF or California?
- xrd 7y ago
  I never said there was a "vast right wing conspiracy" nor did I imply that. You are the only person saying that and thinking that in this thread. You don't want to jump to conclusions, but you already did, didn't you? I wrote: "... that a small minority of people (who could be Rs or Ds) can effectively block legislation to change housing laws." How did you turn that into a vast right wing conspiracy UNLESS you already felt that "someone out there" already thinks that (well before my post)?
  - xrd 7y ago
    None of my statements ever said that I think Republicans have a right wing conspiracy to prevent affordable housing. I am refuting the assertion made by the article that says Liberals are to blame. I think it is more complicated. I point out that there are voters in SF who vote Republican. DOWNVOTES because I must be saying Republicans are to blame. Hint: I never said that, nor do I believe that. I point out that people that align with Trump's immigration policy that live in SF might not be open minded about changing their mind. DOWNVOTES because I must be saying Republicans are not open minded. Hint: I never said that, nor do I believe that. Hint: downvoters, you aren't reading carefully. And, if there is a hint of people making assumptions about who you are, and you are angry, and it is translating into downvotes, then you have some introspection work to do.

trabant00 7y ago

The part about North Dakota having senators way above population share in the country: why is this bad? Maybe they represent a different kind of life. Maybe the zones that encourage overpopulation shouldn't have monopoly on representation. Because on some issues they clearly did bad. And I think we can stretch this logic to the entire article. The author is as guilty as "not in my back yard" as the rich people. Move you yard! Vote with you wallet. Go live, work and pay taxes where they respect your way of thinking. Now you want to have your cake and eat it too. You talk against corporations and rich people but you consume their products and dream about making it big yourself. What other reason could you have for staying in mega cities?

TulliusCicero 7y ago
> The part about North Dakota having senators way above population share in the country: why is this bad? Because it's anti-democratic? > Maybe they represent a different kind of life Maybe Hindus have a different way of life than Christians in the US. Should they get bonus representation too, since they're a much smaller population? > And I think we can stretch this logic to the entire article. The author is as guilty as "not in my back yard" as the rich people. Move you yard! Vote with you wallet. Go live, work and pay taxes where they respect your way of thinking. Absurd. Land is fixed, you can't just go generate more of it. And by not allowing more people to live where a booming economy is, they're hurting people, they're hurting economic opportunity, and they're hurting the environment. That is not okay. The winners here are selfish people, largely landowners who benefit from the housing prices being so high. The losers are the rest of us.
- mfatica 7y ago
  > Because it's anti-democratic? Good thing the US is a federal republic
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    It's also a representative democracy.

elhudy 7y ago

Just curious why has this been flagged for removal?

umeshunni 7y ago
There are lots of wealthy Bay Area liberals on HN.
- WalterGR 7y ago
  I’ve noticed that lots of accounts that post dismissive, low-content comments like yours have an “about“ section in their user profile that matches the exact format of about: [ my public key: https://keybase.io/<Hn https://keybase.io/<Hn profile name>; my proof: https://keybase.io/<Hn https://keybase.io/<Hn profile name>/sigs/n_-<text matching [a-zA-Z0-9]+> ] Complete with the opening and closing brackets. Why is that?
nostrademons 7y ago
Politics, presumably. From HN guidelines: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
- elhudy 7y ago
  That's unfortunate. The article offered an interesting new perspective to me and I don't think it's one that would generally be found on tv or elsewhere.
  - mfatica 7y ago
    Because it's a bullshit article claiming all American cities are shit when really it's just San Francisco and the liberal elite that are fucking up their own cities. New York as well. The rest of us are doing just fine actually.

noxToken 7y ago

The headline feels so disingenuous just to garner clicks. First of all, this article is about San Francisco. SF is parodied within many groups for being exactly the way that it is. However, put that aside. Are the problems of SF cause by liberals or are they cause by people who happen to be liberal. This is an important distinction. If it's the latter, then the problems are caused by the inhabitants, and you could substitute any politically identifying individual in to get similar results: >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. That's what I mean. Is that due to liberals only paying lip service, or is that due to wealthy people not wanting to co-mingle with commoners? I agree with some of the base reasoning in the article: NIMBYers make it hard for a major city to be inhabitable by others. However, how much of this politics compared to people?

mfatica 7y ago

Cleveland, Ohio is perfectly fine. We have amazing suburbs, nature, a beach, a beautiful lake, tons of unique places to go and see, and a bunch of jobs (tech especially, many startups as well).

asdff 7y ago
That's because greater cleveland has lost population almost every decade since the 1970s, so there is plenty of supply to meet demand and keep housing costs low.

alphabettsy 7y ago

The problem is wealthy people, not just wealthy liberals.

scythe 7y ago

Zoning is half the battle, but municipal boundaries are equally absurd. Many town boundaries are still where they were 50 years ago, but the economic reality has moved past them. For example, a meaningless line between the nonexistent "places" of "San Francisco" and "Brisbane" constrains the development of Hunter's Point. As it is, if one municipality upzones alone, they see an increase in demand and the neighboring municipalities see a decrease in demand. As a result, whoever blinks first loses. So Palo Alto wants San Francisco to upzone and San Francisco wants Palo Alto to upzone. This problem is systemic: it particularly affects suburbs that were originally created by segregation, most famously contributing to Detroit's budget crisis. In ancient times, cities were autonomous units, defended by local armies. The idea of a "suburb" financially independent of the main city was unthinkable; the city was the state. The modern US has created a system of social organization with entities called "cities" and "towns" which are really nothing of the sort; they are more like electoral fiefdoms, chartered by whit of the state government usually back in the time when we were still killing Indians and promoting racial hierarchies. And these "towns" have given rise to their own mythology, with a call to defend "our community" (usually from annexation) which is neither ours nor a community, but a haphazardly sown legal artifice whose primary effect in reality is moving tax money around and putting up signs. This whole charade has got to end sometime. But what would that look like? And how can it be squared with our love of bottom-up governance, which, via English common law, has always been a part of America?

novok 7y ago
This is why you need state level bills with teeth to end the stalemate.

deviomi 7y ago

The problem goes deeper than that. I've have discussion with highly educated people in San Fransisco and it becomes obvious they really don't understand this is basic supply and demand problem. The first step in fixing this is somehow teaching econ 101 as a PSA.

WalterGR 7y ago
That hasn’t been my experience.

flatfilefan 7y ago

«with a fifth of the population struggling to get by» - isn’t this just per definition of poverty: the lower quintile? That is in any place lower quintile is poor. Regardless of their absolute living standards.

Left8ntright 7y ago

Liberal policies create homelessness period. Show me a city or state rife with poverty and crime and I will show you a city or state run by Democrats for decades. 9 out of the 10 poorest most crime ridden cities in America have been under Democratic control for decades. Chicago, Detroit, Flint, I could go on and on. And then you have the model of conservative values. Texas which has one of the fastest growing economies in the country and was until recently a mostly red state. But with people fleeing California in droves because the liberal policies of over-taxation and over-regulation and other Nanny State policies. Truth is a big government makes the people small. Now the people that have fled California are made up of a lot of people with liberal ideology and they don't have enough sense to see that their belief system is what screwing everything up. So they are now trying to change Texas into the nightmare that California has become. That is the Democratic way Liberals forced to leave areas that are becoming unlivable because they voted for people to enact their liberal ideology when everything goes to hell in a they are too blind to reality to see what caused it so they criss cross the like Locust leaving Devastation in their wake.They are taking a perfectly good state like Texas and screwing it up. California's economy which was built on conservative values was rated the 4th or the 5th in the world has now 7th or 8th and falling fast. This is under liberal policy. Data shows that conservative values conservative fiscal policies conservative ideology leads to high employment and more people enjoying the American dream. Capitalism is not by any means perfect but Has Lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. Not once in the history of the world has socialism helped anybody but the Elite and those high up in the . You can bet your last dollar that when they start running out of everybody's money that the government will get theirs first and all their rich friends, and then if there's anything left the people get theirs last and that's how it's always worked Venezuela is a perfect model for that that's where we'll be if we take on the socialist agenda the Democrats have for us socialism always starts out sounding so good and turns out being so bad. I have yet to hear somebody point out the difference between socialism and Democratic socialism other than you vote for somebody to steal from you and your neighbors. Government has never produced anything. Everything the government has they take from somebody who worked to produce it the government paid for it they paid for it with money they took from somebody who worked for it.