17 ms·

I watched the New York Times opinion piece "Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How." [0] recently. This quote sums it up perfectly: >You

by daenz 5y ago

I watched the New York Times opinion piece "Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here’s How." [0] recently. This quote sums it up perfectly: >You cannot say you are against inequality in America, unless you are willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood. Progressive cities should be leading by example, since they have legislative and executive control, but it's especially unsettling to see them take actions that indicate the opposite of the values that they espouse. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Everyone’s for “affordable housing.” It isn’t allowed to exist except in rare synthetic occasions however, and nimbys often know that.
latch 5y ago
Is this particularly unique to inequality? You cannot say you are against animal cruelty unless you are willing to stop eating factory-farmed meat? You cannot say you are against fossil fuels unless you are willing to stop driving [gasoline-powered] automobiles You cannot say you are against child labor unless you are willing to give up coffee/cocoa/textiles ...
- helen___keller 5y ago
  You've listed personal actions. Allowing affordable housing to be built is a collective / political action. The equivalent would be something like "you cannot say you are against animal cruelty unless you support legislation against animal cruelty", and I think that's reasonable.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  Your analogies don't really track. It would be like saying: You cannot say you're for affordable housing unless you're personally willing (and eligible) to live in an affordable unit. (for the record, if I was eligible, I would love to).
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Have you seen the neighborhoods and people that live in "affordable" housing? No you wouldn't want to live there.
    - etchalon 5y ago
      There are plenty of perfectly acceptable affordable housing areas, especially when it's mixed into market-priced housing.
    - Kye 5y ago
      Can you be specific? Insinuations don't help.
      - Igelau 5y ago
        I'm sure it varies by region, but there many places along Appalachia where housing prices are basically the only buffer keeping fentanyl, meth, and guns at a distance. Yeah, it sucks because these are people in desperate circumstances exacerbated by distorted cost-of-living in the first place, but resolving the root cause doesn't magically undo the metastasis of crime and violence. Edit: I'm not saying that there aren't smart ways to do this, and converting one single-family lot in SF to a duplex certainly doesn't destroy the neighborhood. I am saying that some people have seen things they don't want in their backyard, and some people haven't.
        Karrot_Kream 5y ago
        This is one of the worst aspects of American culture, IMO. Instead of tackling the issues of poverty, we just use the market to segregate the poor and their problems. It ends up creating a fractious, rancorous, and mutually distrustful society.
    - ahoy 5y ago
      I used to live across the street from a smaller NYCHA building. 5 stories, probably 20-40 units (new york city housing authority, pubic housing here). It seemed perfectly fine. I never went in, but the outside was clean, well lit, and well maintained. My neighbors there were just like my neighbors anywhere else on the block. There's certainly a lot of bad public housing in the us, but that's not an immutable quality of public housing, that's a policy choice made by politicians.
- godelski 5y ago
  This doesn't really work. Nimby is "I want this, but not near me" but the examples you gave are "I want this but no one is selling this to me." The difference is that in the first scenario someone is presenting a solution and people are saying "no, not like that" and in the second scenario there's no solution presented and people would probably buy them if they existed (or were just as convenient).
- labster 5y ago
  I’m not willing to give up textiles all the time, but I always make an effort for No Pants Day. Do it for the children! Or did I get your argument wrong?
- todd3834 5y ago
  I don’t drink coffee for other reasons but I do buy a lot of dark chocolate. Is it a known fact that cocoa is run by child labor? Even fair trade premium brands like Taza? I’m asking because I will give it up if so. As for textiles, does this mean all/most brands? I think it is worth boycotting brands that have unethical business practices but I didn’t really realize this was still going on in 2021 to a large extent. I know that sounds ignorant but I guess I just never really looked into it and it definitely isn’t shared in my echo chamber.
  - cozzyd 5y ago
    Off-topic but the Taza Factory is a fun tour (in Somerville, MA)
wahern 5y ago
> willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood. The problem here is that you can't really build "affordable housing" any more than you can build "affordable cars". At least, not in the way "affordable" is used by progressives. You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars, which end up becoming "affordable" in the used car market. Ditto for housing. There have been attempts at building affordable housing at large scale. We've spent the past 30 years tearing down those "projects". Similarly, plenty of countries have tried to build affordable cars, but they're only sustainable by limiting imports as market-rate cars end up being preferable, both new and used. How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop. We can use policy and public funding to fill in the cracks, but "building affordable housing" doesn't actually make any sense at scale. Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing. You get significantly more bang for your buck that way as private finance markets have much more money than is available from the government. Advocating for "affordable housing" is really just an excuse to oppose housing as you can always claim that a project isn't sufficiently "affordable". This is basically how most residential projects end up getting stonewalled.
- hoseja 5y ago
  >How about we just let real estate developers build housing. How about letting actual people do it.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Is it illegal for a regular person to build a house by themselves in California??
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Not illegal, but the red tape makes it not worth it. A few manage anyway, but you need a legal team if you want to make money.
- lwansbrough 5y ago
jollybean 5y ago
"nless you are willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood." There is no need for housing to be built in any specific location, or even density. NYC has tons of density and it jumps from poor to rich. So does London. So does Hong Kong. And it's generally 'unaffordable'. Paradoxically Texas has no density, and it's cheap. 'NIMBYISM' is mostly an issue for aspirational workers who want to live in aspirational places, but can't afford it - and that's an inherent function of the system: 'aspirational' places are exclusive. There is no escaping that. Stabilizing housing prices with rational interest rates, tweaking some zoning laws, possibly some subsidies here and there, working with industry, some state level rent control (like Ontario/Quebec it works well) etc.. FYI here are apartments in Ontario, CA, East of LA: https://www.apartments.com/ontario-ca/under-1200/?bb=-_8771t7jNxl44ptE https://www.apartments.com/ontario-ca/under-1200/?bb=-_8771t... If you want to live in Santa Monica, it's very expensive, it's not the governments job to provide you with that opportunity, it's their job to create a level playing field, to regulate smartly so that things don't get out of hand - not to make it so everyone gets to live exactly where they want.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  Tell me more about these affordable parts of Austin, TX. You can’t just compare major cities to vast states or nations, that makes no sense.
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    He said "Texas", not Austin, TX. Not sure why anyone would want to live there anyway... went there to help my nephew move in to his apartment at UT Austin four years ago. Went down there a few times to hang out with him, not fucking impressive. At all. I'll stick with Fort Worth, and Dallas if I really must. If you can't afford rent in Fort Worth, drive 20 minutes up the road to Denton. There are 800 sq. ft. apartments there for $695. At any rate, my personal taste in cities aside, here's the sad truth no one wants to confront: not everyone is going to get to live where they want in life, because not everyone is valuable enough to the economy to make enough money to live in the exclusive places. A cashier at McDonald's will never be as valuable as a developer for a startup company. It's isn't "unfair", it's a function of which adds more value to the market economy.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
It's not so much about "affordable housing" as MORE housing, though, right? Build more housing and prices come down for everyone.
meerab 5y ago
This unfortunately true in California. NIMBY moment is strong. Another perspective.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o (Love this channel!)
luckydata 5y ago
I'm as left wing progressive as they come and I'm disgusted by the so called "liberal" municipal legislations in the Bay Area. Not only they are very conservative, they have an appalling lack of vision and imagination and display a total lack of leadership at every level. This place with better leadership could be a paradise and we're stuck in a shitty suburb always stuck in traffic where there's nothing to do and bad architecture galore. We can do better.
arcturus17 5y ago
When I lived in London, I was always impressed that there were "projects" in neighborhoods like Chelsea (possibly the most affluent in all of the UK). After noticing that striking example, I've begun to see that pattern (although more subtly) in a lot of cities, including my own (Madrid, Spain). I'm all for building affordable housing, but it seems to me that the idea of building affordable housing close more premium housing has been around for some time, and I'm not really sure what it has accomplished for anyone. Are there examples of success in doing this, and what can be learnt from past failures?
- zip1234 5y ago
  The main purpose as I understand it is that it allows poorer students to go to the nicer schools. In the US, the schools that are 'good' are all in expensive areas.
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
I guess people just take it for granted, but can you state a fundamental reason why people should be forced to live next to affordable housing? What if I pay extra money to live in a nice location, say with an unobstructed view to a lake or whatever. Why should there be a law that decides my neighborhood has to be destroyed for the sake of "equality"? Does equality (or "non-inequality") mean nobody is allowed to have anything that somebody else doesn't have? Because that sounds like full blown socialism to me. What about San Francisco - I hear they have many homeless and people defecating on the streets. Should everybody be forced to live on streets with defecating people? What if people pay extra to live in a ice neighborhood?
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  I think you have to look at that the other way around. Why would you have an inherent right to stop somebody else doing something with their own property just because it happens to be near you?
  - kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Ultimately there are no inherited rights, only guns. So I am not sure what argument you are making? I thought you could come up with some fundamental principle, like "human society would be better if we all adhered to this rule, because bla bla and so forth". As I stated elsewhere, I think communities or governments sell land under certain premises. For example (possibly) that people buying become part of the community and get a vote in further developments. That would be a reason why they would have "the right" to interfere.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Hypocrisy? Perhaps but everyone has their best interests. I know progressive people who are very particular about choosing a school for their kids. Not too many immigrants or students from "complex" backgrounds. Everyone wants an inclusive society but nobody wants their child to suffer from it in a world where education is a life or death situation.
sershe 5y ago
"to have affordable housing built" presupposes a statist solution. I am not willing to have affordable housing built as presently defined, due to the amount of tax dollar waste, and actual results that I can see (in Seattle); but I'm totally willing for 90% of all zoning and related (parking minimums/environmental/etc) rules to be abolished, and having the amount of housing increase dramatically via market forces.

by daenz 5y ago

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Everyone’s for “affordable housing.” It isn’t allowed to exist except in rare synthetic occasions however, and nimbys often know that.

latch 5y ago

Is this particularly unique to inequality? You cannot say you are against animal cruelty unless you are willing to stop eating factory-farmed meat? You cannot say you are against fossil fuels unless you are willing to stop driving [gasoline-powered] automobiles You cannot say you are against child labor unless you are willing to give up coffee/cocoa/textiles ...

helen___keller 5y ago
You've listed personal actions. Allowing affordable housing to be built is a collective / political action. The equivalent would be something like "you cannot say you are against animal cruelty unless you support legislation against animal cruelty", and I think that's reasonable.
spamizbad 5y ago
Your analogies don't really track. It would be like saying: You cannot say you're for affordable housing unless you're personally willing (and eligible) to live in an affordable unit. (for the record, if I was eligible, I would love to).
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Have you seen the neighborhoods and people that live in "affordable" housing? No you wouldn't want to live there.
  - etchalon 5y ago
    There are plenty of perfectly acceptable affordable housing areas, especially when it's mixed into market-priced housing.
  - Kye 5y ago
    Can you be specific? Insinuations don't help.
    - Igelau 5y ago
      I'm sure it varies by region, but there many places along Appalachia where housing prices are basically the only buffer keeping fentanyl, meth, and guns at a distance. Yeah, it sucks because these are people in desperate circumstances exacerbated by distorted cost-of-living in the first place, but resolving the root cause doesn't magically undo the metastasis of crime and violence. Edit: I'm not saying that there aren't smart ways to do this, and converting one single-family lot in SF to a duplex certainly doesn't destroy the neighborhood. I am saying that some people have seen things they don't want in their backyard, and some people haven't.
      - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
        This is one of the worst aspects of American culture, IMO. Instead of tackling the issues of poverty, we just use the market to segregate the poor and their problems. It ends up creating a fractious, rancorous, and mutually distrustful society.
  - ahoy 5y ago
    I used to live across the street from a smaller NYCHA building. 5 stories, probably 20-40 units (new york city housing authority, pubic housing here). It seemed perfectly fine. I never went in, but the outside was clean, well lit, and well maintained. My neighbors there were just like my neighbors anywhere else on the block. There's certainly a lot of bad public housing in the us, but that's not an immutable quality of public housing, that's a policy choice made by politicians.
godelski 5y ago
This doesn't really work. Nimby is "I want this, but not near me" but the examples you gave are "I want this but no one is selling this to me." The difference is that in the first scenario someone is presenting a solution and people are saying "no, not like that" and in the second scenario there's no solution presented and people would probably buy them if they existed (or were just as convenient).
labster 5y ago
I’m not willing to give up textiles all the time, but I always make an effort for No Pants Day. Do it for the children! Or did I get your argument wrong?
todd3834 5y ago
I don’t drink coffee for other reasons but I do buy a lot of dark chocolate. Is it a known fact that cocoa is run by child labor? Even fair trade premium brands like Taza? I’m asking because I will give it up if so. As for textiles, does this mean all/most brands? I think it is worth boycotting brands that have unethical business practices but I didn’t really realize this was still going on in 2021 to a large extent. I know that sounds ignorant but I guess I just never really looked into it and it definitely isn’t shared in my echo chamber.
- cozzyd 5y ago
  Off-topic but the Taza Factory is a fun tour (in Somerville, MA)

wahern 5y ago

> willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood. The problem here is that you can't really build "affordable housing" any more than you can build "affordable cars". At least, not in the way "affordable" is used by progressives. You don't build affordable cars, you just build cars, which end up becoming "affordable" in the used car market. Ditto for housing. There have been attempts at building affordable housing at large scale. We've spent the past 30 years tearing down those "projects". Similarly, plenty of countries have tried to build affordable cars, but they're only sustainable by limiting imports as market-rate cars end up being preferable, both new and used. How about we just let real estate developers build housing. Full stop. We can use policy and public funding to fill in the cracks, but "building affordable housing" doesn't actually make any sense at scale. Not unless you do something like Singapore, which sells their affordable housing, permitting individual purchasers to leverage private market financing. You get significantly more bang for your buck that way as private finance markets have much more money than is available from the government. Advocating for "affordable housing" is really just an excuse to oppose housing as you can always claim that a project isn't sufficiently "affordable". This is basically how most residential projects end up getting stonewalled.

hoseja 5y ago
>How about we just let real estate developers build housing. How about letting actual people do it.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Is it illegal for a regular person to build a house by themselves in California??
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Not illegal, but the red tape makes it not worth it. A few manage anyway, but you need a legal team if you want to make money.
lwansbrough 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

"nless you are willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood." There is no need for housing to be built in any specific location, or even density. NYC has tons of density and it jumps from poor to rich. So does London. So does Hong Kong. And it's generally 'unaffordable'. Paradoxically Texas has no density, and it's cheap. 'NIMBYISM' is mostly an issue for aspirational workers who want to live in aspirational places, but can't afford it - and that's an inherent function of the system: 'aspirational' places are exclusive. There is no escaping that. Stabilizing housing prices with rational interest rates, tweaking some zoning laws, possibly some subsidies here and there, working with industry, some state level rent control (like Ontario/Quebec it works well) etc.. FYI here are apartments in Ontario, CA, East of LA: https://www.apartments.com/ontario-ca/under-1200/?bb=-_8771t7jNxl44ptE https://www.apartments.com/ontario-ca/under-1200/?bb=-_8771t... If you want to live in Santa Monica, it's very expensive, it's not the governments job to provide you with that opportunity, it's their job to create a level playing field, to regulate smartly so that things don't get out of hand - not to make it so everyone gets to live exactly where they want.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago
Tell me more about these affordable parts of Austin, TX. You can’t just compare major cities to vast states or nations, that makes no sense.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  He said "Texas", not Austin, TX. Not sure why anyone would want to live there anyway... went there to help my nephew move in to his apartment at UT Austin four years ago. Went down there a few times to hang out with him, not fucking impressive. At all. I'll stick with Fort Worth, and Dallas if I really must. If you can't afford rent in Fort Worth, drive 20 minutes up the road to Denton. There are 800 sq. ft. apartments there for $695. At any rate, my personal taste in cities aside, here's the sad truth no one wants to confront: not everyone is going to get to live where they want in life, because not everyone is valuable enough to the economy to make enough money to live in the exclusive places. A cashier at McDonald's will never be as valuable as a developer for a startup company. It's isn't "unfair", it's a function of which adds more value to the market economy.

chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago

It's not so much about "affordable housing" as MORE housing, though, right? Build more housing and prices come down for everyone.

meerab 5y ago

This unfortunately true in California. NIMBY moment is strong. Another perspective.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o (Love this channel!)

luckydata 5y ago

I'm as left wing progressive as they come and I'm disgusted by the so called "liberal" municipal legislations in the Bay Area. Not only they are very conservative, they have an appalling lack of vision and imagination and display a total lack of leadership at every level. This place with better leadership could be a paradise and we're stuck in a shitty suburb always stuck in traffic where there's nothing to do and bad architecture galore. We can do better.

arcturus17 5y ago

When I lived in London, I was always impressed that there were "projects" in neighborhoods like Chelsea (possibly the most affluent in all of the UK). After noticing that striking example, I've begun to see that pattern (although more subtly) in a lot of cities, including my own (Madrid, Spain). I'm all for building affordable housing, but it seems to me that the idea of building affordable housing close more premium housing has been around for some time, and I'm not really sure what it has accomplished for anyone. Are there examples of success in doing this, and what can be learnt from past failures?

zip1234 5y ago
The main purpose as I understand it is that it allows poorer students to go to the nicer schools. In the US, the schools that are 'good' are all in expensive areas.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

I guess people just take it for granted, but can you state a fundamental reason why people should be forced to live next to affordable housing? What if I pay extra money to live in a nice location, say with an unobstructed view to a lake or whatever. Why should there be a law that decides my neighborhood has to be destroyed for the sake of "equality"? Does equality (or "non-inequality") mean nobody is allowed to have anything that somebody else doesn't have? Because that sounds like full blown socialism to me. What about San Francisco - I hear they have many homeless and people defecating on the streets. Should everybody be forced to live on streets with defecating people? What if people pay extra to live in a ice neighborhood?

iudqnolq 5y ago
I think you have to look at that the other way around. Why would you have an inherent right to stop somebody else doing something with their own property just because it happens to be near you?
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  Ultimately there are no inherited rights, only guns. So I am not sure what argument you are making? I thought you could come up with some fundamental principle, like "human society would be better if we all adhered to this rule, because bla bla and so forth". As I stated elsewhere, I think communities or governments sell land under certain premises. For example (possibly) that people buying become part of the community and get a vote in further developments. That would be a reason why they would have "the right" to interfere.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Hypocrisy? Perhaps but everyone has their best interests. I know progressive people who are very particular about choosing a school for their kids. Not too many immigrants or students from "complex" backgrounds. Everyone wants an inclusive society but nobody wants their child to suffer from it in a world where education is a life or death situation.

sershe 5y ago

"to have affordable housing built" presupposes a statist solution. I am not willing to have affordable housing built as presently defined, due to the amount of tax dollar waste, and actual results that I can see (in Seattle); but I'm totally willing for 90% of all zoning and related (parking minimums/environmental/etc) rules to be abolished, and having the amount of housing increase dramatically via market forces.