4 ms·

> favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives for us non-americans, can someone please explain what general political aims the 'moderate

> favoring moderate causes and candidates and targeting progressives for us non-americans, can someone please explain what general political aims the 'moderate' and 'progressive' parties represent? And where are they on the republican democrat spectrum?

habitue 3y ago
The article goes out of its way to avoid naming the cause which is: housing! More affordable homes! Valuing people over historic buildings and neighborhood character! You know, the kind of stuff that actually should be considered progressive
- willvarfar 3y ago
  so the progressives want more affordable homes, and the moderates don't?
  - jacobolus 3y ago
    Everyone claims to wants more affordable homes, there's just a disagreement about how to best achieve it, and a certain amount of money spent on obfuscation and practically counterproductive policies (arguably on all sides); property owners are a major political force on all sides of SF politics, and some of them want to keep prices high. The "progressives" generally want to limit gentrification, prevent renters from being evicted, and add more subsidized housing. The "moderates" generally want to make it easier to build more housing of any type. You could broadly characterize the two groups as "default skeptical" vs. "default supportive" of real estate developers. But housing is only one point of disagreement (albeit one of the most significant), plenty of people have more nuanced positions than this, and these camps are not entirely uniform across issues. Other points of recent disagreement include Covid lockdowns, what the school board should focus on, how hard prosecutors should go after police misconduct vs. minor crime, responses to the homeless, how much power the board of supervisors should have vs. the mayor's office, ...
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      For context, I think it's important to highlight that 60% of SF renters are in rent controlled units. The split between building affordable and not affordable housing has a huge impact on the cities "soul". It's quite literally choosing one future vs another, in many folks minds.
      - shuckles 3y ago
        Rent controlled does not mean below market rate, and affordability isn’t poured in concrete so “building affordable and not affordable housing” is a nonsensical statement.
        iancmceachern 3y ago
        It is though. It's true that affordability isn't poured into concrete, but it is baked into each and every real estate transaction. A new luxury high rise needs to have x number of affordable units by law. As you point out, it's true that they don't build the affordable units much or any different than their other units. But, the way the whole financial side of the thing is structured is completely different than it would be if the laws were different. A home is just as much a mortgage as it is a physical object.
    - shuckles 3y ago
      This is an extremely charitable take. As far as can be observed by the consequences of their policy, the progs don’t actually care about maximizing new affordable housing production. If they did, they would not have referred to SB35 as genocidal policy. It also squares with their coalition which is basically NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers.
      - jacobolus 3y ago
        I was trying to be as "extremely charitable" to both sides here as I could, because the point is to broadly characterize the two groups for the information of people unfamiliar with SF politics, not to push my own personal message. (For reference, Wiener, who wrote SB35, used to be my supervisor and I am generally a fan.) It's not fair to say that the progressive group primarily consists of "NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers", nor is the group cohesive enough to label anyone's individual comments as representative of a "they"; if you are going to characterize either of these groups negatively you should try to quote specific comments and attribute them to specific people, rather than making vague insinuations.
  - akavi 3y ago
    Moderates believe supply and demand applies to housing, and that building more housing, regardless of whether it is explicitly "low income", is the most important thing to improve housing affordability. In practice, this means favoring upzoning (allowing duplexes/triplexes/apartment buildings in more places), and minimizing burdens on developers. Eg, advocating against "inclusionary zoning requirements" that require X% of a given building to be rented out at below market rate and against long development approval processes. Progressives believe that allowing developers to build housing will only create "luxury" housing that is unaffordable to all but the rich, increasing gentrification and displacement. Therefore it's necessary to mandate things like "inclusionary zoning" and tight review of every single development project. Empirically, the progressive stance results in a lot less housing of any sort getting built, whether "affordable" or otherwise, and consequently higher housing prices for all but the lucky lottery winners who grab the limited number of BMR ("Below Market Rent") units. Some would say that that's actually the goal of progressives (ie, they're using "progressive" window dressing to preserve property values/neighborhood aesthetics of the very rich).
    - shuckles 3y ago
      Again, progressives oppose development regardless of affordability. They, for example, opposed amending the city charter to exempt affordable housing projects from discretionary review. They are suing UCSF over hospital expansion and opposed it constructing new housing for its staff. They organized against state bill SB35 and various density bonuses that allow for the construction of new affordable housing. They opposed the height and density proposed for a 100% affordable housing project through HANC and dragged proposals for redevelopment at Potrero Yard and CCSF through decades of process. Progressive political consultants worked for Livermore NIMBYs to spin a lawsuit against a proposed downtown affordable housing project. I could go on. 20 years ago, progs would admit outright that they thought new development was undesirable. Since, it has become more inappropriate to say that out loud so they dress it in concerns about only supporting housing under economically infeasible conditions.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  The cause of what?
nostromo 3y ago
For the US: Moderate: between Republican and Democrat. Progressive: left of Democrat
- mathgradthrow 3y ago
  No one knows what you mean by left and right.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    "Left" and "right" are common parlance throughout the world. Where, roughly, "left" favours collectivism and social responsibility, and "right" favours individualism and liberalism (classical sense, not American sense).
    - mathgradthrow 3y ago
      Those are horoscopes. They may be commonly understood, (although you're wrong about how people use left and right as well) but if you want to call yourself left, you can match those statements to your opinions, and likewise if you call yourself right. So it is still the case that no one knows what you're talking about. Liberty is a function of an extraordinarily strong social contract. If you don't have strong enforcement of rights, you don't have rights.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    Obviously we're talking about who sits where in the Assembly of post-revolutionary France.
brokensegue 3y ago
Progressive = left = democrat (very roughly)
miriam_catira 3y ago
Usually moderates can be either party, the ones willing to work together from both sides, so in the center. Progressives are generally considered to be the left-leaning democrats. I could be mistaken though, I've been trying to avoid politics recently....
- jacobolus 3y ago
  In San Francisco the Republican Party is marginal (and broadly despised by the electorate), so you can think of the "progressives" vs. "moderates" as sort of the local version of two parties, mostly within the Democratic party.
bilbo0s 3y ago
In US terms. Progressive is Left. Their pet terrorist loot the school, the Target, or the Walmart. Despite what the article says, we have no moderates. Conservative is right. Their pet terrorists take guns and shoot up the school, the Target, or the Walmart. (And occasionally, a church here or there). That's US politics in a nutshell.
- networkchad 3y ago
  Ridiculous and deranged take. No one on the right will endorse mass-shooters. You have plenty of people on the left willing to make excuses for their looters because "muh socioeconomic factors".
drewdevault 3y ago
There are no "moderate" nor "progressive" parties. There's just Democrats and Republicans, which in a global context are respectively center/center-right and right. In a US context, both terms are more likely to refer to Democrats, and definitely not to Republicans. There are some other parties but they are of next-to-no consequence in US politics. It's pretty hard to say what the terms "progressive" and "moderate" mean in a US context, but I would say that both terms exclude the American far right and populist movements, and are vague as to what they include otherwise. The Overton window has shifted hard to the right in the United States, so it's probably somewhat right of what you may expect from, say, a European perspective. A moderate will probably be sympathetic to limiting immigration, for example, a progressive is likely more in support of immigration. Both groups probably support minority rights (e.g. LGBTQ, Muslim, etc), but moderates less so. In terms of economics, both terms and parties generally describe liberal capitalist economic policy, which is dogmatically entrenched across the US political spectrum, to the point where most Americans cannot conceptualize economic systems other than liberal capitalism. The main difference in political economic values across the US political spectrum fixate mainly on who pays how much taxes, and subsidies for liberal capitalist businesses. Progressives may be more pro-union, whereas most moderates are generally not. Moderate and progressive groups can overlap, particularly in a politician who wants to appeal to both, usually by contrasting themselves with the right. Disclosing my biases: I am an American leftist (or social democrat, if you prefer) living abroad, and I generally have quite a lot of disdain for moderates, particularly in the United States. I'm definitely holding my punches for this comment, though, for what it's worth.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  You must be purely talking economics if you think the Democrats are globally center-right. If you have a few minutes of thought to the ~200 countries that 8 billion people are living under, like China, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Poland, Phillipines, Turkey, and their policies on immigration, LGBT, drug use, freedom of speech/press, you would quickly be disabused of any idea the US democrats are center-right. What I think is that steeped in a Western European leftist bubble, 95% of the world is right wing to you, and you’re confused on where America stands in that spectrum, forgetting about who’s currently been elected in the rest of Europe like Sweden, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, etc.

habitue 3y ago

The article goes out of its way to avoid naming the cause which is: housing! More affordable homes! Valuing people over historic buildings and neighborhood character! You know, the kind of stuff that actually should be considered progressive

willvarfar 3y ago
so the progressives want more affordable homes, and the moderates don't?
- jacobolus 3y ago
  Everyone claims to wants more affordable homes, there's just a disagreement about how to best achieve it, and a certain amount of money spent on obfuscation and practically counterproductive policies (arguably on all sides); property owners are a major political force on all sides of SF politics, and some of them want to keep prices high. The "progressives" generally want to limit gentrification, prevent renters from being evicted, and add more subsidized housing. The "moderates" generally want to make it easier to build more housing of any type. You could broadly characterize the two groups as "default skeptical" vs. "default supportive" of real estate developers. But housing is only one point of disagreement (albeit one of the most significant), plenty of people have more nuanced positions than this, and these camps are not entirely uniform across issues. Other points of recent disagreement include Covid lockdowns, what the school board should focus on, how hard prosecutors should go after police misconduct vs. minor crime, responses to the homeless, how much power the board of supervisors should have vs. the mayor's office, ...
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    For context, I think it's important to highlight that 60% of SF renters are in rent controlled units. The split between building affordable and not affordable housing has a huge impact on the cities "soul". It's quite literally choosing one future vs another, in many folks minds.
    - shuckles 3y ago
      Rent controlled does not mean below market rate, and affordability isn’t poured in concrete so “building affordable and not affordable housing” is a nonsensical statement.
      - iancmceachern 3y ago
        It is though. It's true that affordability isn't poured into concrete, but it is baked into each and every real estate transaction. A new luxury high rise needs to have x number of affordable units by law. As you point out, it's true that they don't build the affordable units much or any different than their other units. But, the way the whole financial side of the thing is structured is completely different than it would be if the laws were different. A home is just as much a mortgage as it is a physical object.
  - shuckles 3y ago
    This is an extremely charitable take. As far as can be observed by the consequences of their policy, the progs don’t actually care about maximizing new affordable housing production. If they did, they would not have referred to SB35 as genocidal policy. It also squares with their coalition which is basically NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers.
    - jacobolus 3y ago
      I was trying to be as "extremely charitable" to both sides here as I could, because the point is to broadly characterize the two groups for the information of people unfamiliar with SF politics, not to push my own personal message. (For reference, Wiener, who wrote SB35, used to be my supervisor and I am generally a fan.) It's not fair to say that the progressive group primarily consists of "NIMBYs and nostalgic boomers", nor is the group cohesive enough to label anyone's individual comments as representative of a "they"; if you are going to characterize either of these groups negatively you should try to quote specific comments and attribute them to specific people, rather than making vague insinuations.
- akavi 3y ago
  Moderates believe supply and demand applies to housing, and that building more housing, regardless of whether it is explicitly "low income", is the most important thing to improve housing affordability. In practice, this means favoring upzoning (allowing duplexes/triplexes/apartment buildings in more places), and minimizing burdens on developers. Eg, advocating against "inclusionary zoning requirements" that require X% of a given building to be rented out at below market rate and against long development approval processes. Progressives believe that allowing developers to build housing will only create "luxury" housing that is unaffordable to all but the rich, increasing gentrification and displacement. Therefore it's necessary to mandate things like "inclusionary zoning" and tight review of every single development project. Empirically, the progressive stance results in a lot less housing of any sort getting built, whether "affordable" or otherwise, and consequently higher housing prices for all but the lucky lottery winners who grab the limited number of BMR ("Below Market Rent") units. Some would say that that's actually the goal of progressives (ie, they're using "progressive" window dressing to preserve property values/neighborhood aesthetics of the very rich).
  - shuckles 3y ago
    Again, progressives oppose development regardless of affordability. They, for example, opposed amending the city charter to exempt affordable housing projects from discretionary review. They are suing UCSF over hospital expansion and opposed it constructing new housing for its staff. They organized against state bill SB35 and various density bonuses that allow for the construction of new affordable housing. They opposed the height and density proposed for a 100% affordable housing project through HANC and dragged proposals for redevelopment at Potrero Yard and CCSF through decades of process. Progressive political consultants worked for Livermore NIMBYs to spin a lawsuit against a proposed downtown affordable housing project. I could go on. 20 years ago, progs would admit outright that they thought new development was undesirable. Since, it has become more inappropriate to say that out loud so they dress it in concerns about only supporting housing under economically infeasible conditions.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
The cause of what?

nostromo 3y ago

For the US: Moderate: between Republican and Democrat. Progressive: left of Democrat

mathgradthrow 3y ago
No one knows what you mean by left and right.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  "Left" and "right" are common parlance throughout the world. Where, roughly, "left" favours collectivism and social responsibility, and "right" favours individualism and liberalism (classical sense, not American sense).
  - mathgradthrow 3y ago
    Those are horoscopes. They may be commonly understood, (although you're wrong about how people use left and right as well) but if you want to call yourself left, you can match those statements to your opinions, and likewise if you call yourself right. So it is still the case that no one knows what you're talking about. Liberty is a function of an extraordinarily strong social contract. If you don't have strong enforcement of rights, you don't have rights.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  Obviously we're talking about who sits where in the Assembly of post-revolutionary France.

brokensegue 3y ago

Progressive = left = democrat (very roughly)

miriam_catira 3y ago

Usually moderates can be either party, the ones willing to work together from both sides, so in the center. Progressives are generally considered to be the left-leaning democrats. I could be mistaken though, I've been trying to avoid politics recently....

jacobolus 3y ago
In San Francisco the Republican Party is marginal (and broadly despised by the electorate), so you can think of the "progressives" vs. "moderates" as sort of the local version of two parties, mostly within the Democratic party.

bilbo0s 3y ago

In US terms. Progressive is Left. Their pet terrorist loot the school, the Target, or the Walmart. Despite what the article says, we have no moderates. Conservative is right. Their pet terrorists take guns and shoot up the school, the Target, or the Walmart. (And occasionally, a church here or there). That's US politics in a nutshell.

networkchad 3y ago
Ridiculous and deranged take. No one on the right will endorse mass-shooters. You have plenty of people on the left willing to make excuses for their looters because "muh socioeconomic factors".

drewdevault 3y ago

There are no "moderate" nor "progressive" parties. There's just Democrats and Republicans, which in a global context are respectively center/center-right and right. In a US context, both terms are more likely to refer to Democrats, and definitely not to Republicans. There are some other parties but they are of next-to-no consequence in US politics. It's pretty hard to say what the terms "progressive" and "moderate" mean in a US context, but I would say that both terms exclude the American far right and populist movements, and are vague as to what they include otherwise. The Overton window has shifted hard to the right in the United States, so it's probably somewhat right of what you may expect from, say, a European perspective. A moderate will probably be sympathetic to limiting immigration, for example, a progressive is likely more in support of immigration. Both groups probably support minority rights (e.g. LGBTQ, Muslim, etc), but moderates less so. In terms of economics, both terms and parties generally describe liberal capitalist economic policy, which is dogmatically entrenched across the US political spectrum, to the point where most Americans cannot conceptualize economic systems other than liberal capitalism. The main difference in political economic values across the US political spectrum fixate mainly on who pays how much taxes, and subsidies for liberal capitalist businesses. Progressives may be more pro-union, whereas most moderates are generally not. Moderate and progressive groups can overlap, particularly in a politician who wants to appeal to both, usually by contrasting themselves with the right. Disclosing my biases: I am an American leftist (or social democrat, if you prefer) living abroad, and I generally have quite a lot of disdain for moderates, particularly in the United States. I'm definitely holding my punches for this comment, though, for what it's worth.

reducesuffering 3y ago
You must be purely talking economics if you think the Democrats are globally center-right. If you have a few minutes of thought to the ~200 countries that 8 billion people are living under, like China, India, Russia, Japan, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Poland, Phillipines, Turkey, and their policies on immigration, LGBT, drug use, freedom of speech/press, you would quickly be disabused of any idea the US democrats are center-right. What I think is that steeped in a Western European leftist bubble, 95% of the world is right wing to you, and you’re confused on where America stands in that spectrum, forgetting about who’s currently been elected in the rest of Europe like Sweden, UK, Poland, Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Serbia, etc.