5 ms·
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be elig
by radu_floricica 2y ago
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.
I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.
Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.
I've read this yesterday:
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despite-stagnation https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ...
It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.
And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.
- croes 2y agoThe problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people. Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do. For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
- anon7000 2y agoGreat point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but don’t get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn’t have to deal with it.
- DangitBobby 2y agoWhat legal requirements spawned insurance middlemen?
- rahimnathwani 2y agoThe problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people. Not every excessive process is the result of legislation. Some of these processes arise gradually and unnecessarily, because, in an organization without competition, there's no pressure to be efficient (i.e. focus on increasing output).
- jquery 2y agoA business can become more efficient by focusing on the most profitable customers. The government is not a business, nor should it be. There is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be efficient, the American people never saw a tax cut they didn't like.
- rahimnathwani 2y agoThere is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be efficient What you say may be true in certain parts of the US. But we're talking about San Francisco. I've lived here for over 5 years, and my observations during that time do not tell me there's any pressure on governmental organizations here to be efficient, let alone 'plenty of pressure'.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoAre you looking in the right places? I'm sure all the big tech leaders put pressure on? But their definition of "efficient" may not align with yours or mine.
- jquery 2y agoEfficiency isn't the number one goal of a democracy. You want pure efficiency, dictatorships are the way to go. But for the most part, the things I expect the SF city government to do, get done. The roads are paved, the schools function, crime is kept in check, elections are held, permits are issued, inspections get done, etc. All to varying degrees of course. And the people get to change leadership if they feel things aren't going well (as they did in the last election).
- gosub100 2y agoFor insurance companies? Yes doctors can be fired. They do not provide treatment.
- selfmodruntime 2y agoYou most definitely have to fire people. After all, their number one aim is to make sure their job still exists in a decade.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoBut their job doesn't exist for another month of you fire them. They aren't replacing "unproductive" workers.
- crooked-v 2y agoHow in the world is randomly firing people supposed to make anything more efficient? They literally don't even know what the people they're firing do, as seen with the latest mess with the Department of Energy.
- givemeethekeys 2y agoMaybe it forces the people who're left to prioritize which civil services to keep.
- aqueueaqueue 2y agoAnd forces states, especially poorer ones, to raise their taxes.
- gosub100 2y agoOr lower their taxes, now they don't have to fund useless bs
- bagels 2y agoYou think the states will get more federal money now? The trend of stealing money from New York, shutting down the Department of Education, and FEMA would make me think otherwise.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThe explicit point of dismantling some agencies is to leave it to the states. Aka they want to reduce state funding. So the state choices are generate more income or let certain institutions rot.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- clarionbell 2y agoIt's probably not. At this point I would place my hope in second order effects. But I'm not the sort of person to do that.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoThe necessity for delicately traversing the path to a solution that's more long-term sustainable than that which already exists seems to be something that DOGE is entirely incapable of. Musk seems to want things to scale; fewer people to achieve more productivity. People that already fall through the cracks aren't going to suddenly find themselves better off via a system that scales better, because better scaling actually creates wider cracks. The median flows better, at the cost of the fringes. Your comments regarding Japan are interesting. Japan's definitely an interesting example to use due to the odd, unenviable economic situation, but that makes your point stand out more rather than less, I think.
- UltraSane 2y agoMusk is using DOGE to shut down agencies he doesn't like. The dude likes firing people WAY too much.
- Philpax 2y agoSuch a thing requires a redesign, not an uncontrolled demolition.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- archagon 2y agoYou think conservatives care about actually helping the unhoused? Their ultimate goal is to funnel money from public services into private hands; and their "solution" to homelessness involves prison, concentration camps[1], or exile[2] — because they see the problem as undesirables reducing quality of life for the worthy rich, not abject human misery. (Indeed, Musk considers recipients of federal aid to be part of the "parasite class."[3]) [1]: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-homeless-trump-vivek-ramaswamy-b2663740.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_programs_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr... [3]: https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/02/14/elon-musk-faces-backlash-after-mocking-federal-aid-receipts/ https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/02/14/elon-musk-faces-back...
- majormajor 2y agoDOGE comes from the political machine that believes more restrictions on eligibility for government assistance are a GOOD thing and that spending on such assistance should be dramatically cut. So good luck with that. Zoning as a silver bullet? When you have a huge economic difference as a conflating factor? If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest. Economic stagnation and lower cost of living go hand in hand. Japan stagnated at a pretty high level, quality-of-living-wise. That doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's certainly not comparable to Nigeria, Pakistan, or Chile. It's also not comparable to the US. And do you know who else doesn't want the US to stagnate like that for the elite professional class? Elon Musk. (And Japan's economic situation has more than a few darker aspects to it.) (Republicans also fucking love zoning, so..... again... wtf)
- aprilthird2021 2y ago> If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest. But the article isn't wrong though. Zoning things like Tokyo in San Francisco would be a silver bullet to the woes there and it would go a long way to making people feel prosperous. If you live in the bay area, you'll be shocked to see people with quite large net worths, feel like they have nothing because the only place they can afford near their workplace is $1M or more and we're talking about condos here.
- panick21_ 2y agoZoning while important isn't a silver bullet. Often cities who change zoning reform realize there is a whole lot of other issues that cause problems. But yes, zoning one of the most important ones.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- energy123 2y agoBut DOGE, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't have zoning on the agenda. Trump's campaign platform was verbatim in favor of single family zoning according to his website. Harris's official platform was to ease permitting restrictions and provide incentives to states to reduce these regulations, according to their website and the multiple times they discussed this on the campaign trail. Look past the marketing hype of DOGE and see that it's not actually deregulating anything that matters. The regulations that are blocking housing and energy are only going to be accelerated under this administration -- wilfully so. The technocratic center-right have at times embraced deregulations like this, but not the new populist-right. The populist-right, if anything, see these regulations as useful because it empowers the immigrant scapegoat tactic as an explanation for housing costs.
- Tade0 2y ago> This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default. That is more or less how it works all around the world except the US. Or rather: mixed use is the default, outside of specific cases
- genewitch 2y agoCool. The US is the third largest country in the world; not all of us have to live above a restaurant or laundry. Or in apartments or other multi-tenant housing. Those of us that want to can move to San Francisco or New York. The state i live in has fewer people than metro Los Angeles. What works for them for housing is unnecessary for us.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoOkay, no one was talking about your town. I'm not even sure if your state/town has zoning laws. SF and LA have a lot less "living above a restaurant" because of those.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoI think zoning is THE reason for what the article explains (and thanks for sharing it by the way, it was very insightful, imo). But how does fixing our zoning issues translate to, for example, firing thousands of IRS workers?
- johnnyanmac 2y agoYup. Top bad Trump's actual political stance wants to focus on single family households.
- BrenBarn 2y agoI mean, the other conclusion from that article is a negative, namely: constant GDP growth is not a great measure of success. Who cares if GDP goes up or down? What matters is quality of life.
- hatmatrix 2y agoIndeed there is administrative bloat everywhere, and I can sympathize with your hope that tearing down the current system will leave room for building anew. However, it's hubris to assume that everything is bloat. There is the adage of Chesterton's fence, which reads: "...reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." Many things that appear to be bloat that serves a useful function, and tearing them blindly is going to do irreparable damage. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
- fergie 2y agoDespite the hype, DOGE is about replacing government employees with private contractors rather that actually saving money. Therefore it will almost certainly end up costing more in the long run. At a high level, the current administration is seeking ways to cut tax for the wealthy and pay and conditions for workers. As a property developer, Trump has a literal vested interest in maintaining high property values. Its really difficult to see how this will translate into more affordable housing for poor people.
- Fin_Code 2y agoI'm with you in that hope. There has been wild growth for a very long time. Realignments are painful but necessary.
- UltraSane 2y agoElon Musk is a liar with zero credibility. All his claims about government "inefficiency" are lies used to make people like you OK with him shutting down agencies he doesn't like.
- namuol 2y agoCan you point out the parts which aren’t a shit-show?
- evantbyrne 2y agoReally not seeing the forest through the trees on this one. The president is not supposed to have unilateral authority to axe written law. He's trimming the legislative branch, not the budget.
- yibg 2y agoPersonally I can get behind the stated intentions of DOGE (although I don't think that's the real intent). I can also see the logic of having to break a few things / start over to really get to a clean state. But the way it's done doesn't seem intentional or calculated, it's just randomly smash things and seeing what breaks. To put it in software terms, this is like doing a refactor without knowing what the current code base does, what the intended functionalities are and without having a design. Instead, someone just goes in to delete chunks of code based on the file name and see what happens. With a random CRUD app that might be ok to some extent, but we're talking about people's livelihood, national security matters, environmental and consumer protection and such. The current DOGE approach using the most charitable take is either reckless or hubris.