The unintended consequences from rent control are complex. In this case, one concern is that cities will use this as a backdoor way to prevent new housing altogether. This is one of the reasons we have a big problem in the Bay Area: Palo Alto and Mountain View regularly add (say) 50,000 jobs in a year, but only 1000 housing units. All of these cities want to add all the jobs and none of the housing. Another concern is that making new units rent controlled discourages building new units, making housing prices higher overall. What we really need is a comprehensive housing policy for the Bay Area, but, in the absence of that, the current restrictions on rent control (according to the SPUR guide) are better than nothing.
(NB: I live in a non-rent-controlled apartment. I haven’t decided how I’m voting on this, but I usually find SPUR’s arguments persuasive.)
Thanks, I’ll read that as Austin has some of the same problems writ small. But I gotta say, their board isn’t exactly representative of the common man.
One other reason to think twice is that direct democracy (in CA) can be dangerous: propositions are very difficult to overturn, even if they cause big problems due to unintended consequences. This is why we’re stuck with Prop 13 and “the State of California knows this thing causes cancer” signs on every surface.
For the original article, I would like to hear more thoughtful discussion about the pros and cons of the Proposition, and less about who is funding the opposition. Nefarious opponents are a sign that it’s good, but not proof.
Trump went full Orwell from the start, but the rest of the GOP hasn’t fully caught up yet. You can see the realization trickling across the party in the last couple of years that you can lie about something that’s blatantly untrue and get away with it, all thanks to how well it’s worked for Trump. I expect it’s going to get worse before it gets better…
The more I think of it, I have always been in the libertarian-socialist area of the political spectrum (not anarchist, I still vote although that’s about the only difference), but my willingness to put up with government bullshit has lessened over the years.
I think I did the Carne Ross “loose faith in government institutions” thing, only I did it 10-15 years before he did (in age, we probably were thinking the same things at the same time). I seem to have independently become a communalist before I read Murray Bookchin.
Developers aren’t building new affordable rental units in the Bay Area anyhow – it’s all luxury condos and rentals. This won’t change that situation either way. It will change the situation for currently-housed working- and middle-class people whose salary increases continually lag behind rent increases (and tuition increases, and health insurance rate increases, and, and, and…).
What’s preventing the construction of new affordable rental housing in the Bay Area is developer greed, outmoded zoning and city councillors giving into the NIMBY homeowners every time.
The proposition system in CA is indeed borked. The propositions are often deceptively worded (especially when coming from conservatives) and as others note are further misrepresented by an opposing or supporting side (again, usually conservatives). It needs to go (as does Prop 13, if they can figure out a way to take it out with the proposition system in the form of a repeal mechanism).
When I decided to write that comment, I really thought my views had changed a lot, but looking at it, it just feels that way because American politics has gone from being rather craptacular to off the deep end.
I could add, I favor total drug legalization and taxation to fund recovery and hopefully put the mostly sham addiction clinics out of business. But I’d settle for now for Portuguese style decriminalization .
The drug cartels wouldn’t vanish anymore than the Sicilian-American Mafia did after the 21st Amendment ended Prohibition, but right now the War on Drugs is basically funding them and all the problems that come with them.
That and the many other things I could add can basically be filed under my social anarcho-libertarian views, which boil down to the Wiccan Rede of an it harm none, do what thou wilt.
About a decade ago, a friend of mine filled in a (pseudo-anonymised) questionnaire that asked the following political questions
Are you a Democrat?
Are you a Republican?
Are you a Libertarian?
Are you a Socialist?
She honestly answered yes to all of them. It’s not her fault that some political parties named themselves after political concepts (some of those parties seem to have stopped attempting to follow those concepts)
A lot of people seem to use just the second half of that quote…
You covered most of my small-L liberal views too, so we probably wouldn’t fight over a drink. I follow no party, individual politicians may be worthy, but parties as a whole shouldn’t be blindly trusted.
I think I’m more Left leaning but tend to deliver in a Right wing style; “You should have fucking listened to me earlier!” - because I get impatient with selfish dickery. *shrug.
Especially the GOP and the American Libertarian parties (though to be fair, many of the latter are simply idiots). That’s why I tend to emphasize the anarchist side of my anarcho-libertarian politics. The Randian an-caps have dragged the second-half through the mud.
But I sort of buried the lede. Automation is - and I really hate this term but it fits - a game changer. Looking at history, I see economics as an evolution, and I don’t believe what we have now can or deserves to last. A lot of my other positions could change if we really could have a near-fully automated society. I still want to live in something like Banks’s Culture.
I thought of another thing I’ve changed on. I was pretty skeptical of single-payer health care a decade ago, but I’m more on-board with it than not at this point. I still think there’s room for improvement to implementation, but the health insurance and healthcare industry in the US is a fucking train wreck.
I’m aware that these things are compatible in Europe (depending on how hardcore/territorial you are about definitions) but I’m actually talking about a kind of small-c conservatism that is more about metapraxis and less about ideology. E.g. I don’t believe in revolution as the primary, or even the most desirable, mode of social change–and I believe in it less and less with time, experience, and study.
A LOT of the US system is fucked, truly fucked, and has so many ingrained financial interests vying for their piece of the pie it will take time to get a workable solution. I’d hope the populace wants affordable health care, but the story plays out so very differently thanks to the money-men.
Here in the UK it is the opposite; we had a working system that people love and appreciate yet successive governments seem blindly intent on smashing it, to replace it with something that rewards only their backers.
Personally, I’d slap-drone the lot of them.
I loved Banks, he was full of good ideas. Can we go live on a different Plate, this one is a bit broken…?
Well, yeah. The soaring wealth inequality has led to the weird situation where the interests of most people, from the working poor with no assets to someone with, say, a million dollars’ worth of assets, converge together when they’re compared to the interests of billionaires – and worse yet, of depersonalized, faceless, heartless and soulless conglomerations of money like big hedge funds with hundreds of billions of dollars and no interest whatsoever in what they’re investing in, except that it must provide a certain level of returns.
Well, it was one example of my school of thought. And it is conservative (again, small c) in the simple sense of the word. That said, I’m not inherently a gradualist. I’m not interested in gradually stopping the child-detainee policies currently being inflicted on people at the moment, for instance. Nor am I someone who places a lot of faith in institutions. I’m just not fundamentally sanguine about revolutions. I’ll give another example of a more conservative mindset: I inherently believe that small community interactions matter a great deal. To the extent that I would rather be on IRL speaking terms with a local conservative than someone on Facebook who lives three states away and is pissed off that I’m speaking terms with a local conservative. (And I’m not talking about a Nazi or “identitarian,” which is a way of saying fancy Nazi). I do believe in conversion and proselytism, and adopt a policy on engagement using local issues as common ground. None of these things in themselves is a conservative position, but taken together with other ideas I’ve found I’m sufficiently heterodox that leftists don’t see me as “one of them.” And I’m cool with that. Leftist credentialing (AKA dick-measuring contests) were always really tiresome and the less people ask me to participate, the better.
