Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs Part III -- When an overly appealing narrative hooks up with fatally misaligned market forces, the results are always ugly.

[This finishes up my first round of of NIMBY/YIMBY posts (see here, here and here). I'll be addressing Joseph's asset inflation argument (more sparks will fly). I'll also be tossing in some data points which may not support my thesis since I haven't gotten around to forming one, but will raise some interesting questions about everyone else's.] 

"There are now, in effect, two Americas: the America of high-tech, high-income enclaves that are unaffordable for the less affluent, and the rest of the country," 

In this case, the narrative (heavily pushed by the NYT) is of rich, white NIMBYs who hypocritically claim to be liberal while selfishly denying the rest of the state affordable housing.  You couldn't make it any better if you had the villain twirling his moustache while a title card popped up saying "BOO! HISS!" (I am really starting to regret saying I was going to leave Boyle Heights out of this).

It is always dangerous when an appealing standard narrative (particularly a flawed narrative) attains unquestioned good status (Bowles-Simpson and the education reform movement were two recent examples). The coverage become increasingly unbalanced and the perceived righteousness of the cause lets journalists rationalize exaggeration and distortion, but things get really bad when you have a narrative that supports market forces that are badly misaligned with the public 

Developers play an important role in NIMBYism and for the most part, that's OK because their interests generally align with ours, but there exceptions, including two of the best ways of making a killing:

1. Make a desirable majority-minority neighborhood into a white neighborhood. 

2. Have the newly rich buy their way into the neighborhoods of the established rich.

The problems with the first are obvious, but normally the second is something we can safely ignore. Selling stars to Sneetches can be ugly but in the end, it comes down to annoying wealthy people arguing over tiny stretches of land which generally are not good at all from a city planning standpoint.

There is often an inverse relationship between what rich people look for in a residential neighborhood and what makes an area suitable for smart growth. The elite put a high value on mountain views, ocean breezes, trendy/touristy zip codes, and mainly a degree of isolation from the common folk. In terms of building population hubs, the first three are deeply problematic and the fourth is out and out terrible. It is no coincidence that SF, SM/Venice (adjacent and both so tiny it makes sense to combine them) and La Cañada Flintridge have natural barriers on at least two sides. (Also see Malibu.) This was a feature, not a bug.   

While SF represents less than 1% of the land in the Bay Area, the plurality and probably the majority of the coverage centers on this postage stamp. (Santa Monica is a flyspeck. Venice is the flyspeck's baby brother.)  Even if they weren't so terribly situated, no development policy changes in these "high-tech, high-income enclaves" is likely to have a detectable effect on housing in California. 

Developers, being mostly rational actors will start where the payoff is greatest, then work their way down. That queue moves slowly and may stop dead in the next economic downturn. Any sane conversation about densification in the Bay Area would start with San Jose, not San Francisco. In LA, developing around the Blue Line (and for that matter, pretty much all of Central LA) makes more sense than Santa Monica.

But the main danger of the SF/SM centric YIMBYs is not that they make horrible recommendations (which they do); it's that they've used the trivial to distract us from the vital. In terms of press attention, lobbying and legislative action, the places we need to focus on receive no support nor does the discussion we need to be having about smart growth. If anything, the fixation on these out-of-the-way tourist traps encourages legislators to water down the standards so that the stupidest growth imaginable qualifies as "smart."

Here we go again

I'm sure it's a good show, but almost no one has seen Ted Lasso.

Raise your hand if you still haven’t seen “Ted Lasso”…. pic.twitter.com/IDEL9bFtPY

— Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) September 20, 2021

Almost everyone has, however, heard of it because Apple has spent a mind-boggling amount on marketing and particularly PR. 

If this all sounds a bit familiar (modest and quirky feel-good, fish-out-of-water show from a comedy veteran dominates the Emmys), it might be because you're a regular here at the blog. 

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

I have to admit, it’s kind of a pleasant change to be making fun of trivial things again…

And you don’t get much more trivial than the Emmys.

First off, any show with Eugene Levy or Catherine O’Hara is doing god’s work and having the two work together is going above and beyond. I haven’t gotten around to Schitt’s Creek yet, but I have no doubt it’s a deserving show which certainly makes this a feel good ending:

In 2020, the sixth and final season was nominated for 15 Primetime Emmy Awards. This broke the record for the most Emmy nominations given to a comedy in its final season. During the 2020 Emmys, the show became the first-ever comedy or drama series to sweep the four acting categories (Outstanding Lead Actor, Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Supporting Actor, Outstanding Supporting Actress) and one of only four live action shows, along with All in the Family, The Golden Girls, and Will & Grace where all the principal actors have won at least one Emmy Award.

If anything, this understates how unprecedented the sweep is. If you look at the other shows mentioned here (All in the Family, The Golden Girls, and Will & Grace), you’ll see that they had Emmy wins or nominations every year they ran. Schitt’s Creek had never won a single statue before this year. Until 2019 (note that date), it hadn’t even gotten a nomination. The Television Academy is notorious for playing favorites. To go from nonentity to “honor just to be nominated” to powerhouse in two years goes against the industry’s laws of nature.

The sudden rise in popularity is often credited to a “Netflix bump” from when the streaming service picked it up in January of 2017 (another date to note). Left out of almost all reporting on these bumps is the role of marketing and PR. Netflix spends billions a year on promotion and while it prioritizes its “originals” (which brings up other interesting points), it still has enough for some fairly generous “Now on Netflix” campaigns.

That said, shows getting a ratings boost from syndication has been a recognized and well-documented phenomenon since the business model was established in the seventies. There’s no question that Schitt’s Creek got a bump, but just how big was it? Though not perfect, Google trends can provide a pretty good picture of the interest in a show.

Post-Netflix numbers were certainly better but after settling down, they remained relatively flat for well over a year then, around the fourth quarter of 2018, at which point they started a remarkable climb. On a related note…

In [May] 2018, Debmar-Mercury, a division of Lionsgate, acquired the U.S. syndication rights to Schitt's Creek. The series is scheduled to debut in syndication on Fox Television Stations throughout the U.S. during the Fall 2020 television season. The series is also began airing reruns of series on Comedy Central on October 2, 2020.

Despite its low cool factor, television syndication remains a tremendously lucrative business. For a fairly obscure cable/Canadian show like Schitt’s Creek, awards and media buzz can greatly increase marketability. It would be shocking if Lionsgate, a company with billions in revenue and a substantial PR budget, didn’t launch a major campaign and, given the Q2 acquisition and time to plan the campaign, we’d expect the money to start flowing in October, 2018.

In 2020, this PR push was followed by an aggressive Emmy campaign.

I don’t want to get carried away – this is just one metric (a noisy one at that) and some anecdotes – but the standard narrative (check this Vanity Fair piece for an example that adheres strictly to the form) doesn’t really fit we we see here, neither with the Netflix bump nor with finding an audience. Instead, we have another example of how PR departments shape things like awards and media coverage, and unfortunately not just on trivial matters.

Cage match continues on development

This is Joseph.

So one piece of the ongoing housing debate is that nearly everyone agrees that housing prices are becoming a crisis and there is no shortage of simple solutions. However, what I like about London, Ontario as an example is that no simple solutions are able to be easily proposed. It is a web of problems, working together. Why is the web intractable?

I think it is because of incentives. Government, which heavily regulates housing, has incentives at all levels to push up asset inflation. Matt Yglesias took on the issue of Somerville, which is in liberal Boston and is getting both less dense and more expensive. Housing prices in all of Canada are continuing to go up and I expect that this will accelerate to some extent, as small apartments are less desirable in the context of pandemic restrictions on things like malls, coffee shops, and indoor entertainment (if you think indoors is not important in Canada then I invite you to visit Saskatchewan in January). 

We know that housing wealth makes people more likely to spend and may compensate for things like stagnant wages. We also know that housing price collapses cause underwater mortgages with horrible effects on labor mobility and bank solvency. Imagine if the prices in London, Ontario reverted to the long term mean -- people who had bought houses in the past 5 years would be destroyed and many, many loans would go bad.

So you have an incentive on all parts to increase asset inflation. People like having their houses become worth more money and making a large profit. They like plentiful parking and low levels of local traffic. They generally like affluent neighbors. Cities like taxes and keeping wealthy citizens happy. National governments like to keep the banks solvent and try to use low interest rates to stimulate the economy. Yes, even in the face of a housing bubble so large it might crack the economy open. 

So the reason I am YIMBY sympathetic is that, no matter how daft their ideas are, they at least are not conspiring to inflate assets further. This is less of a crisis in the United States but nobody can look at the Canadian housing market and feel comfortable. 

So this really is my reply to Mark: at least the YIMBY are trying to find a solution. His analysis of Krugman suggests that they are not doing a good job of it, but at least they are identifying a real problem. In my view, the emerging link between housing prices and homelessness is a bit of crisis for low income Canadian and American residents, and it needs to have some solution. Stopping asset inflation would be a good place to start. 

Krugman then told how the ring of mountains almost kept the Challenger Expedition from finding the lost city of Los Angeles

God, this is painful.

Economists trying to understand the rise and fall of regions within a country often rely on some form of economic base analysis. The idea is that a region’s overall growth is determined by the performance of its export industries — that is, industries that sell mainly to customers outside the region, such as the technology firms of Silicon Valley and the Los Angeles entertainment complex (or, here in New York, the financial industry). Growth in these industries, however, generates a lot of growth in other sectors, from health care to retail trade, driven by the local spending of the base industries’ companies and employees.

...

One way to think about this is to say that California as a whole is suffering from gentrification. That is, it’s like a newly fashionable neighborhood where affluent newcomers are moving in and driving working-class families out. In a way, California is Brooklyn Heights writ large.

Yet it didn’t have to be this way. I sometimes run into Californians asserting that there’s no room for more housing — they point out that San Francisco is on a peninsula, Los Angeles ringed by mountains. But there’s plenty of scope for building up.

I'm a huge fan of Paul Krugman. For me, he's by far the best opinion columnist the NYT has. He's a sharp and insightful writer, but like a lot of smart people (see Felix Salmon on the television industry), when he starts talking about something he knows nothing about, his "maybe I should check this" indicator fails to engage. 

1. SF is not part of Silicon Valley; it's around fifty miles away. 

2. People who want to seriously discuss Northern California housing focus on (or at least mention) largest city in the Bay Area, San Jose.

3. Neither the city nor the county of LA is ringed with mountains. We do have some pretty good peaks (the high point in the city is over five thousand feet. Twice that for the county), but they run mainly to the north.

4. More importantly, LA has tremendous scope for building out. That doesn't mean it's a good idea (it's almost certainly not), but LA County has over four thousand square miles of land including tens of thousands of acres of farmland. Add the Inland Empire and we're looking at around thirty thousand square miles. We are not spatially constrained.

For the record, I'm for building up Central LA (much more than Krugman and the rest of the NYT/Vox NIMBYs who favor developments on the edge of the county). I know first hand how bad the housing situation is in LA, but the NYT's take on this has been terrible.

The cage match goes wild

This is Joseph

Mark had a thoughtful reply to me here. In response I am going to make a strong argument that there is a very simple way to find places to increase density. Build where the prices are high. Not just the cities where the prices are high. I mean the residential neighborhoods with the highest underlying cost per square foot of residential land.

Housing tends to be a ladder. If there is a great new apartment building in Georgetown then people will move there (with its proximity to all sorts of great things) and that will ease pressure from gentrification in Anacostia. It is close to a lot of amenities and people want to live there -- the median house price exceeds a million dollars. This is more than double that of Anacostia. 

Georgetown lacks a metro station, it is true, but that could be remedied with political will and how better to generate than than the residents of a high resource area? If you try an experiment in Watts (a Los Angeles neighborhood) that doesn't work so well, there is a lot less pressure to implement fixes. 

That said, the environmental issues do matter. It is unclear whether we need more density in New York city, for example, given rising sea levels and already high levels of density. It is probably a good case for stewardship of the infrastructure that is there and some tough thinking about sea walls. This is a good argument for the "every case is different' and the reason why a national conversation is so hard. Seattle has a completely different risk from climate change than New York City or Miami, due to geography alone. Denver can probably ignore any plausible amount of rising sea levels, but might care a lot more about drought. 

This issue is not just a US issue -- look at the changes in London Ontario housing prices. 

This is a mid-sized city with a mid-ranked university and a 9-10% unemployment rate. Rents are also spiking, so it isn't just houses that are becoming expensive. Unsurprisingly, London now has a growing homelessness problem. And really, that is the entire game. The real reasons that you have had the rise of the density movement is not that crowded is good, it is that there are a limited number of ways to combat the escalating cost of housing that is slowly crushing young people and generating housing problems for people on the margin. 

I remain open to alternative proposals that would drop the cost of housing, I am just worried that car commuting is hitting structural limitations, cars are getting a lot more expensive, and that dense housing is the best shot to drop prices. Very happy to lose in the next round of the epic cage match! 

EDIT: Mark pushed back hard on the September 16th post on using neighborhood examples, which were in this post before I had a chance to read his second post. I think that this exclusion of examples puts one in a hard spot. Real estate is unusual in that every case is always different in some details (no two pieces of land have the same geometry, for example). 

So one can argue that my Georgetown example is one small parcel of land. But DC is extremely expensive (see million dollar median home prices cited above) and has a huge height limit. There are buses, metros and all-season walkability, with many employers in walking distance from NW DC. 

I think the crux of NIMBY versus YIMBY is the question of whether people living in an expensive neighborhood have the ability to increase housing costs, via scarcity, at the cost of limiting the rights of others to develop property that they own. Obviously YIMBY have daft ideas, but the London, Ontario example is a great case of an entire city tripling housing costs and seeing rents go up by as much as 15% per year. The city has 380K inhabitants (and is surrounded by farmland not other developments), so it seems unlikely that the city has simply hit the carrying capacity of a city, beyond which cars cannot work, while simultaneously being unable to develop transit alternatives. 

Los Angeles is a terrible example because Los Angeles county is a complex metro area with non-trivial geography issues and ten million inhabitants. Similar issues are true for New York City and San Francisco. The real canary in the coal mine is the huge cost increases (and consequent rise in homelessness) in cities that are small, have plenty of road capacity, no geographical constraints (London is on a plain, surrounded by farms), and that did not suffer any of these issues 20 years ago.

Now it is true that one apartment building in Santa Monica isn't going to change things. But something is going very wrong if even small cities are seeing these huge increases in housing costs. 

Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs Part II -- Peeing in the River

Last time, I suggested the following rules for prioritizing development:

 1. Locations should be centrally located in a high population area. Important to think in terms of traditional and electric bikes, as well as other micromobility options in addition to public transportation (particularly buses).   The object is to have access to the widest possible range of jobs, shops, schools, etc. Sites cut off in one direction by mountains or large bodies of water are always sub-optimal.

2. And well served by EXISTING public transportation. Ideally within walking distance of a major hub like Union Station. Failing that, directly connected to one of these hubs by rail or rapid bus lines. Think North Hollywood. Particularly if not served by a good metro line, it needs a good selection of reasonably high frequency bus routes going north, south, east and west. Think Echo Park. 

3 Given the costs and carbon footprint of construction, we should avoid sites that are viable now but which probably won’t be in the near future.

a. For coastal cities, elevation should be at least twenty feet. For areas prone to storm surges (pretty much everywhere back East), add another twenty feet to that. Given the economic and environmental costs of building and demolishing large structures, it makes no sense to put them in locations that will be underwater by 2050.

3b. For cities in the West, areas with high risk of megafires should be avoided. In addition to the obvious importance of not putting people in harms way, keeping housing out of burn zones makes essential controlled and managed burns easier. At the very least, we shouldn't have policies that encourage development in Western wildland-urban interfaces.

4. Money matters. Developable land matters. Constraints matter. Magnitude matters. None of the distributions are uniform. The costs of increasing density by, say, a couple of thousand people per square mile varies wildly from town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood.

How do these rules align with where the YIMBYs focus their efforts, attention and political capital?

The three areas that have long been in heavy rotation with the California YIMBYs are, in order, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Venice Beach. Trailing the pack, the NYT has singled out La Cañada Flintridge and Matt Yglesias did a post on Beverly Hills. I'm not cherry-picking here, at least not consciously. With the possible exception of some gentrification battles in majority-minority neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, these are all the places that come to mind.

San Francisco is one of the worst places in the Bay Area to build if you want to alleviate the housing crisis and reduce commuting. It's an hour and a half from the population and employment hub of San Jose and Silicon Valley. Geographically, it's an isolated postage stamp (though still far larger than any of the other cities/neighborhoods on this list). Even if you could build up every one of its forty-seven square miles (and, of course, you can't), you'd still have a trivial impact on housing compared to similar development in larger and much less dense towns such Oakland and, yes, San Jose. There's always the chance that new housing will attract more Silicon Valley tech workers willing to make the hellish commute in order to have a cool zip code. Just the opposite of the outcome we're hoping for and already a problem.

While the fixation on San Francisco is odd, the focus on Santa Monica and Venice is simply bizarre. Tiny (covering combined about twelve of LA County’s four thousand square miles), out-of-the-way, cut off by ocean to the west and mountains to the north. Scoring miserably on places readily accessible by public transit (the E line is terrible though proposed upgrades may improve this somewhat). A big chunk of SM is designated a wildland-urban interface. Venice, while safe from fires, is one of the few parts of LA low lying enough to be threatened by rising sea levels. 

La Cañada Flintridge, in addition to being tiny and isolated, is almost uniquely menaced by megafires with wild-land on both north and south. 

Beverly Hills may be the leper with the most fingers here, but it is still very small (<6 square miles), not centrally located, cut off to the north by hills and canyons, and obscenely expensive. [I hope I’m anything on this last one. BH is one of the parts of LA I’ve explored the least. It’s not a very interesting place.]

To summarize, when you put aside gentrification of black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods,  practically all of the discussion of of the villainy of California’s anti-density NIMBYs and the heroism of the YIMBYs has focused on pieces of land that are vanishingly small and situated in some of the worst spots imaginable for development. 

This is not a coincidence. It is a direct result an overly appealing but fundamentally flawed narrative combined with fatally misaligned market forces and a dollop of NYT toxic provincialism (I expect so much better from Paul Krugman). The quality of the discussion is so badly thought out and relentlessly trivial that it is next to impossible for serious solutions to get any traction.

Next time, why things are so bad (after a rebuttal from Joseph).

They used to wait till the last minute

Via Andrew Gelman

From NBC News:

Republican Larry Elder appealed on Monday to his supporters to use an online form to report fraud, which claimed it had "detected fraud" in the "results" of the California recall election "resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor."

The only problem: On Monday when the link was live on Elder's campaign site, the election hadn't even happened yet. No results had been released. And Elder was still campaigning to replace Newsom as governor.

While the timetable has moved up, the basic idea has been around for a long time.

Lifetime caps on dementia costs

This is Joseph.

So I was looking at this proposal in the United Kingdom to cap dementia costs over one's lifetime to £86,000 per person. End of life care costs are challenging, especially as spouse's often pool assets over a lifetime and disentangling what is what can be quite hard.

But the other side of this proposal is that it does nothing to protect the future access to assets of the person under care, as dementia is an irreversible disease that tends to lead to poor outcomes. Now, that would be different if a person was abandoned as soon as they run out of assets. But even stingy countries like the United States use Medicaid to prevent that. 

Instead, the main thrust seems to be to protect the inheritance of the upper middle class. If your house is worth £100,000 and you have £8,000 in savings then the cap does little to protect assets. If you have a house worth £800,000 and £12,000 in savings (say you bought a house in the correct part of the country to benefit from asset inflation) then you have a lot of protected wealth, which you (as a dementia patient) are not going to be spending. 

This is not to say that this policy is necessarily bad or that there might not be good reasons for the design, as is, but that these are very hard policies to design well. 

Is the US Supreme Court political?

This is Joseph

This came up in two recent contexts. One, is the question of whether Justice Breyer is likely to retire now, while there is still a good chance of confirming a left wing replacement. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg did not, and the result was being replaced by Amy Barrett Coney. Two, ironically Amy Barrett Coney is worried that the Supreme Court is being seen as political.

At this point I think there is no chance that it is anything but. A classic and recent example was CJ Roberts dissent in the Texas abortion law ruling, where he pointed out that the issues in the law required it to argued on the merits. Instead, the Supreme Court decided to refuse to intervene, which led to the US Government suing. 

The problem for looking neutral is that in the case of the Texas law (SB8), the court took a "look and see" approach to a major constitutional question, giving a huge amount of deference to the state government. Yet it is interventionist on other areas like immigration law (where it actually started altering foreign policy) and public health, which are conservative priorities. 

So of course it is political. If it wanted to not be political then it would be more consistent in rulings regardless of the individual political views of the justices. But of course that is not what is happening. It is honestly insulting to think that people would keep Scalia's seat open for nearly a year (replacement nominated March 16th, seat open February 13th), give a big push for one of their side to retire at a key moment, and then rush in a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsberg at the absolute last minute (seat opens September 18th, nomination September 26th). The asymmetry means that people think that nominating a justice is important, and why would that be if it had no practical political impact? The people doing the nominations and confirmations are, after all, professional politicians. 

There are many reasons for a Justice not to retire. But arguing that the reason is to keep politics out of the replacement process is so counter to the facts that it is kind of insulting. 

Yes, YIMBYs can be worse than NIMBYs -- the opening round of the West Coast Stat Views cage match

To change the framing a bit from Joseph's post, as currently being waged, are there NIMBY/YIMBY battles where we are better off going with the NIMBYs? Yes, frequently, but to see why we have to move past the general (where the ideas are mostly good) to the specific (where terrible choices are routinely prioritized). 

First, though, let's get a few things out of the way.  

1. This is a post about the debate over urban densification and how to pursue it, not about other not-in-my-back-yard issues like public transportation and housing for the homeless where I am considerably more YIMBY than the YIMBYs. 

2. All reasonable people agree on the need to build more housing (and productive conversations don't spend time on the fringes). To paraphrase Shaw, we've established that; now we're just haggling over the locations. 

3. YIMBYism is a movement, not an organization or a political platform, so there's always a danger of overgeneralizing. I tend to rely on Vox's David Roberts and NYT's Farhad Manjoo and recently Paul Krugman as representative examples, but there are other self-identified YIMBYs such as Noah Smith who take a very different approach and with whom (particularly in the case of Smith) I find it much more difficult to argue. 

4. I'm putting aside discussion of SB-50. A crappy bill that misses being a very good one by a small margin (partially because of the factors we'll be going through in this post). Too much to cover here, but a possible topic for next time.

5. I'm also putting aside any discussion of the massively complex issue of gentrification except to say I'm sympathetic to the NIMBYs of Boyle Heights and Watts and similar neighborhoods that always seem to bear the brunt when we try a new experiment in urban planning.  

Much of the discussion on densification seems to take a curiously late 19th century view of this early 21st century problem. The live across the street from your job model works best with a single breadwinner working for the same company in the same spot cradle to grave. In age of multi-income families, frequent job changes, mergers/acquisitions/reorgs, multi-hub metro areas, and telecommuting, this view is dangerously antiquated. 

A popular alternative framing views the problem through the lens of supply and demand. Just deregulate and let the magic of the market solve the problem for us. This approach sounds more sophisticated though it’s not. It ignores a misalignment that undercuts the whole-- but I’m getting ahead of myself.    

What if, instead of job proximity, we approached it as a question of job access? Here’s the metric I’m using to get a handle on the problem: Development locations should be judged on the number and quality of jobs (and to a lesser extent, schools, shopping, cultural opportunities, etc.) accessible on foot or by bike/micromobility or public transportation in less than an hour. (If I hadn't decided not to talk about it, I'd mention SB-50 incorporated some of these ideas but didn't take them far enough.)

This metric suggests a few basic rules. Here are the three main ones:

1. Locations should be centrally located in a high population area. Important to think in terms of traditional and electric bikes, as well as other micromobility options in addition to public transportation (particularly buses).   The object is to have access to the widest possible range of jobs, shops, schools, etc. Sites cut off in one direction by mountains or large bodies of water are always sub-optimal.

2. And well served by EXISTING public transportation. Ideally within walking distance of a major hub like Union Station. Failing that, directly connected to one of these hubs by rail or rapid bus lines. Think North Hollywood. Particularly if not served by a good metro line, it needs a good selection of reasonably high frequency bus routes going north, south, east and west. Think Echo Park. 

3 Given the costs and carbon footprint of construction, we should avoid sites that are viable now but which probably won’t be in the near future.

a. For coastal cities, elevation should be at least twenty feet. For areas prone to storm surges (pretty much everywhere back East), add another twenty feet to that. Given the economic and environmental costs of building and demolishing large structures, it makes no sense to put them in locations that will be underwater by 2050.

3b. For cities in the West, areas with high risk of megafires should be avoided. In addition to the obvious importance of not putting people in harms way, keeping housing out of burn zones makes essential controlled and managed burns easier. At the very least, we shouldn't have policies that encourage development in Western wildland-urban interfaces.

4. Money matters. Developable land matters. Constraints matter. Magnitude matters. None of the distributions are uniform. The costs of increasing density by, say, a couple of thousand people per square mile varies wildly from town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood.

This is probably a good stopping point. Lots more to come in this thread, but I’d like to let these points sit with you for a while before we move from what we should be doing to what we actually are.

Friday Spyday -- It takes a lot of balls to do this job

Former CIA Chief of Disguise Breaks Down Cold War Spy Gadgets

How we got here -- a 2016 flashback

 

It certainly did not age well. https://t.co/kIpdfaxhL5

— David Lai (@davidxlai) September 7, 2021

One of the few good things about the past few years was the way the various crimes and crises forced clarity on a lot of members of the political and media establishment. Recently, though, I've noticed certain journalists and publications falling back into old habits at what may be the worst possible time. 

 Perhaps it would be useful to revisit the conversation of five years ago.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

The cognitive dissonance phase

Let's have the essential Josh Marshall set the scene.

We've had a number of looks recently at how The New York Times appears to be revisiting its 'whitewater' glory days with its increasingly parodic coverage of the "Clinton Foundation" - I'm adding scare quotes to match the dramatic effect, even though of course the Clinton Foundation is a named legal entity. Beyond the 'clouds' and 'shadows' TPM Reader AR flagged to our attention, as Paul Glastris explains here, the latest installment from the Times explains how Bill Clinton's request for diplomatic passports for aides accompanying him on a mission to secure the release of two US journalists held captive in North Korea constitutes the latest damning revelations about the corrupt ties between the Foundation and the Clinton State Department.

The Times uniquely, though only as a leading example for the rest of the national press, has a decades' long history of being lead around by rightwing opposition researchers into dead ends which amount to journalistic comedy - especially when it comes to the Clintons. But here, while all this is happening we have a real live specimen example of direct political and prosecutorial corruption, misuse of a 501c3 nonprofit and various efforts to conceal this corruption and the underlying corruption of Trump's 'Trump University' real estate seminar scam. It's all there - lightly reported here and there - but largely ignored.

The core information here isn't new and it's definitely not based on my reporting. Much of it stems form the on-going and seemingly indefatigable work of Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold who's been chronicling Trump's long list of non-existent or promised but non-existent charitable contributions. In this case, it goes to a $25,000 contribution Trump made to the reelection campaign of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013. The neglected story has only popped up again now because Trump was penalized by the IRS for a relatively technical part of the corrupt act.

...

But all of these pale in comparison to the essence of the transaction itself. Trump made this substantial contribution to Bondi at just the moment when her office was evaluating whether to bring legal action against Trump's 'Trump University' real estate seminar scam. Indeed, Bondi admits she reached out to Trump to solicit the contribution just as the decision was on her desk. She eventually declined to take legal action against Trump, overruling the recommendations of career investigators.
A mounting legal case was also underway in Texas, by career investigators under then-Attorney General and now Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott overruled the investigators recommendation for legal action. Shortly thereafter Abbott got $35,000 from Trump. In this case Trump at least mad the contribution without the commingling of nonprofit funds that go them in trouble in Florida.

...

At the risk of stating the obvious, these facts are textbook examples of the sort of political and prosecutorial corruption journalists are supposed to uncover. Trump used money to buy protection from the consequences of his bad acts from friendly politicians. He then tried to cover up his payment of protection money. And on top of all that he made the either bizarre or incompetent mistake of paying the protection money out of his Foundation - the money from which mostly comes from other people beside Trump.

So here you have straight-up bad acts, political corruption to enable prosecutorial corruption to escape the consequences of fraud perpetrated on vulnerable consumers. And yet the page space gets dedicated to Clinton Foundation stories which raise 'questions' that could 'create appearances' and all other journalistic workarounds reporters use when they haven't found what they were looking for. The North Korea rescue mission Glastris pinpoints in the Times latest salvo just gets the whole enterprise to the point of self-parody.

Now why this disjuncture?

I think there are basically three reasons, some more understandable than others but none of them good. The first is that the Times had a decades long institutional issue with the Clintons. There's no other way to put. It goes beyond single reporters and even individual executives editors. Why this is the case I'll leave to biographers and psychologists. But that it is the case is obvious from reading a quarter century of their reporting on the topic.

We've reached the point where much, if not most, of the campaign coverage produced by the New York Times can only be explained by cognitive dissonance. What we are seeing is the journalistic equivalent of the day after doomsday in " When Prophecy Fails."

How we got here is a long and convoluted story dating back at least a quarter-century involving self-interest, declining journalistic standards, class and regional prejudices, the kind of social psych forces normally associated with isolated tribes and high school lunch rooms, and (inevitably) Maureen Dowd, but the result is a set of beliefs so deeply held that they define the paper and so inextricably interconnected that challenging just one can bring down a world view.

As these beliefs have become less and less defensible, those holding them have clung more and more tightly. Particularly over the past year and a half, organizations like the New York Times and the Associated Press have tended to let they expected and/or wanted to see blind them to what was obviously happening. We've seen this in a string of absurdly off-base predictions, a number of stories that had to be retracted because the sources were obviously unreliable, a reliance on ominous and insinuating language that has become the stuff of punchlines ("these clouds cast a shadow over the Clinton campaign"), and most recently, an account of Trump's widely anticipated immigration speech that actually managed to report the exact opposite of its contents.

Self-criticism is always a painful process, but when it requires up ending a number of fully internalized and tightly networked erroneous beliefs, it can be absolutely traumatic .This is especially true for the NYT, where faith in the paper's superiority is fundamental to the institution's sense of identity. Ironically, this very article of faith has become the biggest impediment to the paper reversing its decline. In order to once again be the best, it has to acknowledge that it hasn't been the best for a long time.

Tuesday Tweets on Wednesday

[That's what happens in a four day week.]

Opening with some cyber-silliness

lol. As you say that is 100% bullshit. I mean closer to 18 people than 18 percent. Pollsters have a phrase for this. Like if you ask, “have you tried BoxCrately yet?” You’ll have X % of people say yes even though it is a made up word.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 8, 2021

This would be the president of El Salvador, talking about bitcoin, as of today legal tender in his country. Wild. https://t.co/dIaNFt3k8m

— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal) September 7, 2021

Feral disinformation respects no borders.

In Canada, anti-vaccine protesters swarmed a hospital, blocking ambulances and forcing some cancer patients to get out of cars and walk through the unmasked, angry crowd in order to make it to their treatments and appointments.
https://t.co/QQ96gGcJKX

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) September 4, 2021

And another case study of insane humans...

To anyone who knows anything about the rise of the Brownshirts (Sturmabteilung) in Germany, this is utterly terrifying. https://t.co/liwSRbg8pE

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) August 30, 2021

And sane vampires.

I’ve been around a lot of people running for office. The tempting question to ask is “what happened to @JDVance1?” But that gives him the grace that he wasn’t always an ambitious fraud posturing for attention. He’ll lose & try to reinvent himself. But he’ll always be JD Vance. https://t.co/QNr0I9xGgh

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) September 6, 2021

Vance was born and raised in a middle-class suburb. Speaking as an Ozarks boy, I can tell you that the only thing more offensive than his condescending cosplay was the way the press fell for it.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) September 7, 2021

Speaking of vampires, Vance is, of course, a protégé of Peter Thiel. 


And another for our cult of personality file.

the fetishization of Trump — a doughy crybaby who’s never lifted anything heavier than his own ego — as a chiseled paragon of masculinity is truly the stuff of cultish delusion https://t.co/p0hSAXbmTM

— shauna (@goldengateblond) September 5, 2021

The conservative movement's targeting of strategically valuable elections and offices is also relevant to another recent conversation.

7. Which local offices do they covet the most? Supervisors of Elections and Sects of State. The people who saved the country by refusing to go along with the Big Lie. The gatekeepers of election integrity. And they are counting on the Democratic Party to be focused elsewhere.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 1, 2021

Not to mention related tactics.

Texas AG Ken Paxton said yesterday that if he hadn’t been successful with lawsuits to block mail-in ballots, Trump definitely would have lost the election in Texas. pic.twitter.com/2dVDiEAY1L

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 5, 2021

I've been too busy putting off other things, but I've been meaning to dig into the relationship between marketing psych and behavioral economics.

Lots of old psych holds up and some doesn't, but we don't know which is which. Good to seek these kinds of replications happening. https://t.co/Z7e2NbpbC2

— Oleg Urminsky (@OlegUrminsky) September 1, 2021

And finally the thread you never knew you always wanted (not to brag, but I guessed where they were going with the underwear).

Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓. If even one of these things was absent, the book you hold in your hand today would look completely different. I'll explain why. 5/

— Incunabula (@incunabula) September 6, 2021

I'd dedicate this to the memory of James Burke, but he's not dead yet. 

Another quick hit

This is Joseph.

Josh Marshall is a really sharp operator and his comments on the political (as opposed to legal) implications of the latest ruling in Whole Woman's Health, et al., Applicants v. Austin Reeve Jackson, Judge, et al.

But now they’ve essentially managed not only to overrule Roe but do so with a law that lets that guy you knew in High School who’s always sharing right wing memes on Facebook sue your sister who drove you to the clinic for a $10,000 cash prize. In a way the antis and the Court have done abortion rights advocates a favor by creating a reality in Texas that exposes the hideousness of the Roe opponents’ aspirations: both shackling and predatory.

The problem is so severe that even the center right can see where this is going. Look at Outside the Beltway:

I can’t stress enough that what is going on here is a ban that would normally be implemented via the criminal code is being enforced by civil actions. And, one should note, this is being done to undercut a procedure that is legal under federal court rulings. The pretzel here twists expansive standing with the ability of plaintiffs to receive financial awards as a way to stop providers from engaging in an otherwise legal activity. No doubt abortion opponents find this clever (and, it is–it is certainly creative), but a dispassionate assessment should lead one to see the way in which it is subverting the legal system to get around Supreme Court rulings on a process the Court has deemed as constitutionally protected. If the threat of harassing lawsuits can empower a state to block rights and privileges that are otherwise deemed constitutional, then we have a true subversion of the legal order at play here. 

These are not wild-eyed liberals.  In his previous post, Steven Taylor even focused on John Roberts as having the best dissent (his dissent is the only one he explicitly agrees with) based on it being entirely focused on the issue of procedure and and not focused at all on the substance. There is a serious chance that Roe vs Wade seems likely to be overruled this year in a different case, with better facts than this case, not that better facts would be hard to achieve. Why let the case with bad legal structure proceed and not be disciplined and wait for the best shot?  

There have been some attempts to argue that this should be fought via a series of civil challenges. But the legal fee rules make this complicated:

Still, even getting a lawsuit dismissed can be burdensome and, at times, require expensive lawyers. The abortion law specifically bans plaintiffs from being ordered to pay defendants’ legal fees; opponents fear that the risk of filing a baseless lawsuit is low for plaintiffs and that defending from many lawsuits — even if they are dismissed — could still be financially damaging to a clinic or doctor.

as do the venue rules: 

Adriana Piñon, a senior staff attorney and policy counsel for the ACLU of Texas, said the new law “stacks the deck” against defendants and encourages plaintiffs to sue by including various mechanisms in the law, such as barring a change in venue unless all parties agree, limiting the legal defenses that the defense can present and awarding the plaintiff $10,000 at minimum if they are successful in the suit

This upends standard rules on standing and personal jurisdiction that seem to have very broad implications. Regardless of what you think about the merits, the structure itself seems poised to create a wave of lawsuits that are procedurally 

There is a lot more to say, about the rights that are actually harmed and about the evils of the "Shadow Docket" (where major decisions are made without discussions of merits), but I suspect the procedural stuff is enough to make it clear that this is a bad law. We all focus on the Supreme Court decision not to intervene, but notice that the appeals court has been preventing a hearing on the merits by just deciding to neither stay the law or have a hearing. It's just a mess.

Whatever one thinks of where we ended up, is this really the type of process we want? 

Quick Hit

This is Joseph.

There has been a lot of discussion about leaving Afghanistan and the consequences thereof. For the record, I am generally supportive of the decision to leave, given that the opportunity for long term nation building (i.e., the Japan model) was botched long ago. While we can discuss some obvious places that we could improve policy (easy Green Cards for Afghani residents who helped the US seems like a bit of a no-brainer), the truth is that the war was not achieving any important goals and people were dying. We might not like some of the policies that the Taliban is bringing, but they appears to have much broader support than in 2001 (which is a huge critique of the operation) and war is not really a great way to improve human rights (collateral damage from modern military operations tends to undermine moral credibility). 

But smart people can disagree.

What I find somewhat amazing is people who left the conflict in 2015 (aka the British) are suddenly upset that the US is leaving. The easy way to ensure that an operation continues is to be a part of it. There were only 8000 US troops in Afghanistan -- at it's peak the UK had more and could have decided to send these troops back. 

The narrative that the leaving process was botched is only credible insofar as we think that the complete collapse of the Afghan state was a sign of previous failure. But how do you fix such a problem, 20 years into the conflict? Honestly, I think Trump and Biden made the best of a bad situation.