Editorials

Received from a friend who lived many years in the Bay Area, but now lives in North Carolina:

“You might want to take this guy on.

From the New York Times:

America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals.
The demise of a California housing measure shows how progressives abandon progressive values in their own backyards.”

Here’s the link she sent to the story, which was posted online on May 22 but just appeared in my print paper this morning, May 24:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/opinion/california-housing-nimby.html “

The title of the print version is even dumber than the online original: Nimby Liberals Make Cities Unlivable.

Don’t bother to try to comment on the Times site, because comments are already closed, with a sizable majority branding the piece as nonsense. You’re welcome to submit your rants instead to opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

This op-ed is part of a long tradition in Manhattan-based publications of viewing California from the perspective of the old New Yorker magazine’s Map of the World as Seen from 9^th Avenue. To this we can now add “Map of the Bay area as Seen from Silicon Valley”, in the perspective of one Farhad Manjoo, who for many years produced sycophantic coverage of the latest Valley tech gimcracks for the Times, but has now graduated to doing gee-whiz op-eds on other topics. 

He himself has said “As you know, I’m a sucker for technology” in a Slate piece about using high-tech gadgets to apply makeup, Men Should Wear Makeup. It's not just technology he's a sucker for. 

The easiest way to characterize the thesis of this piece is with the hoary Borscht Belt joke punchline: “It’s gotten so crowded nobody goes there anymore.” 

Well, no. The Bay has not been made unlivable by The Curse of the Nimby Liberals. The real problem is that too many fat cats, not by any means predominantly liberals, are finding San Francisco all too livable, and they have enough newly minted tech cash to buy their way in and push others out. 

But how would Manjoo know? A moment of online search discloses that he appears to live in Mountain View in a low-rise four bedroom townhouse condo, Zillow-estimated as being worth $1,781,127, with possible rent “Zestimated” at $5,475/mo. (This is not doxing—all of this is public information.) 

Some Mountain View highlights per Wikipedia: in the 2010 census it was 56% White, 25.7% Asian, 2.2% African-American. The population density is 6,034.8 people per square mile. For comparison, Berkeley’s population density is 11,322 per sq mi. Mountain View is a lovely suburb, perhaps, but not a city. 

Manjoo’s view of San Francisco: “…the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions…” etc. etc. etc. The scary links are self-referential, to equally myopic NYT articles. The Horror! 

Oh, come on. Really? 

We just got back from a college reunion in Pasadena, driving for the first time in many years down Highways 101 and 1 instead of flying. The wife of another alumnus I met at the event, who’s recently moved from Oklahoma to a small town in Washington, told me she’s horrified by her new town’s homeless population, and was sure that most places wouldn’t allow it. 

But I can report that the kinds of woes that she and Manjoo decry exist pretty much everywhere—well, maybe not in Mountain View, but certainly in Pasadena and Santa Monica and Morro Bay, just to name three places where we stayed a night in vintage old-school motels on this trip. And at the same time, California is as alluring as it ever was, green and golden and floriferous, with a beautiful ocean and stupendous mountains, and therein lies the problem. 

Everyone who can afford it, and many who can’t, want to live here. There are too many well-paying tech jobs which drive up housing market prices, yet not enough housing the poorly-paid service worker underclass can afford. 

Those of us who have been covering California’s development politics for decades quickly spotted State Senator’s Scott Wiener’s SB 50 (which was aided and abetted by Senator Nancy Skinner and Assemblyperson Buffy Wicks) as a naked power grab by the big bucks building industry, an attempt to do away with environmental protection and open up older lower-income neighborhoods to lucrative development pitched at the booming upper end of the market. There’s real money to be made in building luxury condos for people like Manjoo, not so much in developing housing for low-income families. 

Manjoo excoriates progressives for not supporting SB 50. He seems to be totally ignorant of the strong opposition to SB 50 from tenant activist organizations. He’s completely unaware of the increasing number of academic critics of the kind of meat-axe upzoning which this bill and its ilk would like to inflict, one size fits all, from Sacramento on California’s disparate cities. He displays a touching belief in the efficacy of markets, vintage Econ101 from 20 years ago. 

He should have read, for example, Tim Redmond’s neat summary on 48Hills of the new publication on this subject by UCLA economic geography Professor Michael Storper and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose. 

He might even read the new study itself. As a start, here’s the abstract: 

 

“Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the “housing as opportunity” school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations represent a fundamental barrier for economic development. Housing shortages are considered to limit migration into thriving cities, curtailing their expansion potential, generating rising social and spatial inequalities, and inhibiting national growth.

“ According to this dominant view within economics, relaxing zoning and other planning regulations in the most prosperous cities is crucial to unleash the economic potential of cities and nations and to facilitate within-country migration. In this article, we contend that the bulk of the claims of the housing as opportunity approach are fundamentally flawed and lead to simplistic and misguided policy recommendations.

‘We posit that there is no clear and uncontroversial evidence that housing regulation is a principal source of differences in home availability or prices across cities. Blanket changes in zoning are unlikely to increase domestic migration or to increase affordability for lower income households in prosperous regions. They would, however, increase gentrification within prosperous regions and would not appreciably decrease income inequality. In contrast to the housing models, we argue the basic motors of all these features of the economy are the current geography of employment, wages and skills. “

Simplistic and misguided policy recommendations: That’s what the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have been dishing up in their editorials and op-eds since Wiener and Skinner launched their campaign to free up older neighborhoods like West Berkeley for their developer patrons. They should all know better. They should sit in on a couple of upper division Econ classes. 

 

If you’d like to hear more from the source, Professor Storper will be speaking on SB 50 in San Francisco next Thursday, May 30. His topic sounds like fun: “Why Scott Wiener’s SB 50 will not get us affordable housing: The new trickle-down economics – build for the richest 30 percent and cross your fingers for everyone else.” The free event starts at 6:30pm in the Rainbow Room at the LGBT Center, 1800 Market. 

And yes, I did want to take this guy on because I'm pretty bored with having the Bay Area seen from the wrong end of the telescope by the parochial corporate media. But what else is new? They've been doing this since I was an undergraduate, and longer.