Red Red Klein

Cultural Changes Come and Go but Architecture is Forever

“High Rise To The Danger Zone…”

Let's just get it over with. Let's just build a series of high-rise condo complexes and highways beginning from the Haight in San Francisco through Golden Gate Park and the Japanese Tea Garden, all the way to the beautiful neighborhoods in Austin such as Hyde Park and Cherrywood.

I say this because I recently listened to an interview conducted by Bari Weiss with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on their new book “Abundance.”

In case you don't remember Ezra Klein, he’s the pundit who proclaimed the VA healthcare system to be the best one in the country just before the story broke that the 14 day maximum waiting period was complete bullshit, and that in fact at least 40 veterans had died waiting to get healthcare, which actually took up to two years. (This was followed by the usual cover-up scandal.) That Ezra Klein.

“Abundance,” as one Reddit user put it, is at the end of the day just warmed over Bill Clinton “New Democrat.” I refer to the author as “Red Red Klein” because in the end it in the end the recycling of libertarian zealot John the Stosselist’s proclamation; “Single home zoning laws bad, mass housing construction on every block good,” which is a smaller version of big - read, any - government as the root of all evil and the impediment to progress.

This idiotic oversimplification, that should really be treated as a trade-off, with hidden costs and unintended consequences considered, has already been adopted by Austin city council members, Scott Weiner in San Francisco, and Peter Thiel himself; the theory being that the shift in supply and demand will lower the cost of housing in trendy cities.

Construction in San Francisco, for the past few decades has already created high-rises that block the view of the Bay by the Wharf and downtown for the rest of us and soon will block the view of the ocean in the outer Sunset District. Prices have not gone down. They’ve skyrocketed.

I'm not totally surprised by Bari’s lack of pushback during the interview, because her wife Nellie Bowles, is an open YIMBY advocate, and in fairness to them, so is half of the country. ( And her interview with Sarah Wynn-Williams about her time at Facebook was fantastic.)

The problem is the lack of respect for the other half. In Austin, an initial rezoning plan named Code Next failed to pass in a city-wide initiative, and a later meeting on a new council-initiated rezoning plan called HOME — short for Home Options for Mobility and Equity - was contentiously debated by those who showed up long past midnight. (The council wound up ignoring 50% of the city’s population who objected and passed HOME with a 9 to 2 vote.)

I contend that if the local media in all cities actually did their job, they would show an AI simulation of what a city block would look like after eight single houses are replaced by eight fourplexes, complete with the traffic, parking and sewage problems created. Maybe then, far fewer people would support it, or at least have second thoughts.

I also have my suspicions that the same real estate companies that are tripling the rent and driving mom and pops to close up shop are going to charge as much as they can get for each condo, which will still be a lot.

The New Right and billionaire class keep repeating ad nauseam that the left consists of elites which somehow always know what's best for the rest of us. So why are so many lower class folks such as myself not buying into their scheme?

We are just constantly demonized as NIMBY. I myself, don't feel that I was born with a God-given right to be able to afford a home in Honolulu or Manhattan, and would certainly hate to spoil the former with mass development projects that would end what's left of the natural beauty

“I Came In Like A Wrecking Ball…”

Meanwhile back in the Bay Area, Scott Weiner is trying to strip the power of the California Coastal Commission to build supposed low-cost housing along the coast. (If Trump did this it would be first page news, but Weiner is quite the autocrat himself.)

I still predict this is going to be a major disaster with the eventual density destroying the character of both cities in order to save it. As it is already.

Liberals in the 60’s were the ones who bulldozed neighborhoods in the 60’s and replaced them with a grand idea of public housing projects. One example was the Fillmore in San Francisco. Because some people were low-income and some were doing heroin, public housing was the answer. And destroying the beautiful Penn Station to make away for another form of progress. Decades later, these monstrosities that were eventually torn down themselves.

“You will see it come to its fruition…”

I don't find fault with anyone who sincerely embraces YIMBY because they're short on money and long on the desire to own a home. I just can't stand the public intellectuals and politicians who don't present the trade-off, which is the decimation of two of our finest cities.

As Dr. Thomas Sowell reminds us, the simpletons who sold us on this libertarian, free-market utopia will be long be out of office by the time it comes to fruition.