Month: August 2024

NIMBY means Not In My Backyard. In other words, build stuff all you want as long as you don't do it near me, where it will bring traffic and crowds in its wake.

It's a powerful force, but over the past couple of decades a counterforce has been steadily growing that blames NIMBY for slow growth and high living costs in big American cities. It is, naturally, called YIMBY, for Yes In My Backyard. A couple of nights ago it seemed like it finally got its big breakthrough when Barack Obama endorsed it in primetime at the DNC. Kamala Harris is also a fan.

Robert Kwasny tweeted about this yesterday and Alex Tabarrok picked up the theme today:

Kwasny also wonders why Democrats seem to have picked up YIMBY more than Republicans, especially given that deregulation, anti-zoning, pro-growth, pro-developers would seem more compatible with Republican rhetoric and political support.

It's worse than that. It's not just that Republicans haven't "picked up YIMBY." Republicans are absolutely dead set against it.

To understand why, you have to look past the intellectual roots of YIMBYism among libertarians and instead look further back to the original political roots of NIMBYism. It's a movement that unquestionably started in the suburbs, and suburbia has historically been a Republican stronghold. These folks moved to the suburbs for a reason: they liked living in an uncrowded, single-family sprawl. They decidedly didn't want city life sneaking back into their peaceful, grassy neighborhoods where they get to own their own homes instead of renting a few rooms from a landlord.

Democrats, by contrast, have recently become more open to YIMBYism because they have political roots among the young, who push YIMBYism—largely in the form of opposing regulations that restrict new housing—as a solution for high housing prices in cities. These new urbanists also promote greenfield development in suburbs, but their big focus is on infill development in cities.

For Democrats, this is a bit of a balancing act, but for Republicans it's not. They don't care about young people in cities but they care very much about middle-aged families in suburbia. So it's easy for them to oppose anything that has even a chance of ruining paradise.

And they have. Republicans in recent years have relentlessly accused Democrats of wanting to squash everyone into crowded apartment buildings in cities. They make conspiracy theories out of things like Agenda 21, a milquetoast UN program for sustainable development. They oppose bike lanes and trains and mass transit because suburbanites all drive cars.

None of this has to do with ideology or attitudes toward regulation on either side. It's based purely on the demands of each party's political base. This has moved Democrats cautiously in the direction of YIMBYism (cautiously because plenty of Democrats are suburbanites) and Republicans firmly in the direction of opposition.

In the end, most of the second-order arguments for YIMBYism (density is good for the economy, density is good for the climate, density is good for social interaction, etc.) are meaningless. There's only one argument that matters: housing is too expensive in desirable American cities and lots of young people voters believe we need to build way more in order to get the price down. Even now, this is almost universally opposed by people who actually live in cities, so it all boils down to one thing: Who gets to decide? Should the people who live in a neighborhood have the biggest say about what gets built? Or should it be the outsiders who want to move into the neighborhood?

That's a very pretty question, actually, and there's no clear answer. It's pretty obvious what the arguments are on each side, and equally obvious that both sides have legitimate stakes.

Barack Obama aside, I'm skeptical that the Democratic Party is really willing to spend a lot of political capital on YIMBYism. As an applause line it's fine. But in the real world it's primarily a local issue, not a national one, and local Democrats want to get reelected as much as anyone else. Even in California, which has by far the worst housing problem in the country, YIMBY legislation has come slowly and painfully, and it's been fought tooth and nail at every step. So far, even with legislation, YIMBY has had very little real-world impact yet. There's just too much opposition to it.

POSTSCRIPT: On a related note, YIMBYism has had its biggest concrete successes in the fight against homelessness. Los Angeles in particular has passed bond measures, thrown up agencies with thousands of workers, and spent billions and billions of dollars on it. And yet, even so it's nearly impossible to build homeless shelters. Why? Not because of money or lack of political will. Because of NIMBY. That's how strong it is.

When I go out to the desert for a bit of astrophotography, I never take pictures of the moon. This is because I deliberately go out on moonless nights.

However, I happen to have the telescope set up in my backyard at the moment because I wanted to test out a few things, so last night I finally did it. Marian wanted a picture of the (rare!) blue supermoon, so I took some time early in the evening and slewed over to the moon.

The exposure time for the moon is about one-thousandth of a second, so it only took half a minute to take 30 images. I wasn't actually sure if my software could stack a bunch of moon pictures since there are no stars to align the images, but it worked without a hitch. It turned out pretty well.

I'll admit that the nonstop pronouncements of joy at the DNC kind of set my teeth on edge, but regardless of the word itself it sure does highlight an aspect of the Trump campaign that never got much attention before: it's relentlessly dour, angry, and driven by grievance.

It's almost like we had all forgotten just how bizarre this is. Kamala Harris is running what would, in normal times, just be an ordinary campaign. It only seems unexpectedly fresh and lively thanks to its contrast with the lifelessness of the Biden campaign and the exhausting surliness of the Trump campaign.

Sign me up for ordinary.

Here's the latest YouGov breakdown of the presidential race:

Kamala Harris started out three points behind Trump and is now three points ahead.

I should note that I routinely show the YouGov poll for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's a pretty good poll: reliable, weekly, and with good crosstabs. The second is that by tying myself to a single poll I avoid cherry picking the polls that are most favorable each week and thereby fooling myself about how well things are going. It's a discipline thing.

And for those who are going to insist that only state polls matter, that's not really right. State polls are certainly useful, but they also tend to be smallish and error prone. And while it's true that we don't elect presidents via a national popular vote, the states do generally follow the national vote. If Harris gets to a five-point lead, it will be very unlikely that she loses the electoral vote. That's the target.

There are several reports out today about Kamala Harris's stand on taxes, though I'm not quite sure why. They're apparently based on vague statements from the campaign that Harris supports Joe Biden's tax proposals from several months ago, but there have been no firm details about this.

Nonetheless, two of Biden's proposals have been making the rounds:

• Above income of $4000,000: Increase the net investment income tax from 3.8% to 5%.
• Above net worth of $100 million: Minimum tax rate of 25%, including unrealized capital gains.

I'm not a big fan of taxing unrealized capital gains because I think you can accomplish much the same thing with ordinary targeted income taxes. That said, this would affect, at most, about 0.004% of Americans. It's not something for us ordinary schlubs to worry about.

The NIIT increase is small and applies to roughly the top 1% of earners. It's a fairly meat-and-potatoes way of raising taxes on the affluent and rich.

We don't know for sure if Harris supports these specific taxes, and there are other tax proposals in Biden's FY25 budget document. But this is what people are talking about. Just so you know.

Here's a headline in the Los Angeles Times today:

Southern California electric bills are soaring. Here’s why, and how to save money

There have been anecdotal reports that, for some consumers, bills have skyrocketed, even by hundreds of dollars. And Californians are looking for answers.

....In California, the driving force behind rate hikes is utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution upgrades and rooftop solar incentives, according to a recent quarterly report by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Public Advocates Office.

Remember our first rule of journalism? Before you write a story, make sure it's actually true. Here are average electric rates in July for Los Angeles:

The cost of electricity has gone up in recent years, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's gone up this year. And it hasn't. It's gone down.

Anyway, it turns out the reason electricity bills are up this year is that it's been really hot and people are running their air conditioners a lot. That may be boring, but it has the virtue of being actually true.

This is a Fly River turtle at the Los Angeles Zoo, also known as a pig-nosed turtle for obvious reasons.

I just got back from a visit to City of Hope, and it turns out I have no choices to make after all. My prostate cancer makes me ineligible for clinical trials, so my best option is an FDA-approved bispecific treatment called Talvey, or talquetamab:

TALVEY™ is a bispecific T-cell engaging antibody that binds to the CD3 receptor on the surface of T cells and G protein-coupled receptor class C group 5 member D (GPRC5D) expressed on the surface of multiple myeloma cells, non-malignant plasma cells and healthy tissue such as epithelial cells in keratinized tissues of the skin and tongue.¹

There you have it. Unlike my previous CAR-T treatment, which targeted the BCMA antigen on the surface of cancerous cells, talquetamab targets GPRC5D. So it's a whole new thing for my body.

I now have three separate opinions that talquetamab is probably my best choice at the moment, so that's what I'll do. Sadly, the CoH doctor indicated that it requires dexamethasone to work properly, so I'll be back on the Evil Dex. This should all start up in a few weeks.

¹The mention of "tongue" here is a veiled reference to the fact that it kills tongue cells and is therefore also likely to kill my sense of taste to some extent. Hooray.

Donald Trump is hellbent on punting abortion 100% to the states so that he himself doesn't have to take a stand on it. On Monday he extended this even further in an interview with Caitlin Huey-Burns of CBS News:

As president, would you enforce the Comstock Act, which could prohibit the sale of, or the distribution of medication abortion by mail?

No, we will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no, I wouldn't.

You would not enforce the Comstock Act?

I would not do that.

Needless to say, the anti-abortion base of the Republican Party isn't happy about this. But their protests are mostly pro forma. For the most part, they seem to accept Trump's wink-and-a-nudge implication that he's just saying this stuff to get elected and will shift back to their side as soon as he's back in the White House.

But will he?¹

¹Hopefully we'll never find out, of course.

Blecch:

My M-protein level has now increased from zero to 0.51 in just three months. When the CAR-T decided to stop working, my multiple myeloma didn't just saunter back, it roared back.

Tomorrow I see a doctor about possibly participating in a clinical trial. Afterwards, I'll have to decide whether to take a chance on that or to try a couple of drugs that are fully approved but haven't yet been part of my regimen. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I haven't yet gotten advice on this from anyone, so I may change my mind. In any case, it looks like I'll need to make a decision fairly quickly.