Great, but I feel you've buried the lead a bit. The issue isn't wanting a garden if you can pay for it, it's demanding that all your neighbours have gardens too (the analogy with racially-based convenants is pretty obvious). You get to that point, but too far down.
I lived for about 5-6 years in one side of a duplex in a SFH neighborhood, which would've been illegal to build, but had been renovated into duplex form before that zoning was applied. You would not have been able to tell from the street that it was a duplex, without noticing it had two street numbers. I expect SB 9 to have a very marginal positive effect.
I just wish that morons like Mirisch would take the undeserved gains they've reaped from their real estate investments -- vastly greater than any developer ever earns ( https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2021/03/16/who-benefits-from-the-housing-market-graph-of-the-week/ ) -- and go move to rural Idaho or something. If they want wide open spaces so badly, there are plenty of places where their yen for that wouldn't impoverish their neighbors.
Isn’t the correct NIMBY counter that this isn’t actually racist, it’s really just classist, and any racist outcome is due to the uneven allocation of wealth across racial groups (kind of a systemic racism definition).
Basically, the people in Beverly Hills just want to be around other astoundingly rich people and if that means it’s mostly whites (because whites tend to be more astoundingly rich) nothing much they can do about that.
Btw, this isn’t a good (or morally right) argument. But it does attempt to move away from the charge of racism specifically.
John Mirisch is always amazing with the twists and turns he takes arguing how the real racists are the people who want a subway that will force Beverly Hills High to close the functioning oil well on its grounds.
I like that he cites Zev Yaroslavsky approvingly - the guy who banned the use of federal funds to build surface rail in the San Fernando valley, so the Orange Line was put in as BRT instead - and then blamed Metro for not running rail to his district and demanding that they convert it to light rail several years after it turned out to be popular.
Great, but I feel you've buried the lead a bit. The issue isn't wanting a garden if you can pay for it, it's demanding that all your neighbours have gardens too (the analogy with racially-based convenants is pretty obvious). You get to that point, but too far down.
As Matt Yglesias put it, Single Family HOMES are great, but Single Family ZONING is terrible.
Also, I will just put a plug in here: Any time you are tempted to say "abolish single family zoning", substitute, "make normal neighborhoods legal".
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/3/making-normal-neighborhoods-legal-again
I lived for about 5-6 years in one side of a duplex in a SFH neighborhood, which would've been illegal to build, but had been renovated into duplex form before that zoning was applied. You would not have been able to tell from the street that it was a duplex, without noticing it had two street numbers. I expect SB 9 to have a very marginal positive effect.
I just wish that morons like Mirisch would take the undeserved gains they've reaped from their real estate investments -- vastly greater than any developer ever earns ( https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2021/03/16/who-benefits-from-the-housing-market-graph-of-the-week/ ) -- and go move to rural Idaho or something. If they want wide open spaces so badly, there are plenty of places where their yen for that wouldn't impoverish their neighbors.
Isn’t the correct NIMBY counter that this isn’t actually racist, it’s really just classist, and any racist outcome is due to the uneven allocation of wealth across racial groups (kind of a systemic racism definition).
Basically, the people in Beverly Hills just want to be around other astoundingly rich people and if that means it’s mostly whites (because whites tend to be more astoundingly rich) nothing much they can do about that.
Btw, this isn’t a good (or morally right) argument. But it does attempt to move away from the charge of racism specifically.
John Mirisch is always amazing with the twists and turns he takes arguing how the real racists are the people who want a subway that will force Beverly Hills High to close the functioning oil well on its grounds.
I like that he cites Zev Yaroslavsky approvingly - the guy who banned the use of federal funds to build surface rail in the San Fernando valley, so the Orange Line was put in as BRT instead - and then blamed Metro for not running rail to his district and demanding that they convert it to light rail several years after it turned out to be popular.