Housing Plans in California & New York face resistance from construction unions | Hacker News Reader

Housing Plans in California & New York face resistance from construction unions

wsj.com

60 pointsjseliger66 comments

Unions shot themselves in the foot here. Some of the new construction projects would have been run by union shops. Now, they won't happen at all. Net result: fewer union jobs than there could have been.

At some point, the unions will need to realize that stuff is going to get done with or without them. They can be part of the process, or not. If they are part of the process, they get some jobs out of it. This should have been a no-brainer.

Also, support for unions is waning. Here in Philadelphia, union support is at an all time low. They were rendered toothless in recent elections for the first time ever, and a series of bad press (arson, assault, and destruction of property by union members) and continued ties to organized crime have worn thin sympathies.

I also imagine that in difficult economies like ours, the "right" to a job or work over someone else is not looked at favorably when so many are un/under-employed.

At this point, unions seem to be the only ones around here that still support unions around here.

50 years ago, they could have gotten away with this.

Now, the demand for housing is so high that the unions can only delay the inevitable.

Ironically, the NIMBYs and the unions have ended up on the same side of the housing issue. Most union members I know would be unhappy about being on the side of the privileged and established, and against the working-class people, for whom home affordability is of primary importance in CA and NY.

>Now, the demand for housing is so high that the unions can only delay the inevitable.

The unions agree with you here, that's the whole point. The demand is so high that the developers will soon agree with the unions' requests in exchange for a slightly smaller profit.

No, the developers will agree with everyone else except the NIMBYs and the unions, because union workers are a minority of workers, and they don't do a better job than non-unionized workers. In fact, they often do a worse job, because unions protect bad workers who could not survive outside of a union.

The days when unions could get their way in these kinds of matters through outright bullying are long gone, and good riddance to them!

For good reason. They prevent accountability among police: http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/14/police-unions-produce-rule....

They also prevent educational innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Special-Interest-Teachers-Americas-Sc... and pr event urban schools from even functioning.

As the topic article points out, construction unions are attacking the housing supply.

Should it be a surprise that anyone who pays attention is unhappy with unions?

I generally agree with what you are saying, but I should point out that private-sector and public-sector unions are very different animals.

Maybe its because the public looks down upon unions that the middle class is slowly sliding into destitution? [1] [2]

I'm definitely not a fan of unions, but besides the movement to push minimum wage up to $15/hr across the country, I don't see any organized groups continuing to push the salary threshold at which overtime pay is required, reducing the number of hours in a work week (which is f___ing insane we're still working ~40 hours a week with how much productivity has grown since the 60's), and so forth.

Either unions or political activists must fight for these labor protections; pick your poison.

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...

[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477/...

The 40 hour work week isn't a productivity related number... It's a cultural construction born from early 20th century union political efforts.

For instance in Denmark, the work week is typically 32 hours and has been this way for decades... Works fine for them... Not sure how well it would work in a culture like America where working as hard as possible is considered a good thing... Regardless of how stupidly obvious it is that this screws up work life balance, individual stress levels and by extension individual health, in the country with the most fucked up health care system in the western world...

37, not 32.

http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/compara...

There are particularly many part-time workers in Denmark, and flexibility of labour market is high (including close to zero protection from layoffs), and this has resulted in Danes working fewer hours per worker than other Western nations (1490 hours per year per employee on the average) but on the other hand the labour marker participation rate is very high, so Danes work more hours per capita than any Western nation.

When I interned for the Federal Government in Canada my wages were for 37.5 hours per week (7.5 hours per day, 30 min unpaid lunch was the implied structure).

It's the same 37.5 hours with all office jobs where I live, Finland. Blue-collar jobs are 8 hours per day (1 hour unpaid lunch implied), they then accumulate more holiday days so that the annual working time is roughly the same.

> The 40 hour work week ... [is] a cultural construction born from early 20th century union political efforts.

This is unabashed union propaganda.

Which isn't to say that unions weren't involved, but there were plenty of other factors involved. I refer you to work such as The Shortening of the American Work Week: An economic and historical analysis of its context, causes, and consequences (Whaples, 1990) which place the shift in a broader context of "wages, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, urbanization, unionization, and legislation" issues, to say nothing of "industrial structure and technology".

One should treat it like the pronouncement that Al Gore created the internet: definitely give the unions some credit, while taking their self-serving praise with a few grains of salt.

The $15 minimum wage push by unions is shockingly unethical when they also include a clause allowing for a wage to be negotiated lower than minimum wage as part of a union contact.

It's basically an effort to force the lowest paid most vulnerable workers to have no choice but to join a union if they want to be able to work at all.

Your own source [1] says the middle class is not slipping into destitution at all (look at the graphs, not the mood affiliation). It's slipping into the upper class. We have become wealthier than ever before, it's just that some of us have experienced higher growth rates of wealth.

> We have become wealthier than ever before, it's just that some of us have experienced higher growth rates of wealth.

Wealth inequality in the US is at its greatest levels ever since recording began six decades ago; the top 3 percent of Americans control 50 percent of the country's wealth.

You aren't disagreeing with me at all.

I think any discussion of the good and bad side of unions needs to distinguish between public and private sector ones.

In the private sector, union negotiations are naturally constrained by the knowledge that if the company isn't profitable, everybody loses. I think there are cases in the private sector where unions make a lot of sense (e.g. mining towns where there's one dominant employer).

In the public sector that doesn't apply. The union's incentive is to demand all that it can. You're not going to put the government out of business.

Unless it's Detroit. Or Puerto Rico.... or....?

I suggest you watch John Oliver piece on Puerto Rico.

Detroit is still there. And so are unions.

That's exactly correct. Public unions aren't as easily accountable to the market. The incentives are disaligned. While private union incentives are generally aligned with business except in more extreme cases such as subsidized industries.

There is also the point that most of the big battles have been won, now. The workplace is incredibly safer than it was 100 years ago. Workplace and wage laws are much more mature. There is welfare for the sick and the aged (to varying degrees depending on country). Apart from squabbling over the exact dollar rate for work, there isn't much in the way of big ticket items for unions to get solidarity over.

My own personal experience with unions:

    'I have a wage problem I need your help with'
    "You're only a part-time employee. We have to rate the full-time employees more, and we don't have the resources to help you, so no"
    'But I pay the same as anyone else. There is no discount for being a part-timer'
    "(crickets)"

So much for solidarity.

They obviously are a part of the process. And, assuming this stuff will get done with or without them, their strategy is the right one - get as much as possible out of it. In this case it's wage guarantees.

People who kill the process entirely cannot be considered a part of it. The next laws that pass regarding this issue will circumvent the unions. If they wanted a seat at the table, they would not have taken such extreme measures.

There is a difference between hardball negotiating, and destroying the very thing the negotiation pertains to.

I don't know anything about the California controversy and I certainly don't think union workers should mandated on new construction in NYC, but I was glad that tax deal died in Albany. It was a terrible program.

Under it billions of dollars of tax revenue over decades which otherwise would have been owed by extremely wealthy people often on their third or fourth home was forgiven and in exchange a few hundred affordable apartments in some of the most expensive neighborhood were handed out to lucky lottery winners. It was about the least efficient affordable housing program imaginable.

A much much better idea would have been to collect the full owed property taxes on the new buildings for billionaires going up in Manhattan and use the money to do more good for many more people. Mostly in the outer boros where the dollar goes further.

It would depend on how well that money was managed. If history is any guide, I suspect not well.

It's hard for me to imagine the government being simultaneously too incompetent to spend tax money sensibly but competent enough to direct an effective lottery based affordable housing program.

If you suppose that the government can't spend taxes wisely, then you seemingly must also suppose that any alternative affordable housing program would be run into the ground by the same incompetents.

This one instance might be so (unions are imperfect human endeavors), but this article comes across as thinly-veiled MSM/establishment strawman/false equivocation via the pernicious, irrational, data-free worldview which completely ignores the net positive force unions had in the bloody struggle for worker pay and working conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

See also: "Inequality for All" and "Where to Invade Next?"

Unions did a lot for working people. But that's not relevant to the question of whether or not they are on the right or wrong side in this particular case.

"helped in the past" != "helpful now"

Burning coal has been a tremendous help to society, but that doesn't mean we should continue to do it when we find better alternatives for each of its use cases.

Can you name some of the advancements unions have brought to employees in the US over the last 10-20 years? Does that outweigh their anti competitive nature that has led to companies moving manufacturing out of unionized areas entirely?

Off the top of my head, try being a non-union Electrician, Plumber, etc. in San Francisco for a day.

At the end of that day, you will drop to your knees, and thank god for those lefty unions. At the end of a few years, you just might be able to afford a house.

Actually San Francisco has a lot of union jobs, and they arn't moving to China.

Personally, I think people in tech will look back, and wish they had some Union protection. It's the one profession I'm shocked hasen't completely moved overseas.

What's the better alternative? America is better now because got rid of a lot of unions? Yes--a lot of products are made where your boss can get maximum ROI. They are made overseas for a lot of reasons, including lax laws concerning every aspect of that widget. Employee health/happiness/economic viability--who cares. Enviornment--who cares. Ability to pay taxes--who cares. Who cares as long as it's cheaper. Sometimes the cheapest is not the best for society as a whole?

As far as the union jobs you described, its not actually possible to outsource manual on-site performed labor to overseas. Is that really an accomplishment of unions?

Very possible to import immigrants, illegally or through visas, to labor for below market rates.

If they're willing to labor for those rates, they are "market" by definition.

The OP's question was:

"of the advancements unions have brought to employees in the US over the last 10-20 years?"

Not what's possible. Also local trade unions are not really involved in federal immigration policy.

>What's the better alternative?

Let's look at the BART. It's one of the worst and most expensive transit systems in the US. It costs $4 to ride it from SFO to the nearest caltrain stop a couple of miles away. Part of the reason is that the train operators can easily rake in 6 figures with overtime for doing something that could easily be automated or made more efficient with centralized control at a minimum. The bay area has given up affordable/useful subways to subsidize a bloated union-based operation.

>Personally, I think people in tech will look back, and wish they had some Union protection. It's the one profession I'm shocked hasen't completely moved overseas.

You're gravely mistaken if you think unions protect jobs from moving away. Labor costs that greatly exceed the market rate are the primary reason the jobs move elsewhere.

>Actually San Francisco has a lot of union jobs, and they arn't moving to China.

Oh? Point me to all of the union heavy manufacturing jobs in SF. You will find that difficult because they don't exist anymore. The only union jobs that are left here are ones that have no competition because they are local (e.g. your electrician example).

Can you name some of the advancements that heirs who have never worked a day in their lives have brought in the US over the last 10-20 years? Who live off the labor of those of us who do work, the labor time of which they expropriate with their dividends and profits?

The heirs, the parasites who live off the labor of those of us who do work are the ones who have to explain what good their parasitism is doing in this day and age. We who work and create wealth and who organize ourselves don't have to justify our existence to these parasites and their myrmidons. They need us, we don't need them.

> Who live off the labor of those of us who do work, the labor time of which they expropriate with their dividends and profits?

You know, you certainly don't have to like entitled rich children of millionaires, billionaires, and industrialists. I certainly don't. But this rant confuses me for a few reasons. First, if we have a system where people are allowed to own capital and that's legitimate, doesn't inheritance just follow? I mean, what's the alternative you're after here without heirs? When Steve Jobs died, should the government have taken his shares and distributed to all current Apple employees? (And if so, according to what formula - proportional to pay? time served? the product of the two? equal division?) And why stop at just the shares - what about the shares of other companies, and his houses and cars and any bars of gold he bought with salaries or shares he'd previously sold? Where's the line? How much is the line? Do we redistribute everything to company employees? What about people who own multiple companies? Or maybe being at the company is no part of it - should the government have just auctioned off his estate for the general fund? Doesn't the government already sort of do that when it collects a roughly 50% inheritance tax? Is that not enough? How much exactly is enough? I could go on... Also, all that notwithstanding, morally: isn't that one of the things human beings work for, a good life for their children and grandchildren? If you respect the original industrialist, can you respect this? (If you don't respect the original industrialist, why are we attacking his heirs?)

Second, are they really even all that big of players in the large-corporation ownership scene writ large? Even in the absence of taxes, big inheritances will spread themselves out over several generations unless all rich kids are only children.

> They need us, we don't need them.

Then quit and found your own company.

"First, if we have a system where people are allowed to own capital and that's legitimate, doesn't inheritance just follow?"

No, it doesn't necessarily follow. We could have a system based on the idea that people should benefit from their own efforts. You can own capital, well done you, and you can even choose to give your property to other people - it's yours, after all - but giving involves one person losing the benefit of it. Inheritance involves people holding onto things until they don't need it any more, and have no use for it, and whatever happens to it next affects them not at all, but they still want to be able to dictate what happens to it. We could jack up inheritance tax to basically 100%, and still have a society in which people can own capital and we encourage people to benefit from their own efforts.

In this day of clever contracts, I could write one where I co-own my capital until I die. Thus constructing inheritance even if it doesn't generally exist in law. Like charitable remainder trusts etc.

We should probably get rid of the charity tax exemption above a small threshold anyway.

It doesn't take charity to hold property in common. Or shares in a corporation with a nominal value of $1. No gift is required I think.

You could; that would be better. Such a contract would have to surrender some control to the other co-owner; in effect, you've given something away, while you were alive. Trusts do a similar thing; the Duke of Westminster just "inherited" a large chunk of London, but he can't just do whatever he wants with it (that said, it is clearly tilted way too far in his favour).

I've no doubt some people would try to cheat the system, but that requires the taxman to look the other way; we already have situations in which people have tried to cheat by obeying the law in paperwork only, and a taxman paying attention can get them.

There already are cases in which people try to come up with clever contracts to attempt to dodge inheritance tax, and the taxman has been known to tear it up.

> Such a contract would have to surrender some control to the other co-owner

No, it wouldn't. You could easily structure this contract such that the person on the receiving end has no control until the original owner dies.

We call that a "will". They already exist. The new owner pays inheritance tax because they've inherited things. Labelling it something else doesn't change it. People already tried.

I did say that people already tried this sort of thing and that the taxman has come down on them in the past. This has really been tried and really not worked.

> We call that a "will". They already exist. The new owner pays inheritance tax because they've inherited things.

You're hypothesizing a world where inheritance isn't a recognized thing and asserting that in such a world, it would be impossible to effectively recreate inheritance with clever contracts. I'm telling you that you're wrong. It would be trivial in any world where contracts and transfer of ownership are accepted to recreate an inheritance system.

I am speaking of this world; the world in which we live today. In this world, "inheritance" is a thing we already know about. In this world, when actions are taken to stop something we know about, people don't suddenly forget about it.

We have laws already against people trying to dodge inheritance tax, and when people try to do that, it is frowned upon. In this world, should inheritance tax effectively become 100%, and based on the knowledge people have now, I see no reason why society would not notice people trying to break the law by clever use of contracts to recreate the inheritance system. This is something that already happens; laws come into being, some people try to break those laws, it is frowned upon. This happens already. Fact.

"It would be trivial in any world where contracts and transfer of ownership are accepted to recreate an inheritance system."

This would be some other world entirely. Sure, in that world that you're hypothesising, you can have whatever you like. I'm talking about this world; the world in which we already live, where we have hard evidence of people already trying to dodge inheritance tax with contracts and getting busted for it, and hard evidence of new laws being created and people being busted for breaking them. You have no such evidence (hardly your own fault; your world doesn't exist), so I find your argument less convincing. I will find any argument based on hypothetical worlds where you simply assert whatever you like as fact to be unconvincing.

If you have no facts and no evidence to present, the usefulness of this conversation is at an end.

Inheritance does not naturally follow from the existence of private capital. Just because the state protects wealth earned by someone does not mean it needs to commit to protecting the transfer of that wealth after death.

To the contrary, inheritance is a weird construct. Dead people don't have property rights--inheritence is a whole mechanism to get around that.

Of course if we got rid of inheritance people would just make inter vivos gifts.

You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological purposes. Please stop doing that. It's not a legitimate use of this site; it poisons the spirit of collegial curiosity that we hope for here. If you want to do political battle, please do so in other places.

What is MSM ? I keep seeing it, google hasn't helped.

Main-Stream Media

"In California last week, legislators and interest groups declared dead a measure pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown to allow certain apartments with some low-income units to sidestep the state’s environmental review process. "

It sounds like unions objected to using "low income housing" as an excuse to "sidestep the state’s environmental review process." I would also.

Environmental review shouldn't be an excuse to engage in NIMYBism but environmental review is important to prevent projects that are environmentally destructive.

It sounds like every interest group involved here is using "low incoming housing" to ram through the "reforms" they're after.

That's a mischaracterization. The law Jerry Brown proposed dealt with "as-of-right" zoning, i.e. if a parcel of land has been zoned for housing, and someone wants to build housing on it, they can do so without the NIMBY neighbors holding up the project indefinitely with frivolous lawsuits and "environmental" reviews. Unfortunately, Brown attached a low-income housing restriction onto it, but it was definitely a step in the right direction.

Real environmental review, by qualified people, happens when the land is zoned in the first place. Most "environmental review" lawsuits are not about the environment at all. The real environmental experts already had their say, or else the land wouldn't have been zoned. Most of these lawsuits seek a new review, often for bullshit reasons, and are filed by NIMBYs to bully the developers into giving up on developing the land by piling on years and millions of dollars of litigation. If that fails, they fall back on "quality of life" and noise complaints.

That's not how it works, especially in hot markets. Zoning is not absolute and the current process allows for all kinds of variances and exceptions.

The Pen Factory project is an excellent example. Local NIMBYs defeated a really neat project that even included low income housing. The original developer said "screw it" and sold the property to a developer that is now doing a by the books and within exact letter of zoning project that will result in a lot of office space and no mitigations for extra traffic or anything. No reviews will stop it.

The environmental reviews cannot be used as an effective NIMBY weapon is the developer is using original zoning. Instead, most project I have seen in LA push boundaries for profitability, often resulting in legal fights with locals.

Source: http://urbanize.la/post/construction-underway-santa-monicas-...

In the San Francisco area, new environmental reviews can, and have been, used as an effective weapon against development.

The point of Jerry Brown's law was to make zoning absolute, and to bypass variances and exceptions which generally accomplish nothing except to allow NIMBYs to bring frivolous lawsuits.

The proposal was to allow for as-of-right development if the development adhered to local zoning ordinances. That means no variances. As soon as a developer wanted a variance, they'd be back under the current system.

That isn't why the unions opposed it. The unions need CEQA so they can extort developers. When developers don't hire enough union electricians, the IBEW files frivolous challenges under CEQA until the developer relents. Unions oppose Brown's measure because they would lose their ability to practice this racket.

Impossible to read without subscribing. Incognito doesnt work. Clicking on google search link doesnt work.

Clicking the Google search link is working for me. Did you install some privacy proxy that may be screwing with referrer headers?

Or is there some new requirement they're checking?

The Google search link fails around 20% of the time for me, without any browser/plugin/config changes on my side. So it could be just that WSJ is randomizing things.

Yes. The exact same search that went to the paywall earlier now displays the full article.

You're holding it wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0...

Hmm, the CFG bookmarklet worked for me...https://blog.umur.io/2015/03/02/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-c...

Here is a link to the full article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/construction-unions-stymie-low-i...

In the future, copy the URL and paste into new.google.com and click on that link to get the full article

If they continue to be uncooperative, just show them this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnTQMzDvTgc

I'd suggest this will improve our (i.e. demand-side) negotiation chances.

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