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Comment by woooooo | Hacker News Reader

> Keep in mind: Klein and Thompson's political project is a plan to organize the Democrats.

This is the crux of the opposition. It's not that leftists necessarily have a problem with zoning reform, I don't at least, its fine. It's that the "abundance" project is a play for control of the party by the same losers who gave us Biden and Kamala.

People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face. "Think of the millionaire land developers" is a losing message even if it does indirectly help regular people 10 years later. It's not even actionable at the federal level.

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> People on the left feel that we need to be speaking to economic problems that regular people face.

Housing is that.

This just sounds like you want populist things and the outcome doesn't matter. Like price controls and tariffs.

Its about the message. Centering the message on something that has indirect, timelagged effects and isnt even actionable at the federal level is terrible messaging strategy for the national party.

"The dairy industry ran ads saying milk was good for you for 20 years and sales went down. Then they tried 'got milk' and sales went up" https://youtu.be/keCwRdbwNQY?si=kc14Ms7ECxglNgbl

"Build more" is direct and actionable. Regulatory reform is only one dimension.

Up north, Carney ran on a platform of building 500k homes annually, approx double the rate of housing starts. That's direct and done at the federal level, with billions in financing. It's impossible to be less timelagged than that by way of policy. So-called "affordable housing" qua government funding development (price controls after the fact notwithstanding) still entails hoop jumping and waiting for approvals, they don't spring up the next day.

The effects of zoning reform where they're implemented are reflected quickly as well. See: Minneapolis.

The general trend I see is that the left attacks the "Abundance agenda" without having read about it. Either that or the fact that it isn't just about market solutions is deliberately ignored.

> "Build more" is direct and actionable. Regulatory reform is only one dimension.

I could get behind "build more" much more easily than "abundance". You're onto something there IMO.

Fair, and I have to give credence that messaging effectively is extremely important. It's not enough to be "right", you have to sway and win. Will quibbble that the left is not exactly known for message-discipline, what's popular with them does not often translate well to most voters.

Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation.

Housing supply is the biggest economic problem that regular people face.

Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson did not bring us Joe Biden, Ezra became one of the most critical mainstream journalists of Biden. Their politics are meaningfully different.

> Many leftists have a problem with zoning deregulation.

I've been in leftist housing advocacy circles. I studied urban planning.

1) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates euclidean zoning

2) Every leftist I know who cares about housing hates down-zoning

3) Every urban planning class I took said that euclidean zoning is bad

Euclidean zoning is the principle land use regulation in the United States because it is supported by powerful people, landowners and yes property developers (who are also almost always land speculators.)

Thompson and Klein misrepresent euclidean zoning as a leftist project and then set it up as a wicker man to stuff with all the environmental and labor protections they want to torch.

I live and am politically active in a front-line municipality for these issues (Oak Park, IL --- the actual redlining bastion of the western suburbs, a 4.5 square mile gravity well for Cook County school funding so egregious it was one of the first examples in Johnny Harris's NYT "Blue States, You're The Problem video) and I'm telling you, straight out, leftist defenses of existing zoning rules are a very real thing. In fact, where I live, they are the entire defense of those zoning rules: progressives have a supermajority of the board.

Leftists are not solely or distinctively responsible for exclusionary zoning and housing restriction in the US. Nationally, they're not even the biggest problem. But in many jurisdictions, places that should be the vanguards and test cases for housing reform, they are the controlling factor.

Which is why Derek Thompson addresses them so directly. What would be the point of aiming these criticisms at Republican-controlled municipalities? They don't share these values to begin with! They're not listening!

Right now, we have two parties actively propping up home values and the interests of the upper middle class. Klein and Thompson propose: what if on this issue we had two parties?

I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016 (probably calling Bernie a sexist) and voted for Biden and against progressive income tax in 2020. They are not leftists. You seem to be having some trouble understanding the difference between democrats, liberals, and leftists.

T&K are fundamentally dishonest about the role of euclidean zoning in american cities, who supports it and why it's so powerful. Their basic project is to strip environmental and labor protections by tying them to euclidean zoning and saying "it's all the same."

And by the way, they may get their way (Newsom is already forcing repeals of environmental protections in California while toasting Klein) but at the end of the day euclidean zoning will still be around, because it is supported by people who are way too powerful.

Another by the way: I remember fighting the big Chicago rezoning in 2004. They had us chasing our tails by trying to double the parking requirements and letting us fight to get them back down to where they were in the old code, feeling like we won a big victory.

You couldn't be more wrong; this is absolutely Bernie country. In the primaries, it made Washtenaw County MI look like Maricopa County. No, I think I understand just fine what I'm talking about.

Again: this is one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the country.

Speaking of Washtenaw County, as a resident, it is also "the leftists" that are protecting existing zoning and are the major NIMBYs. It is the "evil corporate right wingers" that want to build all kinds of housing, but are prevented from doing so. There is literally two ballot measures for next week where the left wing NIMBYs want to protect a "park" (which is literally a parking lot) from being turned into a larger library and actual green space, because we also want to build more housing as well above the library.

"I guarantee you all your Oak Park neighbors are the type who were With Hillary in 2016"

Its both. That's the problem. In my neighborhood, the construction of any market rate housing will be blocked by Hillary voting land-owners and single family home owners and card-carrying Bernie Bros mad that a private developer even gets to set foot in the city.

It's this alliance that has basically blocked housing in most metro cities.

When it comes to 100% affordable housing, yes the Hillary voters are on their own, but those are like 1-2 headline causing projects. For every affordable housing project there are 10 market rate housing projects that never even see the light of day.

As an example when I was active in housing in Chicago one of the organizations that was with us on the left was a developer of affordable housing: https://www.bickerdike.org/

Several of the activist actually worked for this developer.

Real leftist housing rights supporters are not against developers. They are against for-profit, private equity, land banking speculators, and yeah nimby homeowners. In general we hated the Oak Park type nimby liberal more than we hated the right to be honest.

“leftist housing rights supporters are not against developers.”

They certainly are in my neighborhood.

https://www.ourneighborhoodvoices.com/48-hills-cost-of-growt...

The “private developer risk” the article derides is an enforceable approval timeline that lets private developers have bounded risk. Apparently that’s a bridge too far.

In a market system, Creating a system that is "against for profit" housing developers very predictively restricts housing supply & drives up the cost of living for everyone.

Sounds like you're just applying somewhat arbitrary purity rules to what falls into the "leftist" bucket or not.

I believe that for most people "leftists" means "on the left side of the political spectrum", and so, in the US, it would be a strict superset of democrats & Liberals. But for you, it sounds like it's only subset of these, based on some criteria you haven't made explicit.

Fair enough, but that's a somewhat non-standard definition.

It's standard among self-described leftists, to distinguish themselves from establishment liberals.

I'm not even very far left and I identify with the term because party leadership are all 80yo and out of touch.

"Liberal" is an epithet here too (I'm a liberal, for whatever that's worth).

For what it's worth back, a lot of the opposition towards "establishment libs" is based more on optics than policy IMO.

Voters feel ripped off by the establishment. Running on "we're the establishment and we're here to help" is a loser, and letting Trump be the rebel is malpractice.

I am a libertarian (anarcho-capitalist) but people do not know the differences and similarities to liberal, because both has the prefix "liber".

Both ideologies evolved from the same source of classical liberalism, and still share plenty in common today.

But liberals would definitely down-vote me if I talked about Rothbard and Mises. Why do you think that is?

Because they have a difference in opinion with you about the degree to which markets should be allowed to exclusively allocate resources?

I personally am in favor of free market. Are they? I do not shy away from being a minarchist either, to be honest.

No, that's not what “leftist" generally means, it means adherence to any of a broad grouping of anti-capitalist ideologies (the more widely recognizable being the various forms of socialism and communism). It overlaps a little bit with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the US, but beyond that is mostly outside of the US major party system. The only people who use “leftist" to describe a superset of the Democratic Party also use “socialist” and “communist” in the same way.

I think you're injecting your personal views into the definition, which don't align with the common meaning of the word.

Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary (New Oxford American Dictionary):

> leftist, noun: a person who has left-wing political views or supports left-wing policies.

> left-wing, noun: the section of a political party or system that advocates for greater social and economic equality, and typically favors socially liberal ideas; the liberal or progressive group or section

Anti-capitalist thought represents a subset, but is certainly not the sole marker of left-wing political thought.

Now, my _personal_ take on this is that western left-wing thinking and liberalism (in the moral philosophical sense) are deeply intertwined (given the Enlightenment and its values), but anti-capitalist thought is deeply illiberal in nature. It is this fundamental contradiction that leads to permanent infighting within the left-wing spectrum.

> I think you're injecting your personal views into the definition,

I think I'm injecting what I know from getting a degree in political science and a two and half subsequent decades of experience paying attention to how political terminology is used by scholarly, journalistic, popular, and activist sources across the political spectrum into the definition.

> Here's the definition of the word taken from macOS's built-in dictionary

And that's a tolerably decent definition for a relatively compact general dictionary, but it misses a lot of nuance; outside of activist sources using it as a slur for their opponents, it is not used in nearly the local-politics-relevant way that left/right (especially qualified with a national label, like "American left") is.

I think that conflating "blue state" with leftist is incorrect. "Blue state" confidently implies "centrist" and "not too much on the right". It does include also leftists, but not just them.

The parties are asymmetric. "Red state" implies very much on the right and is much more radicalized then democrats. But democrats themselves are centrists and unlike the republicans, tend to push away more radical parts.

FWIW: Ezra Klein called for Biden to step down before most others and asked for a fast national convention (not Kamala). Broad brushstrokes are energy saving, but just incorrect.

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