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Tag: local politics
Hypocrisy On Housing Is A Bipartisan Scourge

Hypocrisy On Housing Is A Bipartisan Scourge

Right now, selling a home is akin to selling beer on a troopship: Buyers are so eager they'll pay almost any amount. The median home sales price in the United States was nearly 23 percent higher in June than a year earlier.

Surging demand is the immediate cause of the increase, and it will abate before long. But underlying it is a more durable factor: policies that choke off supply by making it harder and more expensive to build homes.

The claim that all politics is local has never been more true than in the realm of housing policy, which has a way of turning principles upside down. At the national level, Democrats favor affordable shelter for all and Republicans oppose burdensome regulation. But in their own neighborhoods, they give priority to high real estate values.

The 18th-century economist Adam Smith wrote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." The same can be said of homeowners, who in many communities have harnessed the power of municipal government to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

In a lot of appealing locales, housing is increasingly unaffordable. The pandemic has boosted prices in suburbs and small towns by allowing urban office workers to relocate while keeping their city jobs. But that development only deepens a chronic malady: too many people and not enough homes.

A new study for the National Association of Realtors documents the fundamental cause. "While the total stock of U.S. housing grew at an average annual rate of 1.7 percent from 1968 through 2000, the U.S. housing stock grew by an annual average rate of 1 percent in the last two decades, and only 0.7 percent in the last decade," it noted. During this period, "every major region of the country heavily underbuilt housing."

It's true in Chicago. In Lincoln Park, one of the most desirable neighborhoods, loss of housing units has helped reduce the resident population by 40 percent. It's true in California. Since 2005, the state has added more than three times as many people as it has housing units.

In recent years, people have been leaving the Golden State for places like Austin, Texas, where rules have prevented the construction of multiunit buildings — helping to boost the median home sales price by 42 percent in the past year. In that respect, Austin resembles Los Angeles, where 75 percent of residential land is zoned for single-family homes and duplexes.

Democratic mayors can be faulted for making it difficult and expensive to enlarge the housing stock. Unfortunately, Republicans reject any attempt by the federal government to encourage more construction and density.

During the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump alleged that Joe Biden would "eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down." Biden's infrastructure package includes $5 billion in grants to local governments that ease zoning rules to allow more housing units.

You might think conservatives would want to scrap government regulations that abridge property rights and interfere with the free market. No such luck. Like Trump, many of them see exclusionary zoning as a way to shut out undesirables and keep home prices up. Self-interest triumphs over ideology.

Liberals are prone to their own hypocrisy. While cities like San Francisco, Denver, and Austin flaunt their progressive values, they have clung to housing rules that harm the people progressives are supposed to care about.

On the left, though, the consensus has cracked. Minneapolis and Seattle have "upzoned" to permit more multifamily units. In 2019, Oregon Democrats won passage of a measure largely forbidding single-family zoning. Last year, the Democratic California state Senate approved a bill to let local governments override such restrictions, and it's up for consideration again this year.

It's often said that the three most important factors in buying a home are location, location, and location. When it comes to housing affordability and access, the three most important factors are supply, supply, and supply. Anything that facilitates more housing units helps; anything that obstructs them does not.

Bipartisanship can be a way for people of differing views to find practical compromises that advance common goals. In the case of housing, though, it amounts to a cartel of the haves against the have-nots. And it's working exactly as designed.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Walker Visits South Carolina, Addresses Firing Of Campaign Aide

Walker Visits South Carolina, Addresses Firing Of Campaign Aide

By Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (TNS)

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Governor Scott Walker brought his Wisconsin story to South Carolina Thursday, telling voters how he overcame protests and a recall effort, and suggesting the departure of a campaign aide this week was rooted in the need to respect voters.

In a speech to about 200 people at the TD Convention Center in Greenville, Walker indirectly addressed the departure of social media aide Liz Mair after news spread about tweets she posted before she was hired that disparaged Iowa and its caucuses, the first in the nation.

“One of my clear rules is, if you’re going to be on our team, whether on the paid staff or a volunteer, what I always say is you need to respect the voters,” he said. “Because really if you think about campaigns, it’s not about the candidate or the staff. It’s about the voter. It’s about how to help people’s lives be better.

“One of the things I’ve stressed … in the last few days as I’ve looked at the possibility of running is you have my firm commitment that I’m going to focus on making sure that the people on my team, should we go forward, are people who respect voters.”

Mair stepped down Tuesday just hours after her hiring had been announced — and shortly after the head of the Iowa Republican Party said Walker should fire her.

The incident was a distraction for the Republican governor as he made his first foray into South Carolina since he began seriously considering a run for the presidency. The state holds the third nominating contest in the country, after Iowa and New Hampshire — two other states Walker has recently visited.

How Walker fares is considered especially critical because the Republican Party is so strong in the South, and most of the likely candidates for the nomination come from Southern states. The votes of the religious and the deeply conservative hold great sway here. The son of a Baptist preacher who has built his reputation as someone who has stood up for conservative causes in a purple state, Walker hopes to appeal to those sets of overlapping voters.

In speeches Thursday in Greenville and Columbia, Walker spoke of his efforts to curtail collective bargaining for public workers and the response those efforts elicited. Walker in 2012 became the first governor in the country’s history to survive a recall effort.

“Throughout all of that, instead of intimidating us, what it reminded me was that I was elected for a purpose,” Walker said to a crowd of about 150 in a Marriott meeting room in Columbia.

“It was worth it because if I had just run for the title or position, a hundred thousand protesters might have scared me off. But because I was running for (sons) Matt and for Alex and for all the other sons and daughters like them, or all the other grandsons and granddaughters like them, I knew I could not back down. I knew it was worth it for them.”

In both speeches, Walker ran through what has developed into his standard stump speech and cataloged his achievements — lower taxes, a concealed weapons law, cuts to funding for Planned Parenthood — and said he saw a need to revive America.

“In America you can be and do anything you want,” he said in Columbia. “The opportunity is equal for all, but the outcome is still up to each and every one of us.”

As he has in other recent speeches, he stressed the need for an aggressive stance in the Middle East and signaled the possibility of needing to send troops there.

“In America, we need a commander in chief who understands that it’s not a matter of if but when, and I’m going to take — and we need a leader who will take — the fight to them and not wait until it comes to us on American soil, to do whatever it takes to protect your children and your grandchildren from another attack on American soil,” he said in Greenville.

He also revived a story he’s told for years in Wisconsin about raking leaves in his front yard with a friend of his son’s when someone pulled up in front of his house and raised a middle finger. Walker said he reacted calmly and minutes later, another car pulled up and gave him a thumbs up.

“It was a great reminder that if you do good, good will come back to you,” he told the crowd.

He told the group he got support from people in all 50 states during his recall campaign, saying he received contributions from nearly 300,000 donors.

“Only Mitt Romney has more donors on the Republican side,” he said.

Between the fundraisers for the South Carolina Republican Party that Walker hosted, he met with GOP South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and other lawmakers, and stopped by a Harley-Davidson dealership to buy T-shirts. On Friday, he will host events for the party in Rock Hill and Charleston, and one for the National Rifle Association in Charleston.

Thursday’s crowds received Walker warmly.

“He wouldn’t be afraid to step on toes, especially with unions,” said Marty Jewell of Prosperity, S.C.

Jewell contributed to Walker’s cause during his recall race.

“I thought he was doing a great job and when they started to persecute him, I knew he was doing a good job,” he said.

Walker has been positioning himself as someone who can appeal to his party’s conservative and moderate wings. He pointed to his success in Wisconsin, where he has won election three times in four years even though the state — as he noted in both speeches — hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1984.

Photo: Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Chicago’s Rahm-Chuy Show

Chicago’s Rahm-Chuy Show

CHICAGO — The mayor is proud to tout his work expanding access to pre-kindergarten programs, raising the minimum wage, and making two years of community college available to everybody. He talks admiringly about his city’s ethnic diversity and stresses his commitment to making it a place where “every resident in every neighborhood has a fair shot at success.”

This is not a preview of the re-election campaign of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, a hero to progressives around the country. It’s the actual platform of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. So it’s mildly ironic that the very sorts of left-of-center voters who elected de Blasio and other mayors blocked Emanuel’s re-election on Tuesday and forced him into a runoff campaign that will not be settled until April 7.

The champion of change was Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a county commissioner who quickly made himself a counter-brand. If everyone here calls their chief executive “Rahm,” everyone now refers to Garcia by his nickname, “Chuy.” The Rahm-Chuy Show promises to be another storied encounter staged by a city that knows how to turn politics into drama — in this case, a production that could draw a class line across Chicago.

Garcia is unabashed in making this contest an ideological struggle. He has cast Emanuel — who received an endorsement from his old boss, President Obama, and vastly outspent his opponent — as a local reincarnation of Mitt Romney, “Mayor 1 percent.”

“Today, we the people have spoken,” Garcia declared on election night after his showing far surpassed his standing in pre-election polls. “Not the people with the money and the power and the connections, not the giant corporations, the big-money special interests, the hedge funds and Hollywood celebrities who poured tens of millions of dollars into the mayor’s campaign. They all had their say. They’ve had their say for too long.”

In this round, Emanuel received 45.4 percent of the vote, well short of the 50 percent plus one that he needed to avoid a runoff, to 33.9 percent for Garcia. Willie Wilson, a self-financed African-American businessman, received 10.6 percent and two other candidates split the rest.

The ideological frame on the race is an important part of the story, and it’s reinforced by the victories of several anti-Emanuel members of the City Council whom the mayor’s supporters tried to oust. Nationally, the race has been characterized as a shadow battle between the Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren wings of the Democratic Party. Garcia is clearly embracing the Warren role.

But this take oversimplifies the dynamics here because politics is also local, and personal. Emanuel is, you might say, unabashedly unabashed. The words “aggressive,” “blunt” and “bullying” attach to him, and he has an urban poet’s affection for expletives.

Some of the Garcia voters I spoke with saw their first-round votes as a chance to force a runoff and thereby bring Emanuel down a peg. Emanuel’s second-round strategy will focus on asking such voters — and the roughly two-thirds of the electorate that didn’t vote on Tuesday: Now that you’ve registered your displeasure, do you want Chuy or Rahm running your city?

There were a lot of accumulated grievances against the mayor that at one point brought his approval rating down to 29 percent: His closing of 50 schools, his protracted fight with Chicago’s teachers’ union, and the high crime rates in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Like many mayors before him, he was accused of focusing primarily on downtown development, and the taxi drivers sure don’t like his friendly attitude toward Uber.

Wilson, who spent about $2 million of his own money, also hurt Emanuel. The mayor carried most of the city’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, but as Fran Spielman noted in the Chicago Sun-Times, his share there typically dropped from around 60 percent in his election four years ago to about 40 percent on Tuesday. Wilson, a very religious man whose television ads included scenes in churches, appears from private polling to have done especially well with older African-American women, even as Garcia expanded turnout in Latino areas.

Emanuel is one of the most complicated, and thus most interesting, characters in American politics. An unapologetically pro-business Democrat, his legendary feuds with liberals, often carried out at high decibel levels, created a legion of enemies who cheered his humbling. He also has a fondness for policies — on education, pre-kindergarten and community colleges — that reflect his passion for widespread upward mobility. The denouement of the Rahm-Chuy Show could depend on whether the second Rahm can save the first.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: ctaweb via Flickr

Grisly Language Propels Kansas Anti-Abortion Bill As U.S. Model

Grisly Language Propels Kansas Anti-Abortion Bill As U.S. Model

By Esmé E. Deprez, Bloomberg News (TNS)

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Activists in Kansas and Oklahoma are seeking to outlaw a common abortion technique by using the text of legislative bills to lay bare its graphic details, a tactic that may spread across the U.S.

Republican lawmakers in both states are pushing to ban what they call “dismemberment abortion” with language supplied by National Right to Life, a Washington-based advocacy group. Opponents say the bills inaccurately describe what medical literature calls dilation and evacuation, a method used in 96 percent of second-trimester terminations, according to the National Abortion Federation.

As state legislative sessions get under way across the U.S., Republicans are tapping into momentum from the 2014 midterm elections to advance an already record-breaking wave of restrictions passed in recent years. That has emboldened activists to revisit the practice of deploying grisly language last used to lobby for a ban on what they call partial-birth abortions, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2007.

“Abortion care can be, in the abstract, deeply upsetting and the anti-abortion movement using the word ‘dismemberment’ is not an accident,” said Carole Joffe, a reproductive health sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “It puts the pro-choice movement on the defensive.”

The aim is to rebrand a medical procedure with a new and unsettling name, include clinical details of what it entails in a bill and let lawmakers’ reactions guide the way they vote.

Kansas has been an early adopter of abortion laws that other states emulated, including mandates that clinics resemble hospital-like surgery centers and tighter regulations on drugs. Republican Governor Sam Brownback has already said he’d sign a ban on dilation-and-evacuation abortions.

The latest bills are trial balloons for a national strategy, said Elizabeth Nash, who tracks legislation for the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and advocacy group in Washington.

“The past four years have been about state legislatures adopting restrictions, because that’s a way to show their conservative stripes,” said Nash. “This is the new trend.”

It’s also a return to an earlier and more confrontational strategy that helped ban so-called partial-birth abortions on the federal level in 2003. That procedure, known by providers as dilation and extraction, involves the partial extraction of a fetus from the uterus and the collapse of the skull and removal of its brain and was used late in a pregnancy.

National Right to Life sees the dilation-and-evacuation bans as a major component of its 2015 legislative agenda. The environment may be favorable: Republicans, traditionally opposed to abortion, added control of two additional governor’s seats in the November election and now hold 31. They also have control of legislatures in 31 states with majorities in a record 69 of 99 chambers.

In Oklahoma, the group contacted Republican Representative Pam Peterson to sponsor a dilation-and-evacuation bill following her years of championing the anti-abortion cause, she said. Women terminate pregnancies because they’re in the dark about what doing so actually means, she said.

“With the discussion about, and passage of this bill, the public will see that dismemberment abortions brutally –- and unacceptably –- rip apart small human beings,” said Kathy Ostrowski, director of National Right to Life affiliate Kansans for Life, in a statement.

Oklahoma’s bill defines the procedure as one “to dismember a living unborn child and extract him or her one piece at a time from the uterus through use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush, and/or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body to cut or rip it off.” The Kansas bill is virtually identical.

Abortion-rights supporters say they worry that what they see as misleading and inflammatory language will carry the day.

Julie Burkhart, who in 2013 re-opened an abortion clinic once run by slain doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kan., says the real motivation of the bill’s backers is to eliminate all abortions.

“They really thrive on sensationalizing abortion care, which is disheartening because we have real women and real families who come in every day to get the health care they need,” she said.

Bruce Price, a Kansas-born physician and associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, said in written testimony to the legislature that the proposal would force physicians to “deviate from the best, most sound care for patients; hence, putting the woman’s life at risk.”

Photo: J. Stephen Conn via Flickr