Tag: san francisco
Best-Selling, Liberal-Bashing 'Abundance' Is Abundantly Clueless

Best-Selling, Liberal-Bashing 'Abundance' Is Abundantly Clueless

The hot-selling book Abundance is written by liberals who bash liberals, or more precisely, try to make them feel guilty. Sure, authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson shed some blame on conservatives for why America doesn't build as easily as it used to. But it's those liberals in expensive cities, the authors insist, who are callously driving less-than-rich families to move elsewhere.

Klein and Thompson argue that Democrat-run "superstar" cities have failed to provide enough affordable housing because of all their building rules and regulations and pesky zoning ordinances that make it harder to build. The chief culprits are San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and, as always, New York City. The comparisons made against them are ludicrous.

A sample complaint: "The Austin metro area led the nation in housing permits in 2022, permitting 18 new homes for every thousand residents. Los Angeles's and San Francisco's metro areas permitted only 2.5 units per thousand residents."

Where do we start? Let's start with the not-insignificant matter of buildable land. The population density of San Francisco is five times that of Austin. Even sprawling Los Angeles has nearly three times as many people per square mile as Austin does.

Another sampling: Houston "is not facing the crises of homelessness and housing affordability seen in the superstar cities of many blue states." Why? In 2023, the Boston metro area issued 10,500 new housing permits, while Houston issued almost 70,000.

Boston has nearly four times the number of people per square mile as Houston. And Boston Harbor borders a big, blue-gray body of water. The land to its east is Portugal. Of course, buying and building in Boston is harder to do — and more expensive.

Really, all the so-called superstar cities getting roasted in Abundance — San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles — are bounded by water whereas Austin and Houston can easily expand into open country. The authors speak a lot about "bottlenecks" impeding progress. I'd say that the Pacific Ocean is a significant bottleneck to Los Angeles building out. Wouldn't you?

Houston has no zoning laws, so you can put almost anything anywhere. That's the Houston way. (This dynamic metropolis might rightly bristle being left out of the list of superstar cities.) Urban Texas has some fine old neighborhoods that locals treasure, but there's a lot more history to protect in the older cities.

Let Houston be Houston, Boston be Boston and LA be unlike either.

This is a big country. The four ultra-costly superstar cities combined take up a minuscule 0.025% of the total U.S. landmass. Let's not insult the thousands of smaller cities and towns by portraying the glitzy coastal metros as the only places where opportunity beckons. Fortunes can be made anywhere. Silicon Valley was almost all fruit orchards into the 1950s.

A needed update: Austin's heralded building boom is over for now. Austin's growth, fueled by the pandemic, now limps along with sky-high office and apartment vacancy rates.

Klein and Thompson speak in that confident wonky voice, arms outstretched with futurama visions of shared prosperity. If only Americans, Democrats especially, would get out of the way.

"Democrats cannot simultaneously claim to be the party of middle-class families while presiding over the parts of the country they are leaving." They predictably single out liberal California, noting "California's most populous cities are run by Democrats."

As it happens, Democrats also preside over Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio.

Abundance operates on the assumption that liberals can be shamed for wanting to preserve landmarks, intimate Main Streets and tenements with old shops at the bottom. Pass the guilt by. Liberals, joined by their conservative neighbors, have every right to slow down the bulldozers.

Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture.She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

When Chappelle Brings Musk Onstage, Massive Booing 'Withers' Mogul

When Chappelle Brings Musk Onstage, Massive Booing 'Withers' Mogul

Why Dave Chappelle thought it was a good idea to bring Elon Musk on stage Sunday night is anyone’s guess, but the audience was not having it. According to Gizmodo, the infamously anti-trans comedian invited the notoriously racist conspiracy theorist billionaire on at the end of his set, and the boos from around 18,000 present in the Chase Center stadium were brutal.

“Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” Chappelle said while Musk strutted back and forth, looking deeply uncomfortable.

Chappelle tried desperately to save the moment, but every time Musk opened his mouth, he was drowned by a cacophony of jeers.

“It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience,” Chappelle jabbed as Musk chuckled. “All these people who are booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious, you have terrible seats,” Chappelle said, taking cheap shots at those in the audience who couldn’t afford more expensive tickets.

And it hasn’t simply been communications staffers, engineers, and executives Musk has discarded like trash since he purchased Twitter; it has also been employees such as Julio Alvarado, a 10-year employee at Twitter on the cleaning staff. Alvarado told the BBC, “I can only tell you, I don’t have money to pay the rent. I'm not going to have medical insurance. I don't know what I'm going to do."

Peppering his jokes with the N-word ironically, even calling Musk “this N-word,” Chappelle was obviously oblivious to the unleashed racism on Twitter following Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the platform.

“One analysis [found] the use of a racial slur spiking nearly 500 percent in the 12 hours after his deal was finalized, which is pretty shocking,” John Oliver said during his show, Last Week Tonight, in mid-November. “Even for a website where a regular trending topic is sometimes just ‘The Jews.’ That happens constantly. You’ll log in and see 30,000 people tweeting about ‘The Jews’ on a Tuesday afternoon, and you do not want to click to find out why.”

Chappelle tried everything he could think of Sunday night to save the failure of bringing Musk on stage and giving him a microphone, but all of his praise of Musk’s money and success couldn’t salvage the moment.

“Dave, what should I say?” Musk said, looking humiliated.

“Don’t say nothing. It’ll only spoil the moment,” Chappelle said. “Do you hear that sound, Elon? That’s the sound of pending civil unrest. I can’t wait to see what store you decimate next, motherfucker,” he added. Then he told a booing audience member to “shut the fuck up.”

Chappelle ended his set with, “I wish everyone in this auditorium peace and the joy of feeling free… And your pursuit of happiness. Amen.”

Elon Musk gets booed by the crowd at Dave Chappelle's San Francisco show (Part 1 of 4)youtu.be

Elon Musk gets booed by the crowd at Dave Chappelle's San Francisco show (Part 2 of 4)youtu.be

Just prior to his pathetic appearance with Chappelle, Musk spent his weekend cozying up to far-right conspiracists, attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, and taking a cheap shot at those who’ve asked their pronoun choices to be respected.

As Daily Kos’ Hunter writes, “Musk has dabbled in COVID-19 denialism from the beginning of the pandemic, but the notion of prosecuting public health officials for doing their damn jobs even when pandemic deniers would rather they didn't is, again, something scraped up from the deepest bowels of the fascist far-right.”

And as Hunter writes, Musk neglects to say anything about why Fauci should be prosecuted but then blows the racist Republican whistle about being “woke.”

Musk is a loathsome rich boy, the South African child of an apartheid-era emerald mine owner, clueless about real work, and he’s friends with folks like billionaire Republican MAGA donor, Peter Thiel. So, in some ways, it only makes sense that Chappelle, who in recent years has become as clueless about his biases as Musk has always been about his own.

There’s a point in celebrity when a person becomes so out of touch with reality that they really don’t see racism or homophobia or anti-trans prejudice, they only see wealth. That’s where Chappelle is today—indifferent and oblivious.

Why did Democrats do so surprisingly well in the midterms? It turns out they ran really good campaigns, as strategist Josh Wolf tells us on this week's episode of The Downballot. That means they defined their opponents aggressively, spent efficiently, and stayed the course despite endless second-guessing in the press. Wolf gives us an inside picture of how exactly these factors played out in the Arizona governor's race, one of the most important Democratic wins of the year. He also shines a light on an unsexy but crucial aspect of every campaign: how to manage a multi-million budget for an enterprise designed to spend down to zero by Election Day.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Danziger: I Found My Heart

Danziger: I Found My Heart

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

What Are Sanctuary Cities, Anyway?

What Are Sanctuary Cities, Anyway?

At Donald Trump’s immigration-themed rally Wednesday night, after he pledged to assemble a deportation force to eject two million people from the country within the first hour of his presidency, the Republican nominee said that in a Trump administration, he administration would move to “block funding for sanctuary cities… We will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths.”

So what is a sanctuary city, and are sanctuary cities less safe because of how they treat undocumented immigrants?

“Sanctuary city” generally refers to any locality which does not honor — or provides leeway to local law enforcement not to cooperate with — I-247s, or “requests for notification,” which notify the feds that there is an undocumented person in custody. Before that, sanctuary cities ignored federal detention orders, or “detainers,” to hand undocumented immigrants targeted for detention or deportation over to the federal government. There are other definitions of the term, and there are considerations of prior felonies and other things on a city-by-city basis, but this generally covers how Trump is using it.

There are around 200 towns, cities, and counties around the country that, if they arrest an undocumented immigrant, either do not investigate their immigration status, or do not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts to deport an individual they know to be here without proper documentation.

Advocates for allowing localities this leeway say that it makes cities safer. They reason that undocumented immigrants are valuable members of their community, and to threaten them with deportation every time they are in contract with local police would have a harmful overall impact on crime, if people are discouraged from calling the police to report crimes and tips. They also say federal procedures regarding undocumented immigrants implicitly encourage racial profiling and restricted access to due process protections.

“A detainer is not a legal instrument,” then-San Francisco Police Chief Ross Mirkarimi said in an interview, soon after the shooting death of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant in July 2015. “From a law enforcement perspective, we want to build trust with that population, and our sanctuary city and other attendant laws have allowed us to do that.”

Yesterday, responding to Donald Trump’s speech, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine said much the same. “I trust police chiefs in terms of knowing what should be done to keep their communities safer and police departments and mayors a lot more than I trust Donald Trump,” he told CNN’s New Day Thursday morning.

Are sanctuary cities more dangerous? There’s no proof of that — though there’s no proof of the opposite, either. As a Mother Jones‘ Josh Harkinson wrote last year, in the state of California, in which the state legislature and all but a few counties have enacted sanctuary city laws, 2014 homicide numbers were in line with decades-low crime numbers across the country. And first-generation immigrants in general are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

The term itself is a bit misleading, as well: Undocumented immigrants still serve time in custody in localities deemed sanctuary cities. They just aren’t handed over to the feds to be deported afterwards. And given the relatively small portion of the U.S. living here illegally — one third of one percent of the total population — and the fact that immigrants are less criminal on average, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that stories on sanctuary cities focus more on the outrage that term provokes than on crime statistics themselves.

Photo: A worker labors on a housing project on Mission Street in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, California April 29, 2014. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith  

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