And you thought NextDoor is bad.

Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system

In China, scoring citizens’ behavior is official government policy. U.S. companies are increasingly doing something similar, outside the law.

[Images: Rawf8/iStock; zhudifeng/iStock]

BY MIKE ELGAN7 MINUTE READ

Have you heard about China’s social credit system? It’s a technology-enabled, surveillance-based nationwide program designed to nudge citizens toward better behavior. The ultimate goal is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step,” according to the Chinese government.

In place since 2014, the social credit system is a work in progress that could evolve by next year into a single, nationwide point system for all Chinese citizens, akin to a financial credit score. It aims to punish for transgressions that can include membership in or support for the Falun Gong or Tibetan Buddhism, failure to pay debts, excessive video gaming, criticizing the government, late payments, failing to sweep the sidewalk in front of your store or house, smoking or playing loud music on trains, jaywalking, and other actions deemed illegal or unacceptable by the Chinese government.

It can also award points for charitable donations or even taking one’s own parents to the doctor.

Punishments can be harsh, including bans on leaving the country, using public transportation, checking into hotels, hiring for high-visibility jobs, or acceptance of children to private schools. It can also result in slower internet connections and social stigmatization in the form of registration on a public blacklist.

China’s social credit system has been characterized in one pithy tweet as “authoritarianism, gamified.”

Steve Randy Waldman@interfluidity

Authoritarianism, gamified. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/10/in-china-your-credit-score-is-now-affected-by-your-political-opinions-and-your-friends-political-opinions/ … ht @VitalikButerin @FrankPasquale

In China, Your Credit Score Is Now Affected By Your Political Opinions - And Your Friends' Politi...

China just introduced a universal credit score, where everybody is measured as a number between 350 and 950. But this credit score isn’t just affected by how well you manage credit – it also reflects...

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At present, some parts of the social credit system are in force nationwide and others are local and limited (there are 40 or so pilot projects operated by local governments and at least six run by tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent).

Beijing maintains two nationwide lists, called the blacklist and the red list—the former consisting of people who have transgressed, and the latter people who have stayed out of trouble (a “red list” is the Communist version of a white list.) These lists are publicly searchable on a government website called China Credit.

The Chinese government also shares lists with technology platforms. So, for example, if someone criticizes the government on Weibo, their kids might be ineligible for acceptance to an elite school.

Public shaming is also part of China’s social credit system. Pictures of blacklisted people in one city were shown between videos on TikTok in a trial, and the addresses of blacklisted citizens were shown on a map on WeChat.

Some Western press reports imply that the Chinese populace is suffocating in a nationwide Skinner box of oppressive behavioral modification. But some Chinese are unaware that it even exists. And many others actually like the idea. One survey found that 80% of Chinese citizens surveyed either somewhat or strongly approve of social credit system.

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China’s social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity by private companies.

Here are some of the elements of America’s growing social credit system.

INSURANCE COMPANIES

The New York State Department of Financial Services announced earlier this year that life insurance companies can base premiums on what they find in your social media posts. That Instagram pic showing you teasing a grizzly bear at Yellowstone with a martini in one hand, a bucket of cheese fries in the other, and a cigarette in your mouth, could cost you. On the other hand, a Facebook post showing you doing yoga might save you money. (Insurance companies have to demonstrate that social media evidence points to risk, and not be based on discrimination of any kind—they can’t use social posts to alter premiums based on race or disability, for example.)

The use of social media is an extension of the lifestyle questions typically asked when applying for life insurance, such as questions about whether you engage in rock climbing or other adventure sports. Saying “no,” but then posting pictures of yourself free-soloing El Capitan, could count as a “yes.”

PATRONSCAN

A company called PatronScan sells three products—kiosk, desktop, and handheld systems—designed to help bar and restaurant owners manage customers. PatronScan is a subsidiary of the Canadian software company Servall Biometrics, and its products are now on sale in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

PatronScan helps spot fake IDs—and troublemakers. When customers arrive at a PatronScan-using bar, their ID is scanned. The company maintains a list of objectionable customers designed to protect venues from people previously removed for “fighting, sexual assault, drugs, theft, and other bad behavior,” according to its website. A “public” list is shared among all PatronScan customers. So someone who’s banned by one bar in the U.S. is potentially banned by all the bars in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada that use the PatronScan system for up to a year. (PatronScan Australia keeps a separate system.)

Judgment about what kind of behavior qualifies for inclusion on a PatronScan list is up to the bar owners and managers. Individual bar owners can ignore the ban, if they like. Data on non-offending customers is deleted in 90 days or less. Also: PatronScan enables bars to keep a “private” list that is not shared with other bars, but on which bad customers can be kept for up to five years.

PatronScan does have an “appeals” process, but it’s up to the company to grant or deny those appeals.

UBER AND AIRBNB

Thanks to the sharing economy, the options for travel have been extended far beyond taxis and hotels. Uber and Airbnb are leaders in providing transportation and accommodation for travelers. But there are many similar ride-sharing and peer-to-peer accommodations companies providing similar services.

Airbnb—a major provider of travel accommodation and tourist activities—bragged in March that it now has more than 6 million listings in its system. That’s why a ban from Airbnb can limit travel options.

Airbnb can disable your account for life for any reason it chooses, and it reserves the right to not tell you the reason. The company’s canned message includes the assertion that “This decision is irreversible and will affect any duplicated or future accounts. Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for the action taken against your account.” The ban can be based on something the host privately tells Airbnb about something they believe you did while staying at their property. Airbnb’s competitors have similar policies.

It’s now easy to get banned by Uber, too. Whenever you get out of the car after an Uber ride, the app invites you to rate the driver. What many passengers don’t know is that the driver now also gets an invitation to rate you. Under a new policy announced in May: If your average rating is “significantly below average,” Uber will ban you from the service.

WHATSAPP

You can be banned from communications apps, too. For example, you can be banned on WhatsApp if too many other users block you. You can also get banned for sending spam, threatening messages, trying to hack or reverse-engineer the WhatsApp app, or using the service with an unauthorized app.

WhatsApp is small potatoes in the United States. But in much of the world, it’s the main form of electronic communication. Not being allowed to use WhatsApp in some countries is as punishing as not being allowed to use the telephone system in America.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SOCIAL CREDIT, ANYWAY?

Nobody likes antisocial, violent, rude, unhealthy, reckless, selfish, or deadbeat behavior. What’s wrong with using new technology to encourage everyone to behave?

The most disturbing attribute of a social credit system is not that it’s invasive, but that it’s extralegal. Crimes are punished outside the legal system, which means no presumption of innocence, no legal representation, no judge, no jury, and often no appeal. In other words, it’s an alternative legal system where the accused have fewer rights.

Social credit systems are an end-run around the pesky complications of the legal system. Unlike China’s government policy, the social credit system emerging in the U.S. is enforced by private companies. If the public objects to how these laws are enforced, it can’t elect new rule-makers.

An increasing number of societal “privileges” related to transportation, accommodations, communications, and the rates we pay for services (like insurance) are either controlled by technology companies or affected by how we use technology services. And Silicon Valley’s rules for being allowed to use their services are getting stricter.

If current trends hold, it’s possible that in the future a majority of misdemeanors and even some felonies will be punished not by Washington, D.C., but by Silicon Valley. It’s a slippery slope away from democracy and toward corporatocracy.

In other words, in the future, law enforcement may be determined less by the Constitution and legal code, and more by end-user license agreements.

The Seekers

THE WILD BOAR AND THE FOX

A WILD BOAR was sharpening his tusks busily against the stump of a tree, when a Fox happened by. Now the Fox was always looking for a chance to make fun of his neighbors. So he made a great show of looking anxiously about, as if in fear of some hidden enemy. But the Boar kept right on with his work.

"Why are you doing that?" asked the Fox at last with a grin. "There isn't any danger that I can see.

"True enough," replied the Boar, "but when danger does come there will not be time for such work as this. My weapons will have to be ready for use then, or I shall suffer for it."

Preparedness for war is the best guarantee of peace.

Jazz Sunday morning.

The Joy of Clutter

Design

The Joy of Clutter: What Marie Kondo Got Wrong

We’re in danger of Marie Kondo-ing our way to empty lives. An artful pile of meaningful objects can be richly autobiographical. But you need a good eye—or these tips from design pros

I AM AN UNABASHED magpie; tchotchkes dot the hill I will die on. They’re mostly vacation mementos, like the silver, Victorian, mussel-shaped “match safe” that I splurged on in a Rome antique shop with my newly minted fiancé. I keep other dust-collectors at hand for a reason. My husband and I are trying to eliminate most of our screen time at home, and having books and playing cards within reach makes it much easier to resist our phones. Besides, the cards are beautiful and graphic.

Yes, some of my knickknacks spark joy, the quality that Japanese organizing dynamo Marie Kondo demands one’s possessions trigger to be deemed worth keeping. But, though I’m sure her 2014 book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” has helped many of the millions of people in 42 regions and countries who’ve bought it stave off hoarding tendencies (now a bona fide mental-illness diagnosis), I’ve always found the bar she sets a little lofty and specific.

My silver mussel certainly conjures the romantic high that buoyed my husband and me through Rome after we became engaged. But other items, with which I feel no less connected, evoke more-nuanced emotions that could hardly be called joy. In that category: the kaleidoscope that my late Aunt Linda made out of stained glass and a marble when she was saddled with MS. I’m nothing but wistful when I look at it. Or the matches I swiped from an Oklahoma restaurant I visited with my dad when I was reviewing it undercover for the New York Times. My hard-won assignment left him teary-eyed with pride, and when I look at the matches I feel a sense of achievement, nostalgia, gratitude—take your pick.

Clutter gets a bad rap. Researchers have found that a muddle of objects can actually jolt creativity. Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, conducted studies in which people were led into a spotless or cluttered room, then tasked with imagining inventive uses for a surplus of ping-pong balls. “The people in messier rooms came up with more creative solutions,” Ms. Vohs said. Their ideas included turning the white plastic orbs into earrings or popping them on chair feet to protect floors. “People in tidy rooms wrote things like, ‘You could use them for Ping-Pong.’”

When she discusses her findings with her students, Ms. Vohs references images of the disheveled office of Albert Einstein, who famously asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” Other disorganized world-beaters: Mark Twain, Frida Kahlo, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan Sontag and Steve Jobs. Yes, the man who transformed personal technology from mundane, clunky devices to elegant, minimalist machines was the dude with the pigsty desk.

Americans acquire a lot of junk we don’t need. In a study of 2,000 people commissioned by Slickdeals, a website that crowdsources bargains, the amount spent on impulse buys averaged $450 a month. And that soulless schlock you giddily carted home after a rainy afternoon at HomeGoods can undo your décor. As Los Angeles designer Kerry Joyce declared, “If the objects feel personal or collected, they will not feel like clutter.”

Especially if they’re artfully displayed. That’s where the counsel of designers comes in. New York-based design pro Thomas Jayne, for instance, advised that amassing your mess within one designated piece of furniture tricks the eye into seeing it all as one. “I like small treasures and the tales they tell but not on the loose,” he said. In his New Orleans home, an old bookcase with glass doors holds the random bits from life there—a golden mask from Mardi Gras, a cannonball from the Battle of New Orleans. “Because they’re all in a display cabinet, they form an interest in their randomness.”

As if in testament to the timelessness of quality clutter, millennials are picking up the vitrines and curio cabinets their grandparents had sloughed off. Los Angeles designer Oliver M. Furth has installed half a dozen vitrines in the last few years, including a 1940s Queen Anne cherry-wood display cabinet that’s now a tidy, dust-free domicile for his millennial client’s inherited heap of Blue Willow porcelain. “For a long time there was a movement away from what our parents or grandparents had. Now I think that people are adopting pieces of furniture that maybe made sense,” he said. Meanwhile, these bibelot corrals come cheap: A rosewood 1960s Norwegian Curio cabinet on resale site chairish.com is on sale for $750. A simple, 6-feet-tall vitrine with curved-glass sides sold on auction site EBTH.com for $75. “People don’t want bitty things all over the house,” he said, “but they still want to have things, and [a vitrine] serves that purpose well.”

L.A. designer Jeff Andrews suggests rethinking your display now and then; even significant objects can lose their charge when they’re static. “If I get really bored and need a change, I’ll take everything off different surfaces in an entire room and redistribute them,” he said. “You’re looking at the same stuff but seeing it differently, and you appreciate it again.” It’s also vital to build in some breathing room. “It starts to look hoardery if there’s something on every surface,” advised Portland, Ore., designer Max Humphrey.

Clutter can be a pressure point for cohabitating couples, especially when one prefers the life ascetic and the other can’t pass up a bargain or a beckoning collectible. The husband of one of Mr. Andrews’s clients finds resonant meaning in KISS memorabilia, “and she hated it, clearly,” he said. The solution: turning his master closet into a dressing-room-cum-KISS-shrine, hidden from her view.

“My husband was really opposed to the idea of having a lot of stuff in our bedroom,” said boho Los Angeles designer Justina Blakeney. “He wanted to feel relaxed, and people can feel sort of stressed by too much stuff around.” Their compromise: lining their bedroom with wallpaper she designed that features bold, gold palm leaves. The pattern satisfies her hunger for maximalism without triggering his anxious response to objects that need dusting and just-so arranging.

When Gloria Vanderbilt said “decorating is autobiography,” she was likely referencing the sort of memento that insurance broker Patti Weinberg wanted to display. Ms. Weinberg and photographer Scott Frances wed at age 50 and had to fuse decades of (literal) baggage from separate lives into their Sag Harbor, N.Y., home. Though neither smoke, she clung to a blue-enamel ’60s ashtray she’d inherited from her parents. “It actually brings me comfort to be surrounded by their stuff, because they’re no longer with us,” Ms. Weinberg said.

Ultimately, a bit of decorative messiness can make a space feel homey, said Ms. Vohs. “It’s like when people have beach hair—it’s well done but has a little bit of muss to it, so you know the person is fun to hang out with.”

Law & Hoarder: How to Do Clutter Right

Aerate Your Collections

Los Angeles designer Kerry Joyce takes his clients’ collections very seriously. In this Manhattan dining room, he hung the homeowner’s cocktail party of portraits from the 1860s to the 1920s. But he kept it (relatively) buoyant: “We painted the room a pale aqua color—which brightened what would have been a rather dank room since it had only one window and faced a shady courtyard.” The designer then interspersed the paintings with light-catching antiqued restoration glass in shapes as varied as those of the paintings but uniformly framed in simple frames painted a matte Gustavian gray. “The mirrors were the perfect way to lighten the ambience; had it all been portraits, the effect would have been too heavy, and perhaps serious.” Mr. Joyce advises hanging only what you honestly love. “Filler art will show right away.”

Ask Your Treasurers to Tell a Story

To turn her detached garage in Los Angeles’s Frogtown neighborhood into a hangout “casita,” Justina Blakeney installed rounded niches with reclaimed wood shelves into the walls, lending an Old World feel, then stocked them with loot: among other things, an Indian hand-embroidered bull figurine from the Rose Bowl Flea Market, a bowl she bought at the annual Santa Fe Indian Market, a burro’s-tail succulent in a ceramic pot. “For me, [clutter has] always been about storytelling,” she said. “When you’re cooking, you use certain flavors to enhance other flavors, like pairing basil with tomato seems to make them taste better. The same thing can work with a visual conversation—it helps all the elements look their best.” Fellow Angeleno designer Betsy Burnham also sets up a narrative with diverse materials. “To offset glossy, chunky pottery, I have something wicker or rattan or wood to give it an organic vibe, or something shiny, new and hard-edge.” Ms. Blakeney noted cohering strategies as well: The items take up the same amount of visual weight, and the repetition of terra cotta on each shelf ties the horde of objects together.

Loud, Proud...And in the Other Room

When Thomas Jayne and his husband, food stylist Rick Ellis, moved into their SoHo loft in Manhattan, they fashioned a separate space for their many collections, inspired by the Kunstkammers (or, cabinets of curiosities) of 18th-century Germany. Their lifetimes’ worth of finds—including Renaissance bronzes, German deer antlers, whale vertebrae—become a de facto museum, visually balanced by the two windows, the daybed flanked by identical arm chairs and a symmetrically placed pair of 1870s cast iron plant urns. “I call it calculated chaos,” Mr. Ellis said. Added Mr. Jayne, “The Dutch chandelier and big metal urns are centering devices.” Spreading lots of little bits about the loft would litter the place. “Massed together in concentration, everything looks good,” he said.

Invite the Eye to Wander

“You’ve got to think about things in terms of a skyline,” said Max Humphrey, a designer in Portland, Ore. “Your eye wants to travel around the room and be starting and stopping and moving up and down. If everything’s on one level, it looks like Washington, D.C., which is no good,” he said, referring to the capital’s legendary restriction that no building be taller than the federal buildings there. Atop a credenza in this living room of a 1910 Georgian-style house in Portland, Ore., Mr. Humphrey placed lanky mercury glass vases alongside squat, hexagonal brass candle holders and books laid on their side. To the left, cloud-shaped ceramic “wall pillows” by New York City artist Stepanka Summer ensure that the symmetry doesn’t get too formal and finicky. They also draw the eye up, as does the framed movie poster. Said New York stylist Hilary Robertson, author of the newly revised “The Stuff of Life: Arranging Things Ordinary & Extraordinary” (Ryland Peters & Small), “Varying scale is really the key to having things on your tables. In all fashion photographs, they always have something that’s a little off—the play of big and small.” She recommends using an oversize item, like a vase, plant pot or stack of art books, as a grounding element.

Housing Crisis? Not so fast…

Housing Crisis? Not so fast…

Posted on August 16, 2019


Here in California we are bombarded with news about our “housing crisis.” State politicians have used the housing crisis as justification for removing local control of zoning and handing carrots to developers. We are told that the Bay Area is the “epicenter” of the housing crisis.

Politicians and pundits who use this overblown language should review some of the reports available from state agencies and business sources. Those reports paint a far more nuanced picture.

The reports show:

1) San Francisco is not the epicenter of the affordable housing shortage. The opposite is true.

2) The state does not have a housing crisis. It does have a severe shortage of affordable housing for our lowest-income residents. This is due a combination of a physical housing shortage and simple poverty. There is not a shortage of market-rate housing.

3) 2018 population estimates show that population growth has slowed dramatically statewide, but the decline varies from county to county. Factors including fires, expensive housing, and the search at the urban boundaries for cheaper housing. Housing projections need to take these new figures into account.

4) Hundreds of thousands housing units have been proposed in California—more than enough to meet growth in housing demand statewide since 2010. While some projects are working their way through local government approval processes, most of them have been approved. For most of these projects, the construction phase is the bottleneck, not local government.

5) Growth is not an act of God. The jobs/housing ratio in the Bay Area is out of balance. The trend toward the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco has been fought sporadically for decades, and is now back on the agenda. There needs to be a serious, competent, open and democratic planning process for growth, both at the regional and state level.

This analysis is based on the following four widely available reports. However, the data has been combined to tease out some conclusions that are not well understood:

1) HCD report: California’s Housing Future: Challenges and Opportunities, Final Statewide Housing Assessment 2025. California Department of Housing and Community Development.

2) LAO report: The 2019-20 Budget: Considerations for the Governor’s Housing Plan. Legislative Analyst’s Office.

3) DOF report: E-5 Population and Housing Estimates for Cities, Counties, and the State, 2011-2019 with 2010 Census Benchmark. State of California Department of Finance, Demographics Research Unit.

4) CIRB report: New Development in California 2018. California Homebuilding Foundation, Construction Industry Research Board.



San Francisco is not the epicenter of the housing crisis

Under the standard definition, any household that spends more than 30 percent of its gross income on rent is considered rent-burdened. The chart below displays the percentage of low-income households that are rent-burdened in California. The chart is taken from the LAO report, but the graph has been truncated to save space. The original chart on page 7 of the report lists several more highly cost-burdened California counties.

Source: LAO report, p. 7.

Note that the least burdened county is San Francisco (which is both a city and a county). Low-income San Francisco residents on average have a rent burden that is lower than any other California county, and lower than the rest of the United States. This is probably due to a combination of low-income residents hunkered down in rent-controlled apartments, while highly paid techies are paying market rates.

'New Left Urbanists’ Want to Remake Your City

It’s about control—using infrastructure to make the masses conform to one vision of how to live."

By 

Christopher F. Rufo

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ILLUSTRATION: CHAD CROWE

America’s big cities are almost all dominated by the Democratic Party, but the politics of urban development are far from monolithic. In the past few years, a new faction has emerged across the country. Call them the new left urbanists.

These activists have big dreams. They want local governments to rebuild the urban environment—housing, transit, roads and tolls—to achieve social justice, racial justice and net-zero carbon emissions. They rally around slogans such as “ban all cars,” “raze the suburbs” and “single-family housing is white supremacy”—though they’re generally white and affluent themselves, often employed in public or semipublic roles in urban planning, housing development and social advocacy. They treat public housing, mass transit and bike lanes as a holy trinity, and they want to impose their religion on you.

“The residential is political,” wrote new left urbanists David Madden and Peter Marcuse in 2016. “The shape of the housing system is always the outcome of struggles between different groups and classes.” By dictating how cities build new housing, the logic goes, urbanists can dictate how people live and set right society’s socioeconomic, racial and moral deficiencies.

One widely circulated left-urbanist plan from April 2018 comes from the People’s Policy Project, a crowdfunded socialist think tank. The authors, Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper, envision the construction of 10 million “municipal homes” over the next decade. The proposal imagines local governments building more housing units than the private construction industry and becoming the largest landlord in many cities.

The abysmal record of public housing in the U.S., from crime to decay, makes no difference to these urbanists. They rebrand “housing projects” as “municipal homes” and assert that new units will resemble neighborhoods in Stockholm, Vienna and Helsinki, rather than Detroit, Newark and Oakland.

Activists are concerned not only with the quantity of new housing but also with who builds and lives in it. New developments must be government-run and tick off the boxes of identity politics. In San Francisco, some activists oppose all private housing construction. A 2017 essay in the San Francisco Examiner called advocates for more market housing part of a “libertarian, anti-poor campaign to turn longtime sites of progressive organizing into rich-people-only zones” and compared them to white nationalists.

One might dismiss this as radical posturing, but public-housing advocates have seized real power in city halls. They’ve learned how to use the zoning and permitting bureaucracy to stanch private development. In San Francisco’s Mission District, laundromat owner Bob Tillman had to spend $1.4 million and nearly five years to gain permission to convert his business into an apartment building. Activists and their enablers in City Hall claimed the laundry business was “historic” and that development would displace minority residents. At one point the planning commission hired a “shadow consultant” to assess whether the shadows cast by the proposed building could cause harm to the community.

In New York City, progressive urbanists have focused on public transportation. The subway system was designed mostly in the early 20th century to serve the practical needs of New Yorkers, but today’s activists see it as a grand instrument for cosmic justice.

In the Straphangers Campaign’s 2018 “Transportation and Equity” report, the advocacy group begins from the premise that “the most vulnerable New Yorkers suffer disproportionately from high fares, long commutes, polluted air, and dangerous streets.” It ends up estimating that an additional $30 billion in tax revenue would be needed for its desired overhaul: upgrading 11 subway lines, building 130 new accessible stations, and purchasing more than 3,000 new subway cars, along with nearly 5,000 new buses, over the next 10 years.

While state and local leaders haven’t signed up for this ambitious plan, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio and other local politicians have expressed support for some of the activists’ funding proposals, including congestion pricing, a “millionaire’s tax,” a marijuana tax, a stock-transfer tax and even a $3-a-package tax on Amazon deliveries.

There’s a reasonable argument for congestion pricing in traffic-glutted Manhattan and for more investment in mass transit. But the Straphangers’ long-term vision involves elimination of the automobile, which remains a middle-class staple in the outer boroughs. Their plan would restrict curbside space for cars by building “protected bike lanes on all major arterial streets across the five boroughs,” “giving developers incentives to contribute toward sustainable transportation over private vehicle usage,” and eliminating parking requirements for new housing.

Activists use euphemisms like “transportation alternatives” and “transportation choices,” but at heart their vision is about control. They want to remake the urban infrastructure in their own image: green, moral and in solidarity with the masses—at least as those masses exist in their imagination.

The new left urbanists’ fatal mistake is to view cities as collections of buildings, roads, tunnels and bike lanes. Urbanists can demolish and rebuild physical environments, but they can’t pave over the people. Life in a metropolis is simply too complex, too variable and too ephemeral—it will evade even the most careful planning. Making cities better and more beautiful requires bringing neighbors, developers, employers and governments into the conversation. Thriving cities are built through cooperation, not compulsion.

Mr. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose Summer issue this is adapted.

Watershed Alliance of Marin STRONGLY OBJECTS to the Marinwood Maintenance Compound too.

Sign the Petition to Stop the White Elephant

HERE

Marin Voice: Legislature should recognize that housing is a right, not a Wall Street commodity

Marin Voice: Legislature should recognize that housing is a right, not a Wall Street commodity

Artist rendering of the Victory Village housing project in Fairfax. (Courtesy of RCD)

By SUSAN KIRSCH |
August 14, 2019 at 10:19 am


We remember the pain and dislocation brought about by the housing melt-down of 2008, when foreclosures spiked by more than 81% and more than 3 million people lost their homes. It was precipitated by deceitful, predatory loans, subprime mortgages, and fanciful financial tools like derivatives.

Many individuals never recovered, but banks, developers, and real estate investors scored big. While property values have largely recovered, an ominous trend has occurred: a shift from individual home ownership to corporatized housing.

The language has shifted, too, from “home” as a safe abode where a middle-class family could acquire a significant asset to “housing unit” where investors could acquire a commodity to produce return on investment.

“We’re in a whole new world of organized, global financial investment into the housing market,” Michael Storper, a professor at UCLA and London School of Economics, explained when asked what changed between 2008 and 2019.

He called it the financialization of housing.

Components of the financialization of housing include giant construction companies such as Florida-based Lennar which is behind the controversial San Francisco Bayview-Hunters Point housing project, and national and global private equity investment firms such as The Blackstone Group, with California offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Why does the financialization of housing matter? It is fueled by corporate greed, not civic values or care about community. Mortgage or rent payments flow out of the community, stewardship diminishes, and global wealth goes into unknown, gold-lined pockets.

In 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council warned that the financialization of housing “undermines democratic governance, exacerbates inequality, dehumanizes housing, and causes displacement and homelessness.”

The UN report cautioned “unprecedented amounts of global capital are being invested in housing as security for financial instruments and traded on global markets, which is having devastating consequences.”

Against this corporate backdrop groups such as Bay Area Council and the Silicon Valley Leadership Team have curried favor with California legislators. They’ve created a simplistic narrative: We have a housing crisis. Cities are to blame. The state must assert itself with top-down, one-size-fits-all bills that undermine local control.

What they don’t say is that by reducing local control, global investment firms and national builders will gain easier access to community wealth, including individual homes, land, and public places.

Certain bills introduced by Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, Nancy Skinner of Berkeley, and Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco would weaken elected city councils’ planning authority and financial stewardship, and ultimately deepen the affordability crisis.

For example, a stripped-down version of Chiu’s Assembly Bill 1487 seeks to gain approval for a 2020 ballot measure known as the “San Francisco Bay Area Regional Housing Finance Act.”

It would provide a regional financing mechanism for affordable housing and would apply to all cities, including charter cities.

This new entity estimates an annual budget of $2.5 billion. It would be governed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, but identified as a separate legal entity.

Critics, myself included, are alarmed because a regional authority to raise, administer, and allocate funds is likely to reduce their capacity to raise local tax revenue for local projects. Small cities worry that big cities will rake off the majority of the funds, and they’ll be taxed for big city successes.

Supporters of putting the regional tax on the ballot try to quell opponents’ fears saying they merely want to give citizens the right to decide. However, imagine the unequal playing field.

The national/global corporations that stand to gain from the financialization of housing will invest millions in messaging, push polls, ads, and social media.

We have a housing problem, but the crisis is the loss of democracy brought about by the financialization of housing. When legislators become champions of the simplistic explanation that cities are to blame, they abandon critical thinking, their constituents, and their oaths of office.

Legislation that diminishes local control by expanding developers’ rights, investors’ profits, and regionalism will worsen the affordability crisis. Take a breather. Adopt a collaborative approach. Review housing policy and projects at the local level that are proving successful.

Susan Kirsch, of Mill Valley, is founder and former president of Livable California, susankirsch@hotmail.com. She wrote this commentary for CalMatters.

Fluent in Bullsh!t

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP07oyFTRXc&t=15s

THE OWL AND THE GRASSHOPPER

THE OWL AND THE GRASSHOPPER

 THE OWL always takes her sleep during the day. Then after sundown, when the rosy light fades from the sky and the shadows rise slowly through the wood, out she comes ruffling and blinking from the old hollow tree. Now her weird "hoo-hoo-hoo-oo-oo" echoes through the quiet wood, and she begins her hunt for the bugs and beetles, frogs and mice she likes so well to eat.

Now there was a certain old Owl who had become very cross and hard to please as she grew older, especially if anything disturbed her daily slumbers. One warm summer afternoon as she dozed away in her den in the old oak tree, a Grasshopper nearby began a joyous but very raspy song. Out popped the old Owl's head from the opening in the tree that served her both for door and for window.



"Get away from here, sir," she said to the Grasshopper. "Have you no manners? You should at least respect my age and leave me to sleep in quiet!"

But the Grasshopper answered saucily that he had as much right to his place in the sun as the Owl had to her place in the old oak. Then he struck up a louder and still more rasping tune.



The wise old Owl knew quite well that it would do no good to argue with the Grasshopper, nor with anybody else for that matter. 

Besides, her eyes were not sharp enough by day to permit her to punish the Grasshopper as he deserved. So she laid aside all hard words and spoke very kindly to him.

"Well sir," she said, "if I must stay awake, I am going to settle right down to enjoy your singing. Now that I think of it, I have a wonderful wine here, sent me from Olympus, of which I am told Apollo drinks before he sings to the high gods. Please come up and taste this delicious drink with me. I know it will make you sing like Apollo himself."

The foolish Grasshopper was taken in by the Owl's flattering words. Up he jumped to the Owl's den, but as soon as he was near enough so the old Owl could see him clearly, she pounced upon him and ate him up.

Flattery is not a proof of true admiration.

Do not let flattery throw you off your guard against an enemy.