Joel Kotkin points out how California is doing it wrong.
Newsom has promised to have 3.5 million homes built over the next seven years to solve the problem. That is, conservatively stated, more than 2.6 million that would be built at the current rate of construction.
This effort is doomed, though, since it fails to address the fundamental cause: regulations that block expansion of housing on the urban fringe, a housing area that serves to lower the price of both urban and suburban land. NIMBYs, who often block new projects, may contribute to the shortage, but by far the biggest problem lies in regulations, many issued from Sacramento, restricting lower-density housing construction on the urban fringe.
Former World Bank principal urban planner Alain Bertaud has pointed out that these regulations raise land prices and exacerbate housing shortages that particularly affect the poor. Before such policies were adopted, California’s housing prices relative to incomes were not far above the national average, even though the state’s population was expanding far more rapidly than today.
There has been tons of speculation about whether or not the AAF would get off the ground. Judging from what I saw Saturday night and Sunday, I think it’s safe to say the eight-team league will be just fine.
I didn’t know white people were allowed to play football.
If you have any interest in football — which I don’t — you might check it out.
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Let’s be honest here, the way the Dems are going bat-excrement crazy right now is, I think, bearing this out. They’ll be up to 30 candidates before long, and each trying to out-Left and out-crazy and out-Communist the other. That sort of rage is frankly unsustainable, and really their entire platform is boiling down to “Not Trump.”
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Silicon Valley is full of opportunities for political donations. But a Soros-funded organization wants to make sure any support goes to the correct side of the political spectrum.
Politico reported on February 9 that major tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, offered “the same technical assistance,” as well as financial aid, to the Republican party as they did to the Democrat party in 2016. George Soros-funded Color of Change objected to tech giving the GOP any support. “It’s no longer acceptable for these companies to play both sides like they’re equal,” said the group’s President Rashad Robinson.
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The Washington Post Fact Checker page has a habit of “hiding the Pinocchios” for Democrats when liberal staffers aggressively engage them. This happened again early Monday with the much-mocked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking points for the “Green New Deal.” Post “fact checker” Salvador Rizzo admitted the new congresswoman and her supporters misled the public, but they were “walked back,” so no Pinocchios. Rizzo concluded the only document that mattered was the actual House resolution submitted:
Cass Sunstein, usually a dependable Voice of the Crust, suffers an attack of atavism.
Sunstein rightly points out that many vocal fans of socialism have no clue as to what it actually means. I’ll pace him by suggesting that many people who complain about ‘capitalism’ have no clue as to what that means, either, and just use ‘capitalism’ as a catch-all term for ‘not-socialism’ — which it isn’t. The problem is that we don’t have a clever one-word term for an economic system based on private property and free trade, so we’re forced to thrash around in a verbal swamp that helps nobody.
This is what happens in a country with no First Amendment. Since the election of New Labour under Tony Blair and the ‘invite the world’ policy of the Labour Party to import ever-increasing numbers of underclass clients, Britain has rapidly become just another EuroTrash sinkhole.
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The story of Colombia’s hippos starts in Villa Napoles, the former estate of Pablo Escobar, who in his heyday had four hippos smuggled there for his private zoo.
Escobar’s ranch housed hundreds of exotic animals including rhinos, elephants and giraffes. By the 1980s, his cocaine empire made him the wealthiest and most feared drug lord in the world. For Colombia, it was a reign of terror. He’s said to be responsible for some 7,000 deaths.
Around the time Escobar met his death in the early 90s, the government relocated most of the animals but not the hippos who were basically allowed to roam free.
“People forgot the hippos,” said biologist David Echeverri, who works with CORNARE, the environmental agency in charge of tracking and managing the hippos in the region. He estimates there are about 50 or more of them now.
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February is, of course, Black History Month. So far, just one week in, the reminders are piling up. I have logged the following outrages that have black Americans cowering in fear in their tarpaper shacks.
In an essay at Curbed San Francisco, Diana Helmuth explores why so many young people have left California. It’s not normal, she writes, considering a dozen loved ones have moved away in the past two years.
We are witnessing two migrations. One is the continuation of the Californian dream, where young people flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds. The other is the migration of young people out of California, which seems to have affected everyone I know, but which I rarely hear examined. These people want to be artists, teachers, blacksmiths, therapists, mechanics, and musicians. They want to have children, open bakeries, own a house. But they can’t. There is no room here for those kinds of dreams anymore.
Here is the original story, which is well worth reading.
The one assertion the author make is, I think, demonstrably wrong:
To the angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere, please hear this defense: The Californians who are coming in and “ruining” your cities are not snobs. They don’t have trust funds. They aren’t entitled. They are the opposite. They have been kicked out of their own backyards for not learning Python fast enough or not having a dad who could introduce them to VC firms or not wanting to live in their family’s in-law unit at age 30 or not being able to afford a $2,000/month studio on a $20/hour paycheck. They aren’t techies; they had the audacity to want something besides tech. They are some of our best, most creative, most hardworking people—and you are getting them. We are losing them.
We are kind to your friends who move here to grow, to start things, to feel safe, to dream. So, please, be kind to my friends and their dreams too.
Sorry, Debbie, but the reason why people hate your Californians moving in is not because ‘they are just like you’ but because they are NOT ‘just like you’. They are leaving California because they are victims of the results of the way Californians think, but they don’t realize that they think that way too, and they are importing that way of thinking to the places to which they are moving. If enough Californicators move into Boise, for example, eventually Boise becomes just like California in all the bad ways that caused them to move in the first place.
We have the poster child for this in Austin, Texas, which is just a little slice of California dropped into the Hill Country. THE ONLY REASON that Austin isn’t the shit-hole that San Francisco has become is because it’s surrounded by Texas, and Texans won’t allow Californicators to ruin their state-wide government the way they’ve ruined the state-wide government on the Left Coast.
By reforming its criminal justice system, Texas has sensibly and carefully reduced its prison population, cut state spending, and expanded prisoners’ access to drug- and mental-health treatment and to education programs—all of which have reduced crime and recidivism rates and improved people’s lives.
…
Now, Texas is once again leading on key issues by analyzing and reconsidering some of its laws that hinder Texans’ ability to pursue a livelihood, a right guaranteed to all Texans by both the state and federal constitutions. Many of those laws carry criminal penalties for those who violate them.
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I rather doubt that The Independent’s campaign had anything to do with it, though.
I guess he didn’t get the memo that Trump is the New Hitler.
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Yeah, that sounds like about the most useful thing Ellison could do with his time.
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Addicts are addicts. Providing them with a ‘safe injection site’ doesn’t fix the problem.
Addicts have an inherent character defect: They prefer life with the drug to life without. Unless somebody can fix that, addicts will persist in self-destructive behavior until they kill themselves — and sometimes others.
The problem with Natural Selection is that it works even when you would rather it didn’t.
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The plan, which would have brought 25,000 jobs to the city, has come under fire since it was announced last year, with local politicians concerned that the incentives Amazon has demanded would strip much needed cash from the community.
“The question is whether it’s worth it if the politicians in New York don’t want the project, especially with how people in Virginia and Nashville have been so welcoming,” one official told The Washington Post, which first reported the potential change in attitude from Amazon towards the project. No official plans have been made against New York so far.
Any passerby on the street could have warned them about this.
Jeff needs to realize that his side of the field has most of the crazies. Being Of The Crust only gets you so far.
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Rush Limbaugh led off his show today with this — it’s pretty funny.
Of course, the Democrats on this committee are trying to set up a ‘perjury trap’ for the AG nominee, and he is leading them around the maypole while enjoying himself doing it.
Well, many of them are ‘Native Americans’, genetically; certainly as much so as Jambalaya Harris and Spartacus Booker and Trevor Noah and Ta-Sneezy Coates and Racist Don Lemon are ‘black’.
What does it say about our culture that this is even a question that would occur to somebody?
Do students at American University think the New England Patriots are a favorite team for white supremacists? The three guys we interviewed said no, but the five girls we spoke with were not fans of Tom Brady or the team.
I guess the SJW mindset is primarily a female thing.
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Getting-off-fossil fuels would reverse much of the progress made over the last few centuries. Just a few of the thousands of products that we get from fossil fuels that would be eliminated from our society and lifestyles would be: Medications, Cosmetics, Plastics, Fertilizers, and Transportation fuels for planes, ships, trucks and automobiles.
Electricity alone, especially intermittent electricity from renewables, has not, and will not, run the economies of the world, as electricity alone is unable to support the energy demands of the military, airlines, cruise ships, supertankers, container shipping, and trucking infrastructures. Getting off fossil fuels would virtually negatively impact the following industries and infrastructures that are driven by the energy density of oil, coal, and natural gas:
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The Antiplanner has called streetcars an intelligence test: anyone who thinks they are a good idea is not smart enough to make decisions about urban transportation. Now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a new intelligence test, this one dealing with high-speed rail.
Democrats will protect American children from the evils of trans fats and gay conversion therapy, but not from doctors who will kill them through negligent homicide in the first few hours of their lives.
This is the ugly reality of the contemporary abortion debate. It’s why most advocates will do about anything to avoid describing the unpleasant realities and consequences of their increasingly radical position.
Thirty years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, I never imagined that a generation later socialism would be a threat to the United States. But bad ideas are, apparently, hard to kill–even when those bad ideas kill hundreds of millions.
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The problem is that Democrats ARE attempting to establish a ‘religious test’, as they have with the various ‘gay wedding cake’ cases; they just cast it in the form of ‘do you believe X’ rather than ‘are you religion X’.
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