Bleeding Heart Rationalist

I mostly just retweet stuff I want to read or reference later. A lot of it has to do with housing, land value, and homelessness.

🧦🔰

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

The Earth’s bounty belongs to everyone, private property rights are good, labor and capital deserve a fair return, and please don’t hand over our precious natural resources to Some Guy.

[Joe Cohen @CohenSite]

27,000 available units in a city with 874,000 renter households is a “available to rent” vacancy rate of 3%

Prices are set by the market. You can’t arbitrarily pass on rising costs (although they do effect prices by impacting supply)

Los Angeles clearly has a housing shortage

[Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler]

Never forget. They put a 25% tax on new housing construction in San Francisco in 2016-2017. https://t.co/ZrcUNGLNnV

[Jesse Zwick @jessezwick]

As it turns out, researchers at Harvard, UCSD, and UC Irvine decided to study it.

They found that in the case of Measure ULA "the resulting property-tax revenue loss offsets about four-fifths of the revenue generated by the transfer tax."

Four-fifths!

https://t.co/KqtyFMbGzK

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@mottsmith Would you mind giving or linking to a reminder on the unworkable affordable housing covenants here? Ty

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@otter401 And the parallel Jarvis ballot measure is still proceeding?

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@mattyglesias @grok did Mamdani cut spending on public sector pensions or just reamortize payments to lower the short-term cost?

[Steve Glazer @Steve_Glazer]

“The spending has grown, employees have grown, salaries have increased. They should have made these hard choices that would, in turn, build public trust . .“

This politician wants transit leaders to tighten their belts https://t.co/bmFzo5AfgH via @politico

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@Steve_Glazer @politico You are dead on! Bay Area voters are willing to help but BART has to show that they're serious about pitching in on the sacrifice as well.

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@mattyglesias now he just has to do guns!

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@RichardK4 @mateosfo I live in a duplex in a dense urban environment. If we let the market work, it will serve folks with defensible space.

Not going to subsidize you.

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@RichardK4 @mateosfo I am a moderate income homeowner in the bay and I do not want to subsidize people living in fire zones. They can do so at their own risk.

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@RichardK4 @mateosfo Yes, because their home is far riskier to insure.

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@michaellane

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

It's 2028. You are the sole author of the $10B+ Bay Area affordable housing bond.

You can include provisions that force counties and cities receiving grant money into pro-housing reforms to make that money go further.

What do you require?

@ShaneDPhillips @CohenSite

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@HalSinger Good breakdown, but given that NO United States metro builds housing at scale (except for the free who have where rents for all have plunged), how can a real intermetro comparison be accomplished here?

[Bleeding Heart Rationalist @Jake_Marzoff84]

@mnolangray I paid a real estate attorney to research this for me in Oakland. His conclusion was that the ADU is not rent controlled (C/O within last 15 years) but the single family home becomes rent-controlled. City of Oakland official materials back him up. Couldn't tell you why, though.

[Trevor Acorn 🔰🌹🇺🇸🌎 @trevoracorn]

If we raised the property tax bill on the blue lot to match the others on a $/SF basis, the overall tax bill for the houses/businesses would go down.

People who want to see lower property taxes should be all over this!

[Joe Cohen @CohenSite]

Last year, LA produced LESS market-rate multifamily housing than at the height of the great recession