joshhansen.net

Category: politics

  • Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Mandatory Housing Affordability does not make housing affordable

    Seattle has MHA zones, and yet rent is what it is. Case in point.

    But if you’d like more evidence than that brute observation, a recent study goes further, finding that housing permits declined in MHA zones in Seattle, while they increased in non-MHA zones. This is effectively a non-result, or a negative result, spitting into the supply-vs-demand wind:

    While the metro area population has grown by 30 percent over the past two decades, Seattle is building fewer new units per year than when it had 1 million fewer inhabitants. As a result, since 2000, median house prices have nearly tripled; one in seven residents is severely rent burdened.

    The core cause of unaffordable housing is there not being enough housing.

    Mandatory Housing Affordability centers on a requirement that a certain percentage of units in new residential buildings be provided at below-market rates to lower-income residents. This requirement is coupled with a relaxation on restrictions to the density of developments.

    The goal is noble, but by imposing a costly requirement on developers, MHA drives developments into non-MHA zones, and possibly prevents some developments ever getting off the ground.

    The MHA zones were presumably zoned with an affordable housing requirement out of a desire to provide affordable housing in that geographical area. Now, perversely, the MHA requirement reduces the new housing actually built in the MHA zone, likely contributing to housing costs in that area.

    Whatever makes sensible housing developments illegal to construct makes housing in general less affordable, by making there be less of it.

    If there were more housing to choose from, people wouldn’t have to pay as much – as recently happened in Austin, TX after a glut of new housing construction.

    Every restriction on housing construction is also, de facto, a restriction on the so-called “wrong type of people” moving into “our” neighborhood – which explains much of their popularity. Zoning laws were the original vehicle of redlining, and still reinforce de facto segregation by preventing different sorts of housing from coexisting in the same area.

    That same concern over “preserving the character of the neighborhood”, I expect, is behind the startling fact that 98% of developments in Seattle MHA zones chose to pay into an affordable housing fund rather than actually providing affordable units.

    In a sense, affordable housing mandates like MHA are trying to artificially reintroduce interesting heterogeneous neighborhoods, made illegal by zoning’s introduction 100 years ago, replaced by the sameness of the zones.

    Without restrictions like minimum lot sizes, a wider range of plots sizes and thus housing types and levels of affordability could possibly coexist in the same neighborhood.

    Minneapolis has pioneered such reforms, with good results, and Washington is following that lead (and Oregon’s and California’s) with HB 1110 allowing duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes in most neighborhoods, and HB 1337 allowing more accessory dwelling units.

    HBs 1110 and 1337 tackle the root of the affordability problem by making less housing construction illegal – i.e. allowing a greater quantity of sensible housing to be built. Many more reforms of that sort can, and should be made soon.

    Increasing housing supply is the only path toward actually making housing affordable. A proper respect for material reality, rather than misguided mandates, will pave the way.

  • Separation of race and state: a response to Coleman Hughes and Jamelle Bouie

    The most delicious thing in the world is a good discussion of a critical issue.

    That’s what we got in Open to Debate’s conversation between Coleman Hughes and Jamelle Bouie on the topic of color-blindness with regard to race.

    It was a great debate. I think Jamelle was most effective in pointing out that civil rights movement leaders’ views on color-blindness were not unitary. Coleman’s quotes were the most convincing to me, but I would still like to see a thorough historical assessment of the question, preferably in book form.

    Disparities between racial groups function largely as embarrassing reminders of past injustices. But beyond that they are a distraction: for every race-based disparity, there is a more general issue—poverty, health, neighborhood quality, etc.—for which people deserve help regardless of their phenotype or the racial group with which they may identify (if any).

    Or is one to believe that a person’s suffering is somehow more deserving of help because their racial identity lines up a particular way?

    Such disparities also exist for religious groups, and yet it would be offensive to American sensibilities (not to mention the First Amendment) for government programs to target members of certain religions.

    So it should be with race which, like religion, is primarily a social construct.

    We need separation of race and state.

    But more than that, we need to untrain ourselves from thinking in racial terms, from seeing each other through the narrow lens of the Census form’s categories.

    Unconscious bias is usually brought up at this point in the discussion: because we hold prejudices subconsciously, so goes the argument, we must build race-based social and political structures to counteract our deep-seated antipathies.

    But again, the same could be said of religion. But the answer to anti-Catholic or bias was not to create government programs favoring Catholics; in fact, it was the opposite: the answer was to dismantle any program that discriminated on the basis of religious identity.

    The United States pioneered a liberal order in which religion was privatized and the state gotten out of the religion business altogether. This has been a wonderful success, freeing us from the sort of religious animosity that killed millions in Europe in the 16th through 18th centuries.

    We have partly achieved a race-agnostic political order as well, but this transformation is incomplete. Race is not yet fully privatized, and many intelligent people, like Jamelle in the above debate, are working to maintain racial considerations by the state in a belief that it is the most effective, or perhaps the only, way to correct historical wrongs.

    But we don’t live in history, and history, no matter how offensive, is never justification for injustice right now.

    In such questions, the racial identity of the sufferer is incidental; alleviation of suffering is primary. It is dehumanizing and illiberal to categorize people by race even under the noble banner of help, because it nevertheless reduces them to a socially-constructed and obsolete category, with which they may not even identify; not only that but by implication it reduces, dehumanizes, and on the basis of the same category refrains from helping everyone else.

    In personal life, the same should apply: if we refrain from an activity, or a relationship, out of racial considerations, we are contributing to and strengthening race as an institution. And so we should (and I believe most Americans do) strive to act without regard to race, to acquaint ourselves with a wide variety of life experiences regardless of the list of categories.

    On that, both of the debaters agreed, differing only as regards state policy. That is the bone of contention, the thing we should all chew on until we make up our collective minds.

    If we all strive for color-blindness in our personal lives, how could we collectively justify “race consciousness” in public policy? Why is color-blindness moral and commendable personally, but wrongheaded, even racist, publicly?

  • ‘they’ is not a drop-in replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, but we could use one

    Singular usage of ‘they’ is well-established in English, going back centuries. Depending on your exposure to it, you may yourself use it regularly, as I happily do. It’s great having a single word that can refer to individuals whose gender is unclear or unspecified.

    However, gender-neutral ‘they’ and its friends ‘them’, ‘their’, and ‘theirs’, do not and likely cannot have the same function as he/him/his/his and she/her/her/hers without major reworking of the language.

    That’s because ‘they’ is also, prominently, the third person plural pronoun. That function is arguably more important syntactically than its usage as a gender-neutral or gender-ambiguous singular pronoun.

    The collision of the desire for ‘they’ to be singular, and the possibility for it to be plural, leads to ambiguities that don’t exist for ‘he’, ‘she’, et al.

    To illustrate the problem, I asked ChatGPT to tell a story about trans woman Sylvia and daughter, Olivia, going on a walk to the grocery store. My prompt indicated use of ‘she/her/etc’ pronouns for Sylvia. I then replaced all uses of ‘she’ that referred to Sylvia with ‘they’, all uses of ‘her’ that referred to Sylvia with ‘them’, etc. See what you think:

    Sylvia and Olivia stepped out of their house on a bright, sunny day. Sylvia had a small list of groceries that they needed to get from the store, and they thought it would be nice to take Olivia along for some fresh air and exercise.

    As they walked towards the store, Olivia chattered away about her day at school and the latest books she had been reading. Sylvia listened attentively, enjoying the sound of their daughter’s voice and the warmth of the sun on their face.

    When they arrived at the store, Sylvia gave Olivia the list and asked her to help them find the items they needed. Olivia eagerly took the list and led her mother through the aisles, pointing out items as they went along.

    As they walked back home, Sylvia felt a sense of contentment wash over them. It was moments like these, they thought, that made all the hard work of being a mother worth it. They felt grateful for the time spent with their daughter and for the simple pleasure of going on a walk together.

    Simply substituting ‘they’/’them’ is not enough; the possibility of plural ‘they’ alone means ambiguities arise from straightforward replacements.

    For example, the first ‘she’ that I replaced with ‘they’ (“groceries that they needed”) could now refer either gender-neutrally to Sylvia, or plurally to Sylvia and Olivia.

    This ambiguity wouldn’t arise if, alternately, we replaced ‘she’ with ‘he’, though of course if there were a son present, for example, a need to disambiguate the male referents would come along with it.

    But the plural sense of ‘they’ in particular strongly constrains singular usage of the pronoun. For ‘he’ and ‘she’, there is no such ambiguity and so they are much more flexible.

    Languages are evolved systems much more than they are products of engineering. It’s easy to think you’ve considered every possible effect of a change when really you haven’t. I would prefer usage of alternative third-person singular pronouns such as ‘zie’ for those whose experience of their own gender doesn’t align with the prevailing categories. Those who adopt ‘they’/’them’ should be aware of the pronoun’s limitations for singular usage. If it’s still adopted, it should be used with care to avoid confusing hearers and readers in contexts where a plural meaning is live in the sentence.

    Of course, real people don’t just replace ‘she’ with ‘they’ without adjusting; additional wording would likely come with the change to clarify who’s meant by it. At least, one would hope, though I’ve seen a few examples of glib replacement with no seeming awareness of how confusing the language was becoming.

    To the degree that it takes added wording and circumlocutions to convey the same meaning as ‘he’ and ‘she’, ‘they’ is a lesser pronoun for singular usage. It simply hasn’t benefited from centuries of language change yet. For that reason, we should adopt a new non-gendered third person singular pronoun instead, working with the language we have, instead of fighting it.