You can't have progress without change. By Matthew Yglesias / SlowBoring.com

You can't have progress without change. By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

February 7, 2021.

A rant about the character of our communities

Hey folks, I’d initially planned to run an item today about the case for approving the AstraZeneca vaccine for use in US non-seniors. But South Africa’s decision to suspend use of the AZ vaccine in light of some new information about its performance with variants seems to me to potentially change the situation, and I want to check back with experts to see how much this should change my view.

So instead, I apologize for giving you all something that’s a bit closer to a rant than to a normal Slow Boring column because I saw a statement on housing policy from a New York City’s mayoral candidate on Sunday that really set me off. Not just because it’s a bad statement (though it is) but because it came from Maya Wiley who’s someone who’s really worked her up the long march through the progressive nonprofit universe and very much reflects the worldview of increasingly influential institutional actors on the left.

If you can call a movement whose bottom line is local control and opposition to change a form of left.

Maya Wiley’s bad housing statement

Maya Wiley served as counsel to New York City mayor Bill de Blasio before being appointed to chair the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board.

She’s now running for mayor of New York. Her official campaign bio describes her as “a nationally recognized racial justice and equity advocate.” More formally she is senior vice president for Social Justice at The New School and the Henry Cohen Professor of Urban Policy and Management at the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment. She’s been an MSNBC legal analyst for the past couple of years. Before working for de Blasio, she worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU, and the Open Society Institute and she was the founder of the Center for Social Inclusion, which is an organization supposedly dedicated to dismantling structural racism.

In other words, she’s an extremely accomplished veteran of the nexus of foundations and non-profits that dominate the present-day left in American politics now that labor unions have become so weak.

And in a statement she released to answer downtown Democratic clubs’ questionnaire for mayoral candidates she revealed how ill-equipped that progressive non-profit universe is to actually deliver on the promise of social inclusion, social justice, or dismantling structural racism.

“Progressives” against change

The statement is long and has a bunch of moving parts and I do want to quote it in full for the sake of fairness. But the key sentence is “we can address our city’s affordable housing needs without changing the character of our City’s neighborhoods.”

That’s a key sentence because values matter more than policy specifics. Reasonable people can disagree on exactly which policies will have which effects, and any strategy for improving housing policy needs to work its way through a political process. But if you live in a city with a serious affordable housing problem, then part of the character of that city’s neighborhoods is that some of the neighborhoods are packed to the gills with rich people and nobody else can move in. The high price of housing in those neighborhoods is a sign that a free market would add a lot of housing units in them, but the way these cities work is that building new housing in those neighborhoods is against the law. That’s the character of the neighborhoods.

At any rate, here’s Wiley (my emphasis in bold):

How would you go about creating more affordable housing in New York? What about permanent housing for New York’s homeless population? Where would you put it? How would you make sure it’s actually affordable and sustainable? Would you ever support upzoning in order to create it? Will you accept money from real estate interests? Please be specific in your proposals.

If elected, my administration will fight for affordable housing in every borough on multiple fronts. First, we need rent subsidies to address the immediate eviction crisis facing our families while standing up with fellow advocates to fight in Albany for universal rent protections and to preserve affordable rentals. Next, we need to change the City’s approach to land use and re-zonings in ways that create and maintain affordable housing, with a focus on deep and permanent affordability over simple unit production. All land use and housing plans should include a fair distribution of resources, prioritize the construction of affordable housing, and take into account community needs while correcting for historic disinvestment and displacement. We must rethink our planning processes and economic development programs to be based on key principles and include real community and stakeholder engagement, so people have a real say and control over the destiny of their neighborhoods, without abandoning fair share principles. I would only support upzoning in order to create affordable housing if the zoning changes were supported by the community that they would affect. Currently, our land use process provides inadequate opportunity for substantive community input. I oppose upzoning our City’s historic districts. We can address our city’s affordable housing needs without changing the character of our City’s neighborhoods.

Also, my administration will pursue homeownership strategies and innovations such as nonprofit development, ways to increase access to credit, and community land trusts. Additionally, communities should have the opportunity to acquire their own housing. This means exploring programs where distressed properties, including commercial buildings, are acquired by the city for use as permanently affordable housing to be managed by nonprofit affordable housing developers, investing in community land trusts, keeping housing built on public land permanently affordable, and exploring measures like TOPA/COPA at the city level to put housing in the hands of residents. I will work to implement creative solutions to expand our affordable housing stock by converting tax liens, buying up vacant properties left behind in the wake of COVID, and stimulating more non-profit housing dveelopment. For too long affordable housing and homelessness have been viewed as completely separate issues. My administration will not make that mistake. I have learned that all New Yorkers are housing ready and I will work to create permanent housing for New York City’s homeless population. There are currently around 100 hotels that will likely go bankrupt due to the pandemic. As Mayor, I will explore ways for the city to acquire these properties to convert them into permanently supportive housing. My campaign has not and will not accept money from real estate interests.

I think this is an important statement to digest because it’s not the work of an ignorant, unintelligent, or misinformed person. The thing at the end about understanding homelessness as essentially existing on a continuum with general housing affordability challenges represents state-of-the-art thinking on homelessness policy (see my interview with Mary Cunningham from the Urban Institute). Wiley’s answer here is well-informed and detail-oriented.

She’s also not cruel or dismissive in her responses. Lots of anti-housing politicians speak in derogatory ways about apartment-dwellers or newcomers and she doesn’t do that.

This is the flower of the progressive non-profit world speaking, so she speaks carefully and with detail. And what she’s saying, loud and clear, is that if she runs the city then she will do everything she can to empower residents of every neighborhood in the city to be even more able to block any kind of change. There’s of course a name for a political ideology that prioritizes halting change. It’s conservatives who want to stand athwart history yelling “stop!”

And yet here we are.

Progress requires communities to change

I am not 100 percent opposed to historic preservation anymore than I’m opposed to national parks or art museums or any of dozens of other kinds of “nice things” that a decent society invests resources in maintaining.

But the rhetoric of “without changing the character of our City’s neighborhoods” drives me bananas because it’s not only bad housing policy, it vitiates the entire premise of progressive thought which is that many longstanding features of our society are in fact unjust and need to be changed.

New York City, like other American cities, is highly unequal, highly segregated, and highly unaffordable.

One can debate what kind of policy changes would alter that dynamic. But were the dynamic to be successfully altered, then obviously the character of the neighborhoods would be different. Right now the neighborhoods are unequal, segregated, and unaffordable!

If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written, you know that I believe that broad upzoning — especially of the most expensive neighborhoods — is critical to achieving better results. But suppose you think I’m totally wrong about the merits of market-rate construction, and the real answer is a massive program to build public housing.

Well, guess what — neighborhoods would be pretty damn different if you filled them up with new public housing developments! I’m not really sold on the relevance of Red Vienna to the housing problems of the contemporary United States but to give the Austrian socialists of the 1920s their due they were actually socialists not grant-funded reactionaries promising to protect the character of Viennese neighborhoods. The point was to make things different!

The new radicals

Lots of people have bad housing politics.

But this particular statement from this particular person is especially striking to me because I think it really exemplifies the torpor that progressive politics has fallen into over the past couple of years — an incredible elevation of jargon and process over substance and the delivery of actual change. Much of this statement would be borderline incomprehensible to a typical person — much less a New Yorker struggling with housing affordability. And on the merits, it actually has nothing to offer the legions of neither-poor-nor-rich New Yorkers poised to leave the city when they have kids because they want more space.

Supportive housing for the homeless and “deep affordability” for the very poor is nice. But when a normal person says “housing in New York is unaffordable” they are making a (correct!) observation that is much broader than that — housing is really expensive.

But it doesn’t genuinely ignore normal people’s housing policy concerns in favor of strict priority for the poor, because the actual thing that gets strict priority is absolute community veto power over anything with an avowed aim of making sure that nothing changes. And it’s reinforced by the fact that within the progressive nonprofit sphere, there’s no real accountability for anything or to anyone. The way to get ahead is to say the right things, hop on the right fads, and perform good allyship by not getting into fights with anyone else in the same nonprofit complex. Whether your ideas actually represent the thinking of the people you claim to represent — much less whether your ideas actually work — doesn’t count for anything at all.

And yet this brand of do-nothing, change-nothing politics insists on casting itself not just as a brand of progressive politics but as actually the most elevated and forward-thinking brand imaginable. But imagine believing that the United States can ditch over a century of dependence on fossil fuels without the character of any neighborhoods changing. How is that going to work? Here in DC, the historic preservation board wouldn’t let me install more modern windowsills because it’s not historic. But that’s the point — historically houses have not been very energy-efficient and in the future instead of old bad buildings we should have newer and better ones. Authentic historic buildings are also incredibly inaccessible to wheelchair users and parents pushing strollers. To me, that’s bad and change is good! But your mileage may differ.

Avowed conservatives at least do us the favor of saying that they think the existing hierarchical relationships in American society are fine and that they fear experimentation and change. But Wiley comes from the kind of circles that are much too enlightened to think of racism as acts of individual bigotry perpetrated by prejudiced individuals. These are the people who are tackling structural racism, patterns of inequality that are deeply embedded in our history and the functioning of our institutions.

But they’re going to address them “without changing the character of our city’s neighborhoods.” It’s absurd.