CityLab: How to Make a Housing Crisis

Contract cities aren’t the first thing that come to mind for most people when they think of the affordable housing crisis that many American cities now face—these suburban communities tend not to have many homeless people or renters at risk of eviction. But in desirable regions like coastal California, contract cities have played a huge role in exacerbating housing problems outside their borders. For over half a century, they’ve been all too successful at implementing their founding mandates: preserving their physical and demographic character, and delivering consistently rising home values to homeowners. [...]

Golden Gates is at its best as a history, whose breadth demonstrates the impossibility of silver-bullet housing solutions. One of many counterintuitive origin points for California’s current crisis was San Francisco’s freeway revolts that began in the 1950s, when grassroots neighborhood activists successfully prevented highways from being constructed throughout most (but not all) of the city. The revolts marked the beginning of the state’s anti-growth movement, which challenged California’s longstanding growth-for-growth’s sake philosophy. That doctrine had brought “urban renewal” projects that transformed minority neighborhoods into bombed-out shells of their former selves and inspired proposals to fill in nearly the entire San Francisco Bay.

Anti-growth activism began as a close cousin of the state’s environmentalism, but as time went on, “the good intention of stopping sprawl soon became cover for stopping everything,” Dougherty writes. The broad language of the California Environmental Quality Act enabled this conceptual fudging, granting ordinary citizens the power to halt coastal subdivisions and green urban infill projects alike. As land use and planning power devolved to neighborhood groups, city governments followed their lead by “downzoning” large swaths of their land to preserve the existing urban landscape, as if it were a pristine old-growth forest.

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Aeon: How Europe became so rich

It should be emphasised that Europe’s success was not the result of any inherent superiority of European (much less Christian) culture. It was rather what is known as a classical emergent property, a complex and unintended outcome of simpler interactions on the whole. The modern European economic miracle was the result of contingent institutional outcomes. It was neither designed nor planned. But it happened, and once it began, it generated a self-reinforcing dynamic of economic progress that made knowledge-driven growth both possible and sustainable.

How did this work? In brief, Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition. It meant that European rulers found themselves competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans. The economic historian Eric L Jones called this ‘the States system’. The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation. [...]

In early modern Europe, however, political and religious fragmentation did not mean small audiences for intellectual innovators. Political fragmentation existed alongside a remarkable intellectual and cultural unity. Europe offered a more or less integrated market for ideas, a continent-wide network of learned men and women, in which new ideas were distributed and circulated. European cultural unity was rooted in its classical heritage and, among intellectuals, the widespread use of Latin as their lingua franca. The structure of the medieval Christian Church also provided an element shared throughout the continent. Indeed, long before the term ‘Europe’ was commonly used, it was called ‘Christendom’.

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Social Europe: Can the left really stop Salvini?

The turnout in Emilia-Romagna was up more than 20 percentage points from five years ago. This made a huge difference. The strong personal victory of Bonaccini—whose electoral list with his name on it added almost 6 per cent to the progressive tally—could at first sight be explained by the local tradition of good governance. This is represented by the modello Emiliano,characterised by a tempered capitalism embedded in a social-democratic governance with a strong left-wing subculture.[...]

Their full name, ‘Sardines against Salvini,’ tells a lot about their nature and genesis as well as their will to counter a far-right victory in a left-wing bastion. In some ways, they recall the mobilisation of grassroots progressive groups in the United States since the election of Donald Trump as president. This complex and variegated activism, a ‘middle America’ rebooting democracy—made up of Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter, local canvassing, and a spontaneous citizens’ engagement in cities and suburbs of many states—has largely been missing on European soil. [...]

As the resistance of the last bastions against the European populist trend becomes increasingly fragile, it is time for progressive forces to find new forms of mobilisation—without mirroring demagogic nationalism and its policies—and to learn a few lessons transnationally and from Italy. The left needs to regain its capacity to create a shared political culture, to focus on integrative responses and to challenge rising populism with its traditional political weapons: rights, solidarity, equality, democracy.

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openDemocracy: How the Greens won Budapest

On the back of an anti-Semitic re-election campaign that spring, Fidesz had secured 2/3 of the seats in Hungary’s gold-plated parliament building, giving it the right to change the country’s constitution at will – a power they’ve not been slow to use. None of the various progressive parties had managed to even reach second place: they’d also been beaten by another far right party, Jobbik. [...]

It’s not only Roma people. Orbàn has chased much of the Central European University out of Budapest, and attacked gender studies departments as part of his war on feminism. His allied oligarchs have bought out the majority of the press. Last year, openDemocracy uncovered a long list of examples of electoral malpractice in the 2018 election. And in 2018 more than one person said to me that public criticism of the ruling party – including in social media posts – can mean losing your job if you’re one of the many people on the government’s public works scheme. The country is sometimes described by those following the rise of the global far right as a model for social control with the veneer of democracy. [...]

Just as important, though, was a new innovation the party brought to Hungary: door-knocking. In a media environment where people don’t know what to believe, nothing beats meeting them face to face. While Fidesz rely on mobilising a huge database of their own supporters, the Greens knocked on thousands of doors, speaking to people about their concerns. Barabás tells me he personally knocked on 1,500 doors – 40% of the district he now represents, and that this is something other parties haven’t done in the past in Hungary.

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Politico: Iran’s leadership rigs an election — and still loses

The orchestrated vote now looks like a flop in terms of bolstering the regime’s legitimacy, however, thanks to the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history and growing concern that the government played down the scale of a coronavirus outbreak rather than risk empty polling stations. Coronavirus has now killed eight people in Iran, the biggest death toll outside China. [...]

Since Friday night, Tehran has dithered over releasing even the “official” turnout figure in the vote for the 290-seat assembly, but Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli on Sunday put it at a record low of just under 43 percent. This is way beneath 62 percent in 2016 and the 69 percent who turned out in the vote of 2000, which proved a big win for the reformist camp of President Mohammad Khatami. (Turnout in the last presidential election in 2017, when Hassan Rouhani beat the hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi, was 73 percent.) [...]

In the aftermath of the vote, Iran suddenly announced a sweeping crackdown to try to stop the spread of the disease. It announced the closure of schools, universities, cultural centers and cinemas. Several sports fixtures will be canceled while several big sports matches will be played without spectators. Even a Tehran district mayor tested positive for the disease. Turkey, Pakistan, Armenia and Afghanistan have closed their borders with Iran, or limited transport.

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