The Urgency Agenda
We need nice things right now
On July 5, I rewatched Independence Day. It’s a movie set in a different world, but one’s that unfortunately much the same.
The 1996 movie about an alien invasion of Earth starts with large spacecraft parking themselves over America’s major cities. A ship hovers over Midtown Manhattan, another over the White House and a final one over what’s now the U.S. Bank Tower in Downtown Los Angeles.
As the ship traversed the Hollywood Hills, casting a shadow over the L.A. Basin, I couldn’t help notice that the city of 30 years ago looked essentially the same as the city I lived in today. Sure, the downtown skyline has added a few buildings and Hollywood and Koreatown added some apartment towers, much the flat expanse of single-family homes stretching from the ocean to the L.A. River is mostly unchanged.
The aliens arrived in the first years of Los Angeles’ ongoing experiment in moribundity. A massive downzoning of city had just gone into effect a few years prior. A planned rail extension that would’ve traversed Wilshire Boulevard, the city’s main job corridor, had been halted by local and Congressional segregationists. And the city’s population growth, meteoric over the past century, began to flatline.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is now Abundance-pilled. Signing landmark legislation that would defang the California Environmental Quality Act’s (CEQA) ability to block infill housing, Newsom shouted out both the YIMBY movement and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book. The Gavin Newsom who peered meekly from the sidelines as segregationists torpedoed housing reform in the first years of his governorship is apparently a thing of the past.
The CEQA shifts Newsom signed into law before the July 4th holiday were indeed transformative and while everyone in the housing movement would’ve loved these changes in 2018, we’ll certainly take a victory today. But I don’t think I’m alone in wondering what both the state and the nation’s political fortunes would look like if California had mirrored the success of New Zealand, who passed major changes to their land-use policy around that same time.
Time has a political value. Policy changes impose costs and distribute benefits long run, but the sequencing of each is as important as the coursing of a long meal. If voters feel pain distant to a time they reap rewards, there’s a risk they might not connect the two in their minds and their noble sacrifice for the greater good might just register as capricious government overreach and a fortunate twist of fate.
This goes double for elected officials who in the United States enter into office with a shot-clock ticking loudly above their heads. The Sword of Damocles hangs heavier in a state like California where elected officials face term-limits and their job tomorrow will likely take them far away from the constituency they serve today.
Elected officials see reelection as their primary goal and work towards that goal by boasting about “wins” to those who will vote to extend their term. Interest groups jockey against one another to elevate policy concerns, but also work together to set agendas that members of their larger party coalitions will advance once in office. An elected official will sometimes face a choice to defy this interest group coalition in order to produce some “win” they can later credit-claim on.
Sonja Trauss, one of the founders of today’s YIMBY movement, captured this very poignantly during the 12-plus year battle to build a paltry 315-unit apartment complex in Lafayette, Calif. which was only allowed to break ground after the state Supreme Court intervened. As quoted in the New York Times:
“An ordinary political process like a sales tax — both sides have an opportunity to show up and say whether they’re for or against it,” she said. “But when you have a new project like this, where are the 700-plus people who would initially move in, much less the tens of thousands of people who would live in it over the lifetime of the project? Those people don’t know who they are yet. Some of them are not even born.”
Imagine that new residents would move into an apartment building in a matter of months not years. Or imagine new riders would use a Bus Rapid Transit line that took the place of a parking lane weeks after it was approved. A politician, with years left on their term, can stand before those enjoying this new urban amenity and proudly proclaim “I did this.”
As we seek to break free of scarcity, we must ditch the mindset that says there is an abundance of time. A politics that delivers must dramatically contract the time between cause and effect. Our political institutions, the rule-sets which govern our politics, shape the behavior of our politicians just as much as the rule books of the NFL dictate what players do on the field.
A politics of abundance is paved with ribbon cuttings.