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We’reTexas

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by We’reTexas

  1. I’ve only been exposed to him through housing Twitter, where he is routinely dunked on, but his ads are extremely well done. Quite interesting to see a progressive surge in the NYC primary after progs got taken to the woodshed throughout other Blue coastal enclaves last fall.
  2. Wait that dude just polled as the front runner? Lmao
  3. Go see your boy Robert at Sylvain! Seriously, summers are getting rougher. BABs and Justine just closed.
  4. Same, brotha. I prefer lighter roasts and my bambino is made of plastic and won’t last forever, and the Move seems like a pretty reasonable endgame set up for when I’m ready. However, I feel like it could look outdated quickly, so if you are going to go for counter candy might as well get something like a Linea Mini which will last for decades and never go out of style…
  5. Have you been considering upgrading from the Go to the Move?
  6. Well, to save you many hours right now the best quality for value is the Bambino and DF64 if you just want to get that and call it a day for the next few years.
  7. If you find yourself in that area, Deli Board is arguably the best sandwich spot in the city since Turner’s closed (and then GTFO unless you are there for a leather bar, fentanyl or jury duty).
  8. I just watched and thought it was a good summation of the intra-left debate. It’s funny how reactions seem to be so polarized - I thought Seder was unable to answer any of Klein’s questions. They fundamentally disagreed over the importance of consensus in the Democratic coalition. Klein’s basic argument is “if the process is everyone has to have their say and as a result nothing gets done then we should rethink the process” and Seder’s actual response was “No I mean unless it’s an emergency I’m cool with that”. I would say that Klein’s view has been the driving force of Blue state millenials over the past decade and is worth listening to despite the fundamental disagreements among the left.
  9. He may be smug but “I am once again begging you to please just legalize housing” is not academic. They never really intended to put together a national Democratic platform but they recognize that it comes down to delivering results and shaking your fists at the oligarchy does not do that.
  10. It is an incoherent, bad faith attempt to deny the reality of the housing supply crisis. They call it an affordability crisis, and they point to all kinds bogeymen. Everything in those paragraphs is wrong. It is prohibitively expensive to convert commercial to residential. Vacancy rates are consistent with historical lows (SF and Vancouver have vacancy taxes - they have done fuck all of nothing). Are there conspiracies to slow play construction? Idk, but the economics are complicated and restrictive regulations almost certainly play a bigger role. Do these guys offer a single viable policy approach? Of course not, never.
  11. Klein and Thompson’s perspective of Texas is definitely one from their coastal bubbles, but I think it’s fair to say that they (and many other YIMBY-ish writers like Jerusalem Demas and Conor Dougherty) conceptually see that Texas has not been weighed down by the “everything bagel” progressivism that California and New York have. Inclusionary zoning requirements for BMR, union labor requirements, “community impact” fees, CEQA, etc - by giving everyone a right to get their say and take their piece, nothing gets built, which is of course a feature. And, in CA at least, this isn’t a LA/SF issue. The suburbs are just as bad. But yes the book is very CA- and NY-centric (to be fair, that was their original intent) but the way they have riled up the tankie left makes me think it was worth raising these issues for broader discussion.
  12. David Sirota is a moron and everything in that article is rehashed NIMBY bullshit.
  13. Local shop (Tahona Mercado in San Francisco if ever in town).
  14. San Francisco is basically the same as LA and NYC in terms of housing and development, save for one regulatory quirk that allows it to claim the title NIMBY king. I think the main issue with Thompson and Klein’s writing over the past few years is that it is very relevant to the insular political discourse in those Blue coastal cities among your Blue coastal elites, but it’s not clear how their arguments apply to national politics. They don’t seem to realize it, but the “Abundance” agenda is basically how growing Blue cities in flyover country have generally always operated (on a podcast with Matt Yglesias they used Houston as a red foil to San Francisco, which I found quite amusing). That’s great in one respect - I tell people all the time that San Francisco should be run like Houston. I loved Bill White! But that dude and everyone in his path continue to fail to win statewide office. I’m not really sure how their book will lead to any real impact.
  15. Fair, but in San Francisco (and I think LA and NYC?), the two wing of the party are literally called “moderates” and “progressives”, and you will see Ezra Klein et al use that terminology from time to time.
  16. I’m reading it as exemplified by the Blue state intra-Democratic party fight over housing, which has gotten quite heated since “Abundance” came out. Basically: Moderates: We should build more housing, and in America we rely on private development for most housing, so we should facilitate that. Housing production has been stifled largely because of a regulatory framework enacted with progressive intentions but ultimately has resulted in a housing crisis, so we should consider removing these obstacles. We need to support realistic approaches towards housing affordability. Progressives: No. Market-rate development enriches developers, and we hate developers. Removing regulations is deregulation, and that’s what Republicans do. Any new development should be public housing dedicated to working class people, and we should pay for by taxing the rich. We believe in unions, so these projects must be 100% union labor. The former is objective-oriented and less concerned with getting tied up in ideological labels. The latter is driven by ideological allegiances and axiomatic beliefs - and totally unconcerned with actually delivering results. It’s also the wing of the party that has been steadily losing ground over the past five years
  17. lol Prop 13 is wild.
  18. I spend a good chunk of my life ranting about the unreasonableness of every aspect of California housing, but on a board of relatively affluent college graduates I will agree that it’s actually quite attainable. You will probably not get 3,000 square feet, but that’s a Texan mindset issue. You eventually get over it because you spend all your time outside!
  19. Looks like those are all listings in nice neighborhoods - sellers are shooting for around $1k per square foot these days. Which, to be fair, is a depressed price for the Bay due to lack of BART access and impossible commute to the Peninsula (also, the Berkeley Hills are in a high risk fire zone and going through the same insurance issues yall have unfortunately experienced).
  20. Special bottling from Macurichos for their 60th, and apparently only 60 bottles made it to the states. Fantastic - bright and floral on the nose and cacao and pepper on the finish.
  21. I imagine a huge chunk of longtime Palisades residents can’t afford to rebuild and the County has totally fucked things up by only trying to fast-lane like for like rebuilds. Ugly backlash of 50 years of Prop 13 and NIMBYISM.
  22. I definitely have after enough Orange Crushes at Dewey Beach.
  23. Hey, at least he went from Steve Bannon to jumping on the Abundance bandwagon.
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